Scientific research! No, it isn’t just a bunch of folks in lab coats shouting “eureka!” and then getting handed a Nobel Prize. Lots of scientific research gets done these days in the United States alone. This work is being done by a widely diverse (but maybe not diverse enough) group of people at universities, labs, companies, you name it. In fact, the average scientist likely spends more time writing than “doing” research. The process to go from research to publication is not well known by most of the public, so let’s demystify it!

First off, let’s get a few things straight

1. Accepted scientific research has been peer-reviewed. This means that scientists independent of the research have vetted and commented on the work and the paper that was written about the work. This is why publication in a peer-reviewed journal or book is the gold standard … and why random people on the internet claiming grand scientific discoveries (like earthquake prediction) without submitting it to peer review should be handled extremely skeptically.

2. No person is an island. Very little modern scientific research is done by one person. Research is done by teams and collaborations because, in the end, it tends to produce better, more thorough results.

3. Published papers are not the end of the line. So, you published your results! This doesn’t mean that the research is done. You or anyone can take the baton and run with it, possibly overturning your results. That’s ok! That’s part of science. However, if your results are solid, then they should start the test of further research. Most science is a theory, so it is just an idea with evidence for how the some part of the universe works.

Creating the Manuscript

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts. The process of publishing scientific research starts with results. For some fields, it might be from experiments. In others, it might be field observations. In others, it might be laboratory analyses. In many cases, it is a combination of these with a dollop of data from other researchers. You need to take all these data and make sense of them, either through statistical analyses or comparisons to known results or theoretical modeling.

Once you’ve built your explanation for your data, you actually need to write the manuscript. I’m not going to get into the gory details, but manuscripts can vary from a few pages to tens of pages depending on the results and your chosen venue to attempt to publish. You’ll likely have to make some figures and tables as well. For most scientists, you are doing this all yourself! In many ways, you have to become your own desktop publisher.

Unless you are in the small minority without collaborators, you are likely working together with others on the manuscript. They might write parts of it, analyse the data, offer content. Authorship has different roles in different disciplines. For me, my coauthors tends to be active collaborators, people who played significant roles in the data collecting, or students who worked on the project. In the end, all these people likely get to examine and comment on the manuscript before it heads to a journal.

Picking your Venue

And journals … there are so many of them! Some are big for all of science, like Nature and Science. Others are for specific disciplines like Geology or Earth & Planetary Science Letters. Still others are much more specific to sub-disciplines, like the Journal of Volcanology & Geothermal Research. There are also journals for specific geographic regions, for applications of research to teaching and many more. It can be challenging to decide where to submit and there are lots of sketchy, predatory publishers out there as well (more on that later).

Once you’ve decided what journal, you need to get your manuscript into their formatting. This might mean specific fonts, reference styles (you need to credit the previous papers when you use their information or ideas), image sizes, data appendices and more. This, again, is like being your own publishing firm. It takes time.

How much time? Well, depending on how quickly you write and how quickly your collaborators respond, the average manuscript might take months to years to come together. And that is just from inception to submission … in a sense, the journey is just beginning.

So, You’ve Submitted a Manuscript

OK, so you’ve submitted the manuscript to the Journal of Awesome Earth Science. The journal has decided that your paper meets their criteria for potential publication based on the novel nature of the work or the field of research. What’s next? Usually, an associate editor (usually a volunteer from the discipline community) gets assigned the manuscript and they need to find reviewers (also volunteers).

Most journals let authors suggest some (and nix others), but the associate editor might reach out to experts in the field to review. Usually, the review process is supposed to take a few weeks, but more likely it might take a few months (remember, everyone is volunteering). Much of the time, the authors never find out who the reviewers were unless the reviewers specifically say they can be identified.

Once the associate editor gets the comments and recommendations from the reviewers, they need to decide what to report to the authors. Usually, there are four(ish) tiers: accept, accept with minor revisions, major revisions and reject. If your manuscript is rejected it is typically because it was poorly written or the data and interpretation didn’t hold up to examination by your peers (the reviewers).

“Major revisions” means that the reviewers seem something of value, but think the manuscript needs work and may need to go through review again before acceptance. “Minor revisions” means that the manuscript has a few things to fix, but after that, it should be good to publish.

So, it’s back to the authors! If you weren’t rejected (and getting rejected happens, especially if you are submitting to a top level journal like Science or Nature), then you likely need to revise. That might take a few weeks to months. When you resubmit the revisions, you need to provide a point by point response to the reviewers comments, explaining how you fixed things (or chose not to fix). All of this gets sent back to the associate editor to decide the manuscript’s fate.

The associate editor will then make a recommendation that will likely need to be approved by the main editor for the journal. If they give it the OK, then it heads to the folks who will give it a stern copyedit and start to format it for publication (print, online or both). This might take another few weeks. Usually, after the copyedit, the manuscript-now-paper can exist as a “pre-print” that hasn’t been formatted for the journal but might be available for “early access”.

Publishing Costs Money

Now, here is the rub. Guess how much scientists get paid by publishers to publish their work? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, most of the time researchers have to pay the publisher to publish the manuscript and if you want it to be open access, you really have to pay. We’re talking hundreds to thousands of dollars just to get your work out to the community.

And remember what else I said? The editors and reviewers are volunteers, too! So there is a huge amount of work that most publishers get for free. There are a handful of journals that don’t work in those models, but many of the big, fancy journals are put out by for-profit (and very profitable at that) publishers like Elsevier or Wiley.

The publishers then turn around and charge libraries for subscriptions (print and(or) digital, with those being in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Without those institutional subscriptions, many scientists wouldn’t have access to all the published research out there.

That leads to problems in access and equity. If only those who are at institutions that can afford subscriptions have access, what does that do to the scientific community as a whole? And if scientists are donating all this time to publishers, why can they get away with charging so much to both the producers and consumers of research?

How to Change the System

In the end, many scientists are judged by the quality, quantity or both of their research. This means that getting tenure, getting promotions, salaries and more are based on working in this model. If that seems problematic to you, well, you’re right to think that. Scientists are beholden to a system that is scientifically rigorous but financially imbalanced for the most part.

Most researchers are just excited to get their work out there. We love discovery! We love trying to understand our world better and then share that with other scientists and the public. The process of peer-reviewed publication can take years and cost thousands of dollars, but many millions of papers are published each year across the natural sciences alone. A more equitable and open version of this is needed, but how this cycle is change depends on scientists and universities to look at what is means to be a successful researcher in a new light.