a letter of introduction from the conpher team

Publicado por Info @conpher en

Dear Colleagues,

Before we explain anything about conpher, we want to express our best wishes to the global academic community during challenging times for us all. Some of you will be at the forefront of fighting Covid-19, in many cases risking your own health to help others, and for that, we are eternally grateful!

The conpher team is made up of a group of post-doc researchers and support staff who have been publishing research or managing journal publications for the last 20 years.

We came up with the idea a few months ago as we were looking for advice, and at the same time were being asked for advice, on where to publish our research. We realised that the best advice was coming from colleagues.

So we decided to take that idea and expand it, enabling colleagues around the world to share journal publishing experiences, sharing their advice and performance ratings. To create a database of comprehensive, transparent and verified information to enable you to make educated, calculated publication choices.

We were also inspired by Dr. Daniel Himmelstein and his original 2015 study, “Publication delays at PLoS and 3,475 other journals”. In his conclusions, Daniel called for a journal review service, not just calculating speed of publication and impact factor but a “host of other journal attributes”

Calling for a journal review service

“Acceptance and publication times are not the only factor to consider when selecting a journal. Traditionally, the impact factor — average citations for articles published in the two preceding years — has been a primary criteria. However, any single metric is insufficient to make an informed decision on where to submit. A host of other journal attributes matter such as readership, aesthetics, communication, friendliness, flexibility, features, and web nativity.

I propose a journal review service. I see three main benefits:

  1. Transparency — past author experiences with a journal are a treasure trove in need of a display case
  2. Search — even finding all journals that publish research in your field is difficult. A search feature would support filters and rankings based on user preferences.
  3. Progress — journals can improve based on their feedback. If not, they will perish.”

And so, driven by Daniel’s vision, we have devised conpher. We launch today with 1.2 million items of pre-populated data gathered from NIH PubMed regarding actual journal publication times. And in addition, we will constantly be adding actual experiences, insights and opinions shared by your colleagues to support your publication selections.

Our aim is to build a transparent resource, to celebrate good publication experiences, highlight poor ones, but ultimately raise the standard of the journal publishing experience for all.

Originally, we had planned to launch the service with a touch of humour and fanfare as we want conpher to be a lively forum of participation with colleagues around the world. But to be quite honest, with current events, we have concentrated on accelerating development in order to go live earlier than we had originally planned. If conpher can help crucial data find a faster, more professional publication route for you to share with colleagues and the world, then that will make us happy.

Thank you for your support – we are building conpher with you and for you, so please do not hesitate to contact us – [email protected]

Stay safe in these times!

Best wishes, the conpher team

share your publishing experiences now!

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