Alternative Routes to Academic Publishing?!

Flippantly…..

  1. Get in a ghost writer to write your publications for you; inspired the old practice of taking first authorship on work done by your research assistant/postgrad etc etc…
  2. Use your influence – tell your research assistant/postgrad/unpublished colleague that you’ll add your name to their publication and your chums in the peer review pool will let it through;
  3. Comment on everything anyone sends you or tells you – where possible, make changes inline to any document that anyone sends you (rather than commenting in the margins) – and make it so difficult to to disentangle what you’ve added that they’re forced to give you an author credit. Alternatively, where possible, make structural changes to the organisation of a paper early on so that other authors think you’ve contributed more than you have… Reinforce these by commenting on “the paper you’re writing with X” to every one else so they think it actually is a joint paper;
  4. Give your work away because you’re too lazy to write it up – start a mentoring or academic writing scheme, write half baked, unfinished articles and get unpublished academics or academics playing variants of the games above to finish them off for you.
  5. Identify someone who has lot of started but not quite finished papers and offer to help them bring them to completion in exchange for an authorship credit.

Note that some of the options may be complementary and allow two people to exploit each other…

Author: Tony Hirst

I'm a Senior Lecturer at The Open University, with an interest in #opendata policy and practice, as well as general web tinkering...

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