Maastricht University Library Wall

More than 150 participants took part in the seminar on 20 October. Three speakers gave good advice related to the writing and publishing process, whereas the fourth speaker talked about an alternative of getting research more visible; besides addressing how to publish a journal article, he presented a newly developed publications portal for scientific output.

Professor Jan Smits stated that publishing articles in Humanities and Law not really differs from Science, Medicine or Economics. Routine and techniques in order to structure your thoughts and findings are essential. Professor Maurice Zeegers stressed upon the fact that it is important to build on your own skill-set: remain stress-free, be persistent and be disciplined. Using visualization techniques to structure your thoughts in the way that fits the structure of an article is important. Maurice provocatively stated: “if you can’t write, it’s because you don’t know what to say”.

Anthony Newman, representative of Elsevier Sciences gave a good insight in the considerations of a publisher. In addition to the former speakers, he gave a lot of practical information regarding writing and the publishing process. In accordance with Maurice he stressed the importance of language and structure (different per item: title, abstract, introduction, etc).
Anthony concluded with a summary slide:

Aside from publishing via a licensed or open access journal, depositing the articles in an institutional and/or subject repository will affect the visibility and findability of your paper positively. Ron Aardening’s presentation showed us a tool (with underlying workflow) to promote efficiently scientific output on different levels: UM, faculty, department, research school or individual researcher.

The evaluation of this half day seminar turned out to be very positive. Several respondents gave the advice to organize a similar seminar next year. If so, we will pay attention to the issues that were mentioned: keep an eye on session end times and be aware of overlap between the speakers.

On the website of Research- Open events 2011 you can find links to the sheets of the presentations, as well as the digital version of the booklet distributed at the seminar (Charting a course for a successful research career, A Guide for Early Career Researchers; 2nd Edition by Professor Alan M Johnson).

Henk van den Hoogen, Odin Essers