Good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone welcome to this first session in the webinar series called publishing agricultural development agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research and social science journals my name is frank place i am director of the cgir agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research program on policies institutions and markets or pym and it’s my great pleasure to be moderating this webinar while there are many important ways to disseminate findings from agricultural development agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research publishing in reputable peer-reviewed journals is particularly important for agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers as a means not only to showcase their work but also solicit peer input gauge how their own work compares with that of others thereby enhancing the quality of science and enhanced options for career advancement deciding where to publish or submit articles is a difficult choice especially for early career agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers there is now an almost bewildering array of journals in almost every field but all journals are not the same they reach different audiences with different business models impact factors and prestige what are the factors one should take into consideration while deciding on a journal what do editors really want what makes editors decide what to desk reject right offhand and what to send out for review how should one handle referee comments what types of peer review are most useful to editors to authors and to reviewers themselves these are some of the questions that we will address in the this series of three webinars the series is co-sponsored by the cgir agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research program on policies institutions and markets the cgir standing panel and impact assessment or spea and the african women in agricultural agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research and development program or award that these organi three organizations came together for this and the high response rate for the series of webinars indicates that what high demand there is for guidance on the publications process from the standpoint of pim this series fits well into our commitment to supporting capacity development of social sciences in the cgi cgir and beyond in past years we have contributed to this through sponsoring people to attend and present in social science conferences and as you know this that wasn’t possible this year so we welcomed this initiative conceived by ruth mainz, i’m very much looking forward to it thank you thank you karen now over to you banjiru hello everyone um it’s such an honor for us at awards to be able to be part of this uh wonderful adventure um as some of you may know um what exists to build capacity especially of african women scientists agricultural agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research scientists and to make sure that we are widening the pipeline of women leaders in agricultural agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research on the african continent i remember and for us sponsoring this series is important because um for example for myself i remember as an academic feeling like publishing was such a mysterious uh process such a a a black box really if you will and sometimes even feeling like the the requirement to publish um through us to grow one’s career as a bit of a punishment um and a lot of why we as a water sponsoring this series to really try and reframe um that kind of for those of us who might have fear or dread around publishing to refrain reframe the experience to remind all of us that publishing is an important vehicle through which agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers get to change the world you get to do really interesting agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research and publishing is the vehicle through which the world gets to know about it policy makers get to hear um learn new things and so publishing is is that lever that goes that takes your agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research from something a hard work that you did into hard work you did that is going to make the world a better place and so that is why we at award um are sponsoring this series i want to also just take a moment um and for us also another reason is we do believe that african voices matter in the landscape we believe that african women’s voices matter african women’s agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research matters african agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research matters and not to be considered and african agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers learning how to navigate the publication landscape is an important way of making sure that those voices that matter do get heard um i want to close my remarks by thanking our partners um at f3 uh thanking our partners at um also um across the cgi but also i know that there’s a number of participants who are joining from puani university in um in kenya in kilifi kenya, dick is senior agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research fellow at the international food policy agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research institute and co-leader of our pym flagship on natural resource governance she is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed publications based on her interdisciplinary agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research and property rights collective action water management,when i mentioned the you could pay to make your article open access sometimes there are provisions for those open access fees to be waived for citizens of certain countries or agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research sponsored by certain donors, then there was another a related question a couple other ones is it is it only predatory journals that send random emails requesting agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers to publish in them or do reputable journals sometimes do that uh and then a third one uh was there was um, i’m going no i don’t think so that’s not my field so great so thank you guys thanks so let me come back to a couple other questions so one one one i have two questions from uh uh about uh uh agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers in different stages of their of their lives so one is uh uh from a phd student perspective is it advisable for them to aim for top journals given that the time given that the time considerations, everything you’ve collected in that agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research as this big block of stone, i’m a little hesitant too because it is kind of specific to ifpre in that um we look at the fields that if pre uh agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers are working in and then we sort of evaluate relative to that field is this a top one of the top five percent or or what so i would i would need to ask permission there um there have been some other uh journal listings that we used as a starting point um but like the one was very heavily weighted toward economics, hadn’t been previously um but that will be your final stage of the publication process once you’ve sent the proofs back great thanks cheryl uh we did we did receive a quite a few questions so let me get to some of them here i’ll try to group them if i can um there was a question one question about um just about the the titles are there any guidelines that overall guidelines that you have other than you know look at what journal you intend to submit this to and then there was a query about author lists uh the question was some re some agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researchers prefer to have a short author list of two to three does it mean anything for the quality of paper to have a longer number of authors um say i could i think you know we see a lot of the science, then there was two questions about um the peer review processes themselves one was about an open peer review process have you been involved in one if a journal offers this to a agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural researcher would you recommend it that’s coming from maria garuccio, what how how it works um that you start sending tweets um there may be news outlets that pick up the agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research that sounds really grand that may be maybe big grand news outlets um the economist occasionally publishes little articles on based on academic papers most of us don’t have most of our papers in that kind of way but other other news outlets local kinds of things things about particular topics may do that people start sharing it people start reading it, forth but you do as a junior scholar need to be careful that it doesn’t that your work isn’t seen as that you’re just the agricultural research journals,journal of agricultural research assistant on a on a project for somebody more senior it thanks uh well we’ve reached the end of our time and i think we covered almost all the questions not quite but i think some of them might emerge from in the next uh in the next webinar um as well so we’ll keep them in mind uh as we move into the the second and third uh webinars so now i i guess i’ll let me close this one uh by thanking again uh ruth and cheryl very much for this and and to our co-sponsors of award and spea for organizing this i think this was a very successful one we had a large number of participants and i hope we get a similar number for the next ones so this is just a reminder that the next one will be held on november 30th and it’s a panel of journal editors as mentioned and then the final one is on december 7th which is going to provide more details on the peer review process of reviewing papers and then doing the revise and submit process and finally just to remind everyone all information and recordings and registration links will be available on the event page on the pym website at www.pim.cgiar.org so thanks very much and everybody have a great uh end of your day.
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