Best practice in English academic publication on the ‘periphery’

Matko Marušic, organizer – Croatian Medical Journal and University of Zagreb, Croatia

This panel will explore the best practices in publishing scientific journals in small scientific communities, with particular focus on how to achieve global visibility and local leadership in quality.

  • Does it really have to be in English?Ida Raffaelli, editor in chief, Suvremena lingvistika (Contemporary Linguistics) and Professor of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia

    The aim of this presentation is to discuss the issue of publishing scientific journals in the humanities in English. Publishing in Croatian means a) preserving national sciences, b) accessibility to the wide range of national readers, who are often not familiar with English, c) spreading knowledge to the national readership. Publishing in Croatian preserves, develops and improves scientific terminology in the national language, which is one of the basic tasks for the progress of national sciences. Publishing in English is an obligation which a) increases international visibility, b) increases international authorship and readership, c) brings some new ideas and results to the national scientific community, and d) spreads the national scientific results to the international scientific community. The journal’s editing policy has to balance between two (or more) languages, evaluating constantly the impact of publishing in Croatian or in English. [Read more]

  • Two languages, one journal managed within the Open Journal System (OJS): initiating and maintaining a bilingual editorial and publication processTeo Matković, Managing Editor, Revija za socijalnu politiku (The Journal of Social Policy), and Siniša Zrinščak, Editor in Chief, Zagreb, Croatia

    Advantages to using Open Journal Systems (OJS) bilingually are that managing and submitting articles in different languages is as easy as switching the working language option. Users benefit because they work in the language they are more comfortable with, regardless of the language of submission (such as Croatian authors submitting an English language text via the Croatian interface, while the English-only speaking reviewer will not see a word of Croatian text during the review process). Fortunately, OJS is already translated into several languages (including Catalan, Croatian, French, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish).

    The presentation will include a brief tour of multi-language functionality of the current OJS2.2.1 version. [Read more]

  • Cross-Cultural Communication about Peer Reviewed ResearchTharwat M. El-Sakran, Ajman University of Science and Technology, United Arab Emirates

    This corpus-based study of how two groups of referees express their appraisals to writers of research manuscripts focuses on whether there are any marked cross-cultural differences in the degree of requestive directness between Arabic native speakers (ANSs) and English native speakers (ENSs) in requesting changes/revisions in research manuscripts. The results show that the ENSs used far fewer direct, bald-on-record strategies than the ANSs (43 and 82, respectively) and that the two groups of referees used different linguistic structures to convey to the manuscript authors how documents should be changed for improvement. This paper will discuss the specifics of those observations in order to identify ways to provide guidelines for novice referees just entering the review phase of international academic participation. [Read more]

  • Biomedical research journals from non-anglophone industrialized countries: quality, editorial leadership, international role and future scenariosValerie Matarese, UpTo infotechnologies – Biomedical editing, scientific writing and reading training, and information research, Vidor, Italy.

    Journals that adhere to the Declaration of Helsinki guidelines and checklists and that provide the relevant information in their instructions to authors can be considered to be rigorous and to demonstrate “editorial leadership”. These journals also have higher quality, as indicated by better citation scores (impact factor and SCImago journal rank and cites/doc). These were the results of a comparative study of Medline-indexed journals from Italy and the UK, recently published in PLoS ONE. This presentation will highlight features of this study relevant to journals from non-Anglophone industrialized countries, especially in Europe, going beyond the published study to explore reasons why Italian journals overall demonstrated less editorial leadership than their UK counterparts. [Read more]

  • Working with authors: experience of the Croatian Medical JournalAna Ivaniš, manuscript editor, Croatian Medical Journal and research fellow, University of Zagreb School of Medicine, teaching the principles of scientific research. Zagreb, Croatia

    In countries from the scientific periphery, there are many studies with interesting findings, but they are poorly presented. A good editor has to distinguish between well-performed studies that are poorly presented and studies that are poorly designed or performed, whether presented well or not. From the very first issue of the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ), the editors worked with their authors on improving the quality of submitted manuscripts through an author-helpful pre-review process and intensive editorial work. Fifteen years after its establishment, the CMJ achieved international recognition and visibility and was the first scientific journal from Croatia to reach the impact factor greater than 1. Yet 17 years after the first issue… [Read more]