Requirements for contributors

If you want to contribute to this book, there are a few requirements:

  1. You must have published the paper that your story is about, and provide a link to the paper, and if possible the online reviews

  2. You should have been the principle author and/or the corresponding author

  3. This should have been an important paper for you personally, and preferably have some importance for others in your field. If it’s not been a big deal for you, then it’s not likely to make a good back story

  4. Use the first person singular pronoun to tell your story

  5. This is not an opportunity for ad hominem attacks, so please avoid the names of individuals if you are not being positive about them

  6. Make it personal and please do share your feelings. We want to know about the low times, but we also want to know what helped you through them

  7. Use the exercise as an opportunity to reflect on your experience, and provide ideas that might help others who are faced with a similar situation

  8. Promote solutions. We know that the current world of publishing is not ideal. Provide some ideas for what you think might have worked better in your situation

Formula for contributors

There is no compulsory formula, and you are welcome to write your story in your way. The preference if for you to meet all of the requirements above, but we remain flexible. Remember that the audience is Early Career Researchers (ECRs), and that your contribution is expected to resonate with them and to inspire them to continue sending their manuscripts to journals even after rejection.

If you want some pointers of how you could structure your chapter, then please see the outline below:

  • Introduction: Tell us a little about you at the time that the study, and the write-up took place:

    • what stage of your career were you at
    • where in the world were you
    • what was your home story at the time
    • anything else that we need to know in order to appreciate your feelings and attachment to the study itself

  • Back-story to the study: Briefly outline what the study was about:

    • the approach & ideas
    • time taken to collect the data
    • the other co-authors
    • anything else relevant to understand the completion of the study and its write-up

  • The first submission

    • where did it go
    • how long did it take
    • what was the outcome
    • what did you learn

  • The second submission

    • see the first submission

  • Repeat until accepted

  • Reflect on your experience:

    • What were the major changes that you made to the manuscript between the first submission and acceptance
    • Who made the difference between the rejections and acceptance of your paper and what did they do?
    • What were the major lessons that you learned, and how has this changed your approach to publishing moving forwards?
    • What advice can you give to Early Career Researchers who might be in the middle of their biggest publishing story, but not at the point where they have had their manuscript accepted?

  • Figures — Pictures often say more than you’d imagine. You should add a figure that you can link to in your story. If you can, provide a picture or two that adds something personal to you. Please avoid using any previously published images. If you do and your chapter makes it into the book, we’ll be asking you to provide copyright permission. Of course, if they are published CC-BY then there’s no problem.

  • Figure captions — Figure captions need to include a figure title (in bold), and a full description (one to two sentences). For examples, see Figures 11.3 and 5.2.

  • Additional References — In addition to the paper that you are talking about, you might want to cite additional papers that inspired you. This is all good, but you must supply the complete citation and DOI (if possible).

  • Format — You can use any format (e.g. *.rmd; *.rtf; *.docx; *.txt) to write your chapter, but they will all be converted to R Markdown for inclusion into the Bookdown version. For details see here. Thus, R Markdown is best!

Send me your chapters

You can send chapters directly to me at john@measey.com, or DM me on Twitter @AfriHerp.

There is a plan!

  1. Preliminary chapters published here: these will be edited and added as they come until November 2021. These chapters will be used to submit the book as a concept to a publisher. Publishers will have to conform to the content remaining online Open Access online using Bookdown (Xie, 2016a).
  2. Once contracted, ~5 ECRs will be selected as reviewers for submissions ideally from diverse areas of the Biological Sciences: Cell Biology; Genetics; Ecology; Evolution; Physiology. (I’m open to persuasion here, so tell me why your area should be represented). ECRs will be asked to rank each chapter on its utility toward the ECR target audience, and how likely this is to inspire them to keep publishing.
  3. The book will be opened via social media (e.g. Twitter) for ECRs to nominate stories from academics that they would most like to see. All contributions from this round will be added to the online OA book.
  4. Reviewer ECRs together with JM will select chapters to be submitted for hard copy published book. The hard copy will have a limited page length (~250 pages), and so chapters will be selected on quality, inspiration and diversity.
  5. All chapters will remain in the OA version of the book & the book will remain open for submissions. All chapters will be published CC-BY. It will be written as a ‘live project’ with a GitHub repository for anyone who wants to contribute, improve, or use as the basis for their own book. The easiest way for readers to contribute content directly is through a GitHub pull requests. At the repository for this book, you will find Rmd files for each chapter, and as a GitHub user, you can simply edit the Rmd file and submit the changes.

Software information and conventions

I used the knitr package (Xie, 2015) and the bookdown package (Xie, 2020) to compile this book. My R session information is shown below:

xfun::session_info()
## R version 4.3.2 (2023-10-31 ucrt)
## Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
## Running under: Windows 11 x64 (build 22621)
## 
## Locale:
##   LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8 
##   LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
##   LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
##   LC_NUMERIC=C                          
##   LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    
## 
## Package version:
##   base64enc_0.1.3   bookdown_0.37    
##   bslib_0.6.1       cachem_1.0.8     
##   cli_3.6.2         compiler_4.3.2   
##   digest_0.6.33     ellipsis_0.3.2   
##   evaluate_0.23     fastmap_1.1.1    
##   fontawesome_0.5.2 fs_1.6.3         
##   glue_1.6.2        graphics_4.3.2   
##   grDevices_4.3.2   highr_0.10       
##   htmltools_0.5.7   jquerylib_0.1.4  
##   jsonlite_1.8.8    knitr_1.45       
##   lifecycle_1.0.4   magrittr_2.0.3   
##   memoise_2.0.1     methods_4.3.2    
##   mime_0.12         R6_2.5.1         
##   rappdirs_0.3.3    rlang_1.1.2      
##   rmarkdown_2.25    sass_0.4.8       
##   stats_4.3.2       stringi_1.8.3    
##   stringr_1.5.1     tinytex_0.49     
##   tools_4.3.2       utils_4.3.2      
##   vctrs_0.6.5       xfun_0.41        
##   yaml_2.3.8

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who has helped with the compilation of this book.

John Measey
Cape Town

References

Xie Y. 2015. Dynamic Documents with R and knitr. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Xie Y. 2016a. Bookdown: Authoring books and technical documents with R markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC.
Xie Y. 2020. Bookdown: Authoring books and technical documents with r markdown.