Researchers around the world are trying to keep up on work
duties and responsibilities while being required to stay at home. For some
people this means caring for young children or other family members, devising homeschooling, switching courses to online delivery, scheduling meetings with team members, receiving new duties
from superiors, and perhaps worrying about job security. It is natural
that these people may feel overwhelmed and that routine tasks,
like checking references or proofreading manuscripts, might seem
insurmountable.
However, for others, COVID-19 lockdowns have resulted in
more time to push projects to completion and clear out backlogs. There is then
inequality in the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on individuals.
These COVID-19 impacts on individuals not only have these
unequal impacts on mental wellbeing and career trajectories but are on top of
the desperate necessity of conservation science to continue. We win by having a
greater diversity of experts communicating with one another.
Publication Partners is an attempt to address some of this
COVID-19 impact inequality and to ensure that conservation science is still
being published by assisting people with their manuscript preparation. This is
a match-making service of the conservation community to bring researchers
struggling with their current working conditions together with those that feel
that have extra capacity and are willing to help others in this difficult time.
The partner might be asked for publication advice, to assist with manuscript
editing, help sorting and checking references, organizing tasks for revisions
or preparing figures.
The idea is that the Publication Partners would normally be
contributing less than would be expected for authorship and thus will be listed
in the acknowledgments of the resulting paper. Publication Partners will match
volunteers with those requesting support.
To volunteer or request a partner, please see this document with contact instrucitons.
As a journal editor, I see this a valuable and much
needed assistance strategy. And I’m not alone. Many of the most important
conservation journals have signaled their support and welcome submissions using
this service. The journals support Publication Partners includes (please note that the list of journals is being updated and so will change over time):
*Thanks to Bill Sutherland for sharing his thoughts on this post.
2 comments:
Post a Comment