How to publish a journal article, a Springer guide

Today, we thought we would share a fantastic publishing resource created by Springer. It has been remarked before here on the Open Access blog that there is sometimes a lack of transparent information about publishing systems on publisher websites. So, when a member of the team stumbled across a  step-by-step publishing guide on the Springer website we just had to share it!

© Springer

The guide begins with the questions researchers will want to ask of themselves early on in their article's life cycle. These are questions like: are there any ethical ramifications to the research? What will be the likely impact of the paper? What are the copyright rules at Springer? Will it be Open Access, and if so, where will the funding for this come from? This last point is obviously very important for us in the Open Access team, as being informed early on in the publication process allows us to offer important advice at the best possible time.

Step two of the guide concerns the article creation process: from the Preparation of a manuscript, to Submission to a particular journal, to Production (including copy-editing and typesetting), and then finally Publication. Step 2 is perhaps the most widely appealing section of the guide as it walks you through the processes involved in creating an academic paper at Springer. Crucially, step 2 also reflects the general processes of other publishers, so serves as a useful general guide to academic publishing.

© Springer. An interesting tool in the Preparation stage is the Journal Selector which uses semantic technology to find the most relevant journal for a paper based on the abstract.

The third step of the guide goes into some detail about the post-publication services offered. Of particular interest here is the information about Article-level Metrics, as Springer incorporates the statistics gathered by Altmetrics to offer more detail about the impact of articles.

As a resource describing the life cycle of an article from a raw manuscript to a publisher Version of Record the Springer guide is a rather exemplary introduction, so we highly recommend that anyone interested should take a look.