Tag Archives: publishing

Authoring Published Meeting Abstracts – Searching for Upcoming Conferences for Submitting Your Work

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There are a few approaches that you can take for identifying upcoming conferences that may be appropriate venues for sharing your preliminary research results (as a peer-reviewed paper or poster presentation).

  • One way is to search a database that contains information about the conferences/congresses themselves. Another way is to identify professional associations/organizations related to your discipline/field that would likely be responsible for organizing professional meetings, and then search the website of these organizations to look for announcements of their upcoming events and professional development opportunities.

For example, you can use a database like PubsHub that indexes Congresses and Associations:

PubsHub: https://libguides.mskcc.org/pubshub

Many people are familiar with PubsHub as they may have used it when trying to identify good journal contenders for manuscript submission. It’s a great tool to use for that purpose – it even has functionality that lets you easily compare the features of two different journal titles – but there are also parts of this database dedicated to Congresses and Associations.

  • Another effective way to find this information is to search on your favorite topic in a scholarly literature database that indexes conference proceedings, limit your search results to the Meeting Abstracts/Conference Proceedings publication type, and then note the names of the conferences where these meeting abstracts were submitted and accepted.

For example, you can search a database that indexes conference proceedings of interest and then look up the conference names included in the citations that are returned (from the citation record/published meeting abstracts records that were presented on topics related to yours) using another search tool (like Google) to investigate if those conferences/associations will soon be accepting abstract submissions for their next conference.

Resources available via the MSK Library that index conference proceedings/meeting abstracts include:

  1. Web of Science – https://libguides.mskcc.org/webofscience

  2. Northern Light Life Sciences Conference Abstracts – https://libguides.mskcc.org/northernlight

  3. Synapse – https://synapse.mskcc.org/synapse/works

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library.

Hijacked Journals – A Predatory Journal Scam Sub-type

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Predatory journals have been part of the scholarly publishing discussion for a number of years now and numerous efforts have been made to develop training resources and tools to help potential authors establish whether or not a journal they are considering submitting a manuscript to is reputable or not.

Not surprisingly, as consumers are becoming more aware of the existence and threat of predatory publishing, the predators are adapting to this new reality and becoming more sophisticated – or rather – more downright sneaky in their ways. Which brings us to “Hijacked Journals”.

What is a “Hijacked Journal”?

A hijacked journal is basically a predatory journal that is not just trying to mimic another established journal by adopting a similar title and “look” to their publication, but rather is actually using a legitimate journal’s exact title, ISSN information, and other meta-data. This scam can happen to current titles published by larger publishers, but likely is more easily carried out successfully using journal titles that may have been recently ceased or to smaller society or university publications.

What can you do to protect yourself?

The usual strategies for avoiding predatory publishers still apply to avoiding hijacked journals. That said – taking extra steps to investigate whether or not a publication has ceased or has had a change in publisher is highly recommended as this step will help to determine if even more scrutiny of the journal is warranted. Tools like the NLM Catalog and Ulrichs can be used to verify this information.

Furthermore, to help authors not fall victim to this hijacking scam, the diligent folks at Retraction Watch have begun compiling a spreadsheet of journal titles that they have classified as “hijacked” in their new Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Learn more by reading their recent blog post announcing this new tool.

Additional reading:

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library.

 

Making Sure Your Publications are Digitally Archived for Posterity

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Have you ever wondered:

Who is making sure that the open access, online only, peer-reviewed article that you just published will be digitally preserved and archived for posterity?
So that even if the publisher disappears someday and the journal becomes “abandoned” or “orphaned”, your paper will be “forever” archived somewhere so that it can be accessible for your great, great-grandkids to read?

Thankfully – some great resources exist that can help you investigate the extent to which a journal you are considering submitting a manuscript to is taking measures to ensure that your scholarly work will be digitally archived for posterity.

1. SPI-Hub: Scholarly Publishing Information Hub™ (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) 

From the SPI-Hub websites:

“SPI-Hub™ attempts to provide prospective authors with the available information on quality, rigor, and transparency of the journal publishing industry to aid with informed decision making for the purpose of identifying a publishing avenue.”

Searching for a particular journal title of interest using the SPI-Hub journal search interface will return a range of useful information, including a field under the “Publication Policies” tab that indicates whether or not the journal “Participates in national and international archiving services (e.g., CLOCKSS):”(see below). This SPI-Hub data field is drawing information from another useful resource called the Keepers Registry.
 

2. The Keepers Registry 

The Keepers are “the archiving agencies which act as long-term stewards of the digital content issued as continuing resources including e-serials” and the Keepers Registry “acts as a global monitor on the archiving arrangements for electronic journals”. Basically, the Keepers Registry is resource where you can go to to look up what archiving agencies (if any) a particular journal publisher is using to archive and preserve their journal’s contents. One example of an archiving service that a publisher may be working with is CLOCKSS.

3. CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) 

CLOCKSS operates differently than a tool like PubMed Central (PMC), for example, which is essentially the publicly-accessible full-text repository created by the NIH over 20 years ago to digitally provide access to and archive publications derived from NIH-funded research. In the case of CLOCKSS, participating publishers entrust the long-term preservation of their published content to the CLOCKSS archive which provides “dark storage” (as opposed to making all content publicly and easily accessible to all, as in the case of PMC), however, publishers agree to make their content freely available whenever (if ever) it is “triggered” out of that dark or “closed to the public” storage. 

From: HOW CLOCKSS WORKS

As libraries and publishers migrate from print to online-only publications, they want to know that their shared investments are protected and preserved for generations to come. As a “dark archive” currently housing  48.5 million journal articles, over 34,000 serial and 360,000 book titles, and a wide array of supplementary materials and metadata information, CLOCKSS preserves this growing corpus of online scholarly content. This unique service assures publishers and libraries that the content they steward will withstand potential technological, economic, environmental, and political disruptions and failures and will always be available to those who want to access it, after a trigger event has occurred.

Built with proven LOCKSS open-source technology, CLOCKSS preserves scholarly publications in original formats. The polling-and-repair mechanism ensures the long-term validity of the data.

Mirror repository sites at 12 major academic institutions around the world guarantee long-term preservation and access. Our approach is resilient to threats from potential technological, economic, environmental and political failures.

Questions? Check out the MSK Library’s Support for Authors LibGuide or Ask Us at the MSK Library.