From the Editorial Fellows

Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellowship

The Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellowship was established to contribute to the development of early career aquatic scientists and their outreach to peers in the context of scientific publishing, including open-access publishing, peer review, and writing. Fellows get exposure to all, and experience in most, aspects of the publishing process. The skills developed are aimed to enhance the Fellows’ research careers and future contributions to journals as peer reviewers and editorial board members.

My strategies for attending academic conferences as an ECR

By Laura Falkenberg Ten years ago I attended my first ever international scientific conference. It was in my hometown and my supervisors had encouraged me to go – I arrived not really knowing what to expect. I spent the week feeling overwhelmed and slightly out of place, especially at the poster session where I presented my work. This year I ...

A Fellows’ perspective of the Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellowship

By Laura J. Falkenberg As the inaugural Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellow, when I applied to the program I was largely entering the unknown. In figuring out if this was an opportunity that I was interested in, and putting together my application, I scoured the Internet for information on Editorial Fellowships generally and, in particular, what this one would entail. Unfortunately, ...

Early career peer reviewers should feel confident to evaluate big ideas

By Laura J. Falkenberg As an Early Career Researcher (ECR), being invited to peer review is an important milestone. It shows that a journal Editor recognizes you as an expert, and believes that you can evaluate the work of others. But, once you’ve accepted the invitation to review, worry can creep in – you might ask yourself if you actually ...

Reading about writing: summaries of recently published guides

By Laura J. Falkenberg One of the key activities scientists undertake is writing – for publication in peer-reviewed journals, blog posts such as this one, and even in Tweets. There is much advice out there on how to write, with many books published in the last year alone. These books cover everything from very broad issues (e.g. how to write ...

Effective reviewers enter discussions with Editors

By Laura J. Falkenberg Over my past three blog posts I have been summarising the workshops run at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting about manuscript submission (here and here), and how to be an effective reviewer (here). In this final post in the series, I will talk about the discussion on effective reviewing that followed the presentation on this topic by Maggie Xenopoulos ...

How to be an effective peer reviewer

By Laura J. Falkenberg A key skill scientists can develop is the ability to write effective peer reviews. At the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting, journal editors led a session on how to do this. The contributing editors were Maggie Xenopoulos (Deputy Editor-in-Chief, ASLO’s Limnology and Oceanography) and Miguel Goni (Editor-in-Chief, AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences). As with the session on manuscript ...

How to ‘revise and resubmit’: advice from journal Editors

By Laura J. Falkenberg In the initial post in this series, I summarised the presentation on manuscript submission given by Pat Soranno (Editor-in-Chief, ASLO’s Limnology and Oceanography: Letters) and Robert Pincus (Editor-in-Chief, AGU’s Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems) at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting. Here, I will focus on a key point explored in the ensuing discussion, specifically the issue of how ...

10 tips for a successful manuscript submission

By Laura J. Falkenberg At the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon, journal Editors participated in workshops about key publishing activities, specifically manuscript submission and peer review. Each of these sessions opened with the Editors giving a brief prepared presentation, before moving to more general discussion prompted by questions from the audience. In this blog post, and the next ...

Interacting with editors at academic conferences: tips for early career researchers

By Laura J. Falkenberg As the Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellow, one thing I have learnt from talking with journal editors is that they are often open to helping authors, particularly those early in their careers, develop ideas and manuscripts for publication. A key opportunity many researchers have to interact with journal editors is at scientific meetings. Journal editors can, however, ...

Cross peer review: what is it and how is it being used at Limnology & Oceanography: Letters?

By Laura J. Falkenberg One my central activities as a Raelyn Cole Editorial Fellow (more information on the fellowship can be found here) is to learn more about the editorial process. An obvious step towards this is to be involved as a peer reviewer. While I had reviewed for a range of journals in different sub-fields of biology and ecology before ...
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