 These emerging conservation professionals network, better known as ECPN. My name is Elise Driscoll, and I am the network's professional education and training co-officer. Today we are very pleased to present ECPN's eighth webinar, demystifying the publication process in conservation. ECPN is happy to have three speakers with us today, Carolyn Riccadelli, Michelle Derrick, and Sinchita Balachandran. Each will share insights from their own publishing experiences. Carolyn is an object conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is currently AIC's Director of Communications. Michelle is the Shore Family Associate Research Scientist at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation from 2002 until 2014. Sinchita is a curator and conservator at Starr & Hopkins Archaeological Museum, where she teaches courses on the technical study of ancient objects as well as the history, ethics, and practice of our conservation. Before I continue, I would like to familiarize you with GoToWebinar, the program we are using to facilitate this webinar. The view window where you see our title slide right now can be resized by clicking and dragging the lower right corner. The control panel is where you as an attendee can take some control on your screen. You may find that within Activity, the control panel automatically minimizes. If you would like to keep it open during the entire presentation, under View, there is an auto-hide and control panel option that can be turned off by unselecting it. All of you listening out there are muted. We have solicited questions for the Q&A session today and we hope to answer them all during the webinar. If there are questions that do not get answered, we may be able to address them later in the blog post. I would also like to take a moment before we begin to share some information about ECPM. I'm trying to advance my slide. You can follow ECPM's activities on the AIC blog Conservators Converse. We recently posted – I'm sorry, I'm trying to mix up. We recently posted an interview with Molly Gleason about her experience achieving the status of professional associate. This post is a follow-up of our previous ECPM blog from 2012 by Molly Gleason titled, I'm Not a PA but I Want to Be. Over the next few months, we'll begin posting information about our programming at AIC's 44th annual meeting in Montreal. Visit the link on your screen to access our blog post. In case you don't know, ECPM is a network within AIC that is dedicated to supporting conservation professionals as they move through the first stages of their careers. We do this by organizing a variety of initiatives and programs. Please visit ECPM's page on AIC's website where you will find numerous resources for emerging conservators, including links to previous blog posts and webinars, as well as a link to our Facebook page, where an active community of emerging conservators posts questions and advice and offer support. We encourage conservators of all levels to join in on the conversation. We are also developing our own Wiki page within the AIC Wiki Education and Training section. Here you can find many of the resources we have been creating over the years. This is a work in progress that will continue to be updated. Please visit the link at the bottom of your screen. To stay informed about ECPM's activities, consider subscribing to our periodic eBlast, which you can do by logging on to the AIC website, clicking on Manage Your Profile, and selecting ECPM. Through our popular webinar series, ECPM strives to provide ongoing programming that responds to the needs of emerging professionals at different stages of their early careers, although we believe their webinar series can be beneficial to all conservators. Recordings of our webinars may be accessed on AIC's YouTube channel. A recording of today's program will also be posted there soon. During today's program, the invited speakers will help clarify the mysteries of publishing by touching on topics ranging from choosing an appropriate platform to the nuances of co-writing. ECPM hopes that at the conclusion of the webinar, the prospect of publishing will seem less intimidating to conservators at all levels. As I mentioned, today's program will conclude with a question and answer session. The questions were selected from those submitted by the audience through the email provided in the registration form and on Facebook. Even if we run out of time, our speakers may be able to address additional questions in the form of a blog post. So please continue to submit. I will now turn the program over to our first speaker, Sanjita Belachandran. I think we're having technical difficulties. Please bear with us one moment. Can everybody see my presentation? I guess I'll get started. I guess we're having some technical difficulties with the audio with Sanjita, so I will jump in and start. With my presentation, which is discussing different publications venues that are available within AIC and FAIC, and Sanjita and Michelle are going to go elaborate into other venues, but because I'm the board director of communications currently, I thought it would be a good way for me to introduce myself and talk about what AIC has available to its members. And just to begin, I just want to introduce what the director of communications with that role is. And as a board member, I oversee several different communications modes from AIC. The first is JAIC, and the editor-in-chief is Julio Delhoy Melendez. He's a relatively new editor-in-chief. We also have AIC News, which is edited by Lisa Goldberg. So those two publications are periodicals. We also have, under my purview, is the AICE editor, who is Rachel Arnstein, and she oversees a lot of different features of our communications, including the blog, the wiki, stash, and connecting to collections, which I'm not going to be talking about directly today, but I will talk about the blog, the wiki, and stash. And then also I oversee Kool, which is managed by Walter Henry. And I hope that you're all familiar with that. That's a great place to go for a lot of information on conservation. It's a real clearinghouse of publications and a place where a lot of online publications are being stored. I'll talk a little more about that later. And then finally, I'm also the board liaison to the Publications Committee. And the Publications Committee has changed relatively recently, say, in the past four or five years, from being a group who talked about what kind of publications we want to have coming out of our organization to, rather, has been changed recently to having a representative from each specialty group. And we're also trying to have representatives from the different networks and some of the committees to discuss things like best practices for online publications. And also we're currently working on a digital preservation policy, which has become more important to us as we are starting to publish more of our publications online and thinking ahead in terms of the long-term preservation of those documents. So this is just a quick overview of what I'm going to cover today, the AIC periodicals, online resources, and specialty group post prints, which is really what encompasses what AIC can offer all of you in terms of publishing opportunities. So first, let's take a look at AIC periodicals. And I mentioned these earlier. We have J-A-I-C, the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation. It's a peer-reviewed journal, and that's our major publication, and it accepts journal articles, which are classic research-based or treatment-based articles. Those are submitted and reviewed. They go through quite a rigorous review process, which I'm sure Michelle will describe a little bit later. But the J-A-I-C also takes short communications and book reviews, and those short communications and book reviews might be considered an even more accessible route to an ECPN member. And so I just wanted you to know those are options. The short communications aren't as common, but I think that the journal is quite willing to take those types of communications. Then the next periodical is AIC news, and that is what we get in email format. It's linked to online, sent out from the AIC office. It's edited by Lisa Goldberg, who's a conservator. And it's not a peer-reviewed publication, but it's well-edited, and every edition has a lead article which rotates between specialty groups, networks, and some committees have also submitted lead articles. And I think good opportunities for ECPNers to consider either participating with someone else co-writing or writing on their own. So it's something that through your specialty group, you can step forward. Your specialty group might make an announcement that says that they're looking for someone to write a lead article. It's a really good opportunity to get a publication out there. Without the rigor of going through a JAIC article, it has a wide audience as well. So just to review, I'll go through some of these screenshots real quick, because I know that the website can be a little tricky to navigate. So we'll just go through these real quickly. But in the Publications and Resources tab, there's a place for periodicals, so there's a drop-down list for periodicals. And this is where you can access AIC news, back issues, as well as the current issue, which is available to members. And then, of course, JAIC, the link here gives you all the information you need to know about submitting articles. And then it also takes you to access to the archives, which is through our publisher, which is called Manny Online. And here is just more information if you scroll down on that window, about contributing to AIC. So if you want to get more info, I dig in there. So next, let's move to online opportunities, our online resources, also our opportunities. And those are listed under Publications and Resources, Online Resources. And then those little pop-out menu there shows you where the blog, the Wiki, you link to Cool there, also Stash, and you can get access to the various specialty group listservs. So first, the AIC blog is called Conservators Converse, and Elise mentioned this earlier. One of the great opportunities for publishing, and I do consider the blog, posting in the blog is a form of publishing. So it would be incumbent upon the writer to think about it as a publication. And it's not just a casual, I mean, the blog is a casual venue. But I think that any kind of posting should be considered a publication, and it's a professional representation of you as a conservator. But one of the great things that Eastern Tanners can do is attend the annual meetings, sessions, and write blog posts about what they've seen. It's a great way to get your name out there. Also, a little section called Conservation in the News, people post on articles they've seen in the papers and on the news. And anyway, these are great opportunities for getting your name out there. And this is the blog and how to post, just scroll down to the bottom of that opening page. And it tells you inside that box that you need to contact our e-editor, and that's Rachel Arnstein. The link is there. So you submit through email, and that's how you get a post onto the blog. The AIC Wiki is another really great place to make a contribution. It's more like our AIC Wiki explains a lot of information about materials, treatment, techniques, and so on. Sorry, if you hear my elevator, the freight elevator is running in the background. Sorry about that. I can't control that. Anyway, the AIC Wiki is great because you can write on your own time, and it doesn't have to be like a big long commitment. You can actually write short entries or edit other entries and add your information. And the AIC Wiki is linked through here, and Elise showed you earlier how to find it. It's easily found through that Publications and Resources tab. And at the bottom of that opening page, there's instructions on how to get started. And you need to contact the e-editor, Rachel, to get yourself have a login and get trained on how to do it. And it's really a great way to make a contribution to AIC and as well. It's a form of publishing that's relatively easy to access. And then we have Stash, which is short for Storage Techniques for Art, Science, and History. And inside this website, you can find short articles about storage solutions. I think this is particularly useful for ECPNers. I know that in my pre-program days, I did a lot of really great storage projects, storage re-housing projects. And it would have been nice to have a place to write short articles about what I did. And now that's available to you all. So Stash is a really good-looking website that it's easy to submit through that submission link. And you'll see there's a form there. It's relatively straightforward. It goes through a committee, but I don't think it's too complicated. And then more publishing opportunities are in the specialty group post-prints. And primarily specialty group post-prints are papers that are given at annual meetings. They I see annual meetings, so they're sort of the report of what occurred at all the specialty group sessions. Most of the specialty groups are publishing these. And there are a couple that aren't doing them. So you have to keep an eye on your interest. Take a look. They are not peer-reviewed, although Object Specialty Group has recently started a sort of light peer-review process, which I think has improved the papers quite a bit. So that's really great. It's not the same rigorous process as JAIC, but it's something to improve the quality of the papers. The access to those post-prints tends to be open to members only, but that seems to be changing quite a bit, as those are going more online. And like I said, they're going online, and they're all available for download, although there are exceptions. And sometimes they're available through the AIC store. So I'm just going to quickly run through where those are found, publications and resources tab, specialty group, and then pops out architecture all the way to wooden artifacts, all of the specialty groups. Each one of them has its own page, and it might have a link like this one. It takes you to an Object Conservation, takes you to the post-prints, which is located in this place, which I think technically is hosted on cool, and all of the volumes can be accessed directly there. Book and Paper Annual is the Book and Paper Groups specialty group post-prints. They're working on updating the look and feel of this, but that's currently how it looks, and so on. So electronic media, paintings as a post-print, which are accessed through the online store, photographic PMG topics and photographic preservation, those are unless you're a member, they have to be accessed through the online store. Rats has a post-print, and of course textiles as well. So take a look at these places. Wooden Artifacts has a really nice one. I think that they're getting caught up from past. There are these occasional delays in publishing them, because it's all done on volunteer time. So everybody does the best they can to keep them up to date. So the last thing I want to talk about today is the FAIC Crest Publication Fellowship. And this is really the only place that FAIC offers in terms of applying for funds to support a publication. And this is really probably not directly applicable to ECPNers at this time, but eventually in your careers you may want to consider this fellowship, because it's a generous fellowship. It's $30,000, but it's to support a book length manuscript, it's for PAs and Fellows only. So that sort of implies a certain level in your career, a certain point in your career. And then also the research is assumed to be completed at the time of application. So this is first pretty well thought out, pretty well completed project, and it's really just to support an author during that time of writing. And then I've listed there some of the case studies. And if you go on to the AIC website, you can see past publications that have been supported by that fellowship, which has been quite important to getting a lot of publications out into the world. So that's it for me. I want to thank you for listening. And I've put my email address there, because I would like anybody who has questions about publications and things directly related to my role as Director of Communications, please feel free to reach out to me with questions. So let's see if we can go to Sanchita next. OK. All right. Can you hear me and see me? Someone would let me know. Yes, you are live. I hear you. Awesome. Yay. All right. Let me get rid of this for a second. So thank you so much for inviting me to talk a little bit about my experience. I want to say up front that my perspective is as someone who is within an academic environment. And so my approach to publications is probably a little bit different than, say, a conservator based in a large museum institution. But that being said, I'm hoping that some of the things I have to share will offer some insights into what I hope conservators would like to contribute to, which is a broader conversation about the history, technologies, and applications of the information that we're learning about art more generally. And here's my email. If there are any other follow-up questions, please feel free to ask by email. So some of the things that I'm very interested in is first figuring out why you want to publish. Not everybody wants to publish. And so it's really important to think about what is really driving you. And for me, a lot of this is very personal. So this really comes from my perspective. But there's something that I'm working on that I really want to share or work out. And I think one thing that's important about publications, depending on the venue, I don't think your ideas have to be completely rock solid completed. I think an important aspect of publication is new information out there and suggesting some hypotheses and testing them out through your work and joining a larger conversation that's happening about these materials or ideas, whatever it is. And I think an important part of publication is showing that you have a unique perspective and that you have unique information that really only you can provide. And for me, again, as I said, the important part of publication is that you're actually having a conversation with other people. You want other people to interact with what you're finding out. And it really turns into more of a discussion rather than a fey accomplice. For me, being in academia, I'm surrounded by people who need publications for their jobs or careers. It doesn't apply to me quite the same way. But I just think that where I am, I see this as an important part of establishing myself as someone who's a researcher and, again, really wants to be in conversation with other specialists. And I think one thing that I would love to see more of is conservation publications that really enter into a more general sphere where people beyond just conservators see just the tremendous wealth of information that we have to share that really has something to say about how our history, history more generally, all these larger disciplines are described. So that's really sort of my personal hope. Of course, there are lots of different ways in which one could write. And I think as conservators, we're doing all sorts of different things. So I think it's important to establish what kind of writing you have to share. Ideally, it is primarily original research, but it takes lots of different formats. So is it really very technical? Is it very scientific? In which case that would lead you towards a certain kind of publication? Is it treatment? In which case, again, there's only certain types of publications for which that would be appropriate? Are there more historical things that you want to talk about? Or are you dealing with certain archives? So these kinds of content of your research should really influence where you are going to put this information. There are, of course, other sorts of writings as well. So book reviews, for example, practically every journal. And I will talk primarily about journals, let's just say. Almost every journal has, so if you're wanting to publish something, but you don't have your own original research, there are always opportunities for book reviews. Sometimes there are opportunities to summarize either your work, these sort of short communications which Carolyn alluded to. And many journals have this. And is it just an informal kind of writing that is something like a blog entry or a website coasting? I mean, these are, again, professional things that you would put out there, but they don't have that same rigor in some ways as, say, a journal article. But these are all valid ways in which we share our information. So for me, again, it comes back to who do you really want to engage with your research. And I've just broken it down into these four general categories. Most of the time we want to talk to other conservators, and we want to talk to practitioners who are really engaging with treatments or looking at technical data, in which case, again, that leads to you through a certain kind of publication. For me, more and more, I'm very interested in talking to scholars and researchers, some of whom may be conservators. But really, I think there's some very important things that we as conservators can share beyond the bench. So archaeologists and sometimes they're very specialized archaeologists. And again, I work on primarily archaeological materials. Everything is sort of skewed towards archaeological material. But are you working on 18th century painting, in which case what would be the right venues for publishing information about that sort of material? Or are you just looking for a general audience that has a particular interest? So for example, I published an archaeology magazine, which is really for the general public, but there are people who really care about archaeology. Or is it just a very general thing, and almost anyone can interact with it? These are the sorts of things we want to think about before thinking about specific publications because they will lead you to better places to showcase your work. So that leads me to this question of where would you actually want your work to go? Here there are another series of questions that I think are good to get out of the way. So the first is whether peer review is actually important. And by peer review, this usually means that when you submit your paper, it goes to the editor of the journal, and then that journal editor usually selects between one to three. Usually it's two readers. Sometimes it's three. It depends on the journal. And they will read your paper. And often they don't know who you are, but they will offer some advice on content and will also make recommendations to the editor as to whether it should be accepted, it should be revised before it's accepted or it's rejected. So the peers that are mentioned here can, you know, it depends again on the journal, but usually they are specialists in this field who have been solicited by the editor. So they should have some understanding of what you're talking about. Or at least you should have written your material in an accessible enough way that even if it's not a real sort of specialist in your area, they can still grasp your main arguments. For a long time, there were a lot of questions about whether a physical publication, a printed one, was more important than an online one. I think more and more many journals have gone online. And in fact, there are many journals, including JAIC, where if it's not printed right away, the article does appear once it's been accepted and everything is sort of sewn up. So I think this is less of an issue now than it was maybe even a few years ago, but sometimes that is important. I think it's important to think about what kind of circulation you want because certain things will circulate much more. So a blog entry, for example, on a popular website will certainly circulate more than a postprint or in fact a book. And there might be some journals that circulate far more within, again, your area of interest and an edited volume. So again, things to think about. I also think it's important to consider how formal or complete your work is. Not all publications are completed. The research is never fully done, but you wanna be able to make an argument for something substantive. And again, depending on how substantive your article is, it might suggest one kind of publication over another. And then there's a question of how fast do you want this out there? In academia, people are always concerned about being scooped. Not much of an issue this is for us, but sometimes people really want their material out as quickly as possible. Some journals can have a one or two-year time lag, but if it's really important for you to have that journal article's name on your CV, sometimes people wait, again, it really depends. And I thought I was gonna concentrate mostly on publishing in journals, so I've sort of tailored things towards thinking about what journals would be appropriate. And again, here, it depends on what journal you already read or who you wanna be talking to in these journals. Because of my own interest in archeological material and the kinds of things that I ended up reading, I usually think immediately about journals that are looking at archeological science, about the history of archeology, the history of collections, but there obviously will be specific ones for whatever area of interest you have in particular. Now, if you're thinking about how do you actually find out about journals, there are some of these usual suspects. Certainly Google and Google Scholar in particular is always helpful. JSTOR is fantastic. And increasingly, academia.edu is a great place because people are uploading their articles and you can see, oh, well, someone says this work I'm really interested in, published in this journal, maybe that works for what I'm working on. And I always think about what am I actually downloading from my own research. If I'm working on an Egyptian object and all of the things that I'm reading about come from the British Museum's Technical Research Bulletin or from the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, maybe those are good venues because people are already talking about this material. If you have access to a local academic library, I really recommend that you just go wander around and look at some of these journals. It's a little hard to do online, but if you can just browse and suddenly you run across, you know, Archaeometry Magazine, which you've never heard of before, but suddenly has some really interesting sounding articles that are relevant to what you're interested in, that might be a really good venue for you and it's just a much more kind of visceral way to think about what fits for you. And of course, Ask Colleagues because we're all in conversation with curators and obviously our conservation colleagues and there just might be people thinking, you know, this would be a great piece for Journal X. So if you've actually selected some journal articles and some journals that you think would work for you, this is my process, again, a very personal thing. I usually look through the last five to 10 years worth of articles. Now, so much is online that you can at least look at the titles. You can enter a library loan, some of these things. A lot of them you can find on academia.edu. And I just look at the articles and I say, I'm really curious about, you know, five of these which are making this kind of argument or asking these kinds of questions and my paper is sort of related to that. And, you know, if you start to find that in the last five or 10 years no one's talking about anything related to what you're doing, then maybe that's not the right spot. I also usually try to choose maybe three venues for possible publication and my number one choice is usually the hardest one or the most prestigious journal because that's gonna be the toughest one to get through peer review. But, you know, if it doesn't work out, you still have two other ones that you could submit to. And this, I think, is the most important thing. You have to look very carefully at the submission guidelines. Every journal will have this. I'm sure Michelle will talk about it for JIC. Everyone's got really particular requirements for formatting, how things are laid out. And they also tell you, you know, what they require in terms of original research. But generally, almost all these journals will require original research that is not public elsewhere. And I'll come back to that in a second at the end. Now, if you found a journal that you really love but you're not sure if your work fits with what they're doing, it's great to just be able to email the editor and you wanna email with a query that suggests an sort of abstract of your article without actually sending the abstract, which is a bit strange. So you wanna just be able to write in and say, I've looked at the last six or seven years of your journal and I found these articles are really interesting and I have something related. What would you think? And I found that editors are usually very, very generous about getting back to you about that. A little something about the writing process. Writing is really, it's a pain. There's nothing easy about it. I think it can't be easy because it's where you're working out all of your questions about your research and it just can take forever. I know I have things that are sitting on my computer and have been sitting there for a long time and I've reworked it over and over again. But I think you just have to embrace that that's part of the process. And what can help you as you're trying to kind of client in your argument is to write it for a specific journal because again, specific journals have specific things they're interested in. And if you can say, oh, well this journal's really curious about how pigments of this particular time were utilized because of Question Next. That might help you with writing your piece. The other thing I would recommend is finding a really thoughtful, supportive, and relatively small group of people to read over your draft. It's so important to find, I would say not more than five people who can read your paper and look it over a few different times. If you have more than that, you're going to have 100 different opinions and it becomes really overwhelming. And the other thing I would say is if you can find people who are a little senior to you in addition to your peers, and if at all possible someone a little bit outside of conservation if you're writing for a journal outside of conservation to give you the feedback as to what's working, what's to sort of inward looking and doesn't talk outside of conservation profession, that feedback is really essential. So once you've got everything together and submitted it to the journal, the peer review process can take, sometimes it takes a month, sometimes it takes several months, but usually the editor keeps you on top of those things. And three things can happen. It can be accepted without any corrections, which is quite rare from what I've experienced and what I've seen. You may be asked to revise before it can be accepted or it might be rejected outright, in which case you have two other journals you could be looking at. You usually get a written response from reviewers and again this can be incredibly cursory or very detailed and sometimes quite mean. I think it's quite important to just maintain calm and recognize that there are some really valid things that might be pointed out to you and would really strengthen your article if you took those very seriously. But if there are certain things that just didn't actually understand what you were trying to say, you should be able to argue for your point. And finally, if you need to revise or you intend to revise, you will get a very particular deadline by which you have to do this. A few things in terms of preparing for publication, it's very, very important to get all of the right permissions. Images, photographs, data, all of that stuff has to be vetted by the right people who offensively control it and even if they don't control it, it's always nice to ask. And to actually acknowledge that by sending a photograph, courtesy of it or whatever it is. If it's almost all your own research, then the article should be under your name. But if you couldn't have done the research without certain people, they should be acknowledged as co-authors. I mean, this varies a lot. It really depends on the type of publication. The science publication seems to acknowledge a lot more contributors versus humanities ones. But again, I always think, well, could I have done this research by myself or did I really need someone to help me learn something or understand some data sets? It's also important to acknowledge all the people who've read your drafts and offered advice because that's just a very collegial thing to do. And practically everyone I know publishes more than once on the same topic. But the key difference is that each publication has some other take on this material. It has to be something different that you're offering each time. You can use the same bulk data, but there have to be different arguments being made. And again, with different venues, I think there's plenty of opportunity to change that. One caveat, I mean, some journals do actually charge you for printing color images. I think this is less of an issue nowadays, but just be aware of that. And sometimes you have to come up with the money for it. So just be aware of that potential cost. Just a sort of plug for publishing outside of our usual journals, even though I very much support our journals, I think they're really incredibly important. But I think if we want to really advance our field, I so look forward to a time when conservators are really engaging with archaeologists and our historians and material scientists in their own journals because that's where they go to read stuff. If you're very concerned about how you start doing this, to me, you can start with a baby step, you know, publish with someone who's already in that field. And I would say spend a lot of time looking at some of these interdisciplinary journals, which I'll show you in a minute, that really do value conservation contributions. And I would say it's really important to be up on the research in these areas because you want to be able to say more than, here's this technical information I found because the contextualization of our technical knowledge is what I think has the potential to really change disciplines other than our own. And finally, here are just some articles, some journals that I tend to go to. These are my sort of key ones that I look into every couple of months, just what's going on. And on the far right side, you'll see some links. And these are links to different, the last one was done by the Smithsonian, has a link of a lot of the journals that are mentioned here and more. But the Manny, Sage, and the Wiley ones actually link to groups of journals that these publishers publish that are related to art, art history, archeology, and might be of use. So I think that's it for me. Hi, this is Michelle, Derek. I'd like to thank Carolyn and Sanjita for setting a very good opening stage for me. They covered a very broad perspective. Now I'm going to get into some details that apply to just JAIC. And the first will be the structure of our full journal articles. And the second will be the process that a journal article goes through once it's submitted. Most of us have a lot of experience writing documentary or descriptive type article. This is what we grew up in grade school writing, what I did over my summer vacation. And these are informative, meant to transfer information. It can be treatment reports that include a condition and the rationale for the treatment results. They can be very detailed. But they are not generally the way a journal article is written. Instead, the purpose of a journal article is to consider yourself as the authority on this piece of new information that you want to present to the field. And as the authority on this piece of information, you have to give it a context. You have to be objective about it, write it in third person, because this is the information that has, that you've already researched and completed. Looking at it, it's going to be in past 10th, are some exceptions, I'll mention that. And examples for GEIC, many other journals, perhaps some humanities journals will accept first person, but most will not. Textbooks, patents, things like that. So, now I'm going to go through the specific structure. And I have a set of references at the very last slide that I particularly want to give credit to this very detailed website from Bates University that explains how to write a journal article. And these are their titles, and I love it so, so I put them on here. And a title must be concise and it contains as many index words as possible, and it needs to give as complete a picture as possible. So, you see what's not good. I like the best because it gives you the results of their research, as well as the objects of their research and what they were looking for. So, it's very good. So, when you get to abstract, it is important that this, again, be concise and as complete as possible, especially with GEIC, because the abstracts are translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and they might be adding a few more languages, and those translated abstracts are searchable online. So, that brings your paper to a much wider audience. So, whenever somebody reads the abstract, they need to know what's in the paper in order to determine whether they're willing to pay the $29.95 to buy it, whether it applies to them and their research. So, the abstract, I know it's so tempting to write it first, but don't, or rewrite it afterwards. It needs to include the purpose of your paper. It needs to include all description of the methods that were done in the paper. It needs to include the results. What did you find, and what did you conclude about this? And the abstract is one place where first person can sometimes be used, I'm sorry, not first person, so third person, but first-app present tense can sometimes be used because it is so tempting to say, this paper shows, and this paper presents. Analysis methods include. So, sometimes, as long as it's consistent throughout abstract, present tense can be used, but past tense is still preferred. Introduction, this is where you're going to orient your reader to your paper. The, you have this unique piece of information. The reader needs to know what has previously been done in the literature in this area, and then the reader needs to be told what your purpose of your research is and why this new aspect is important. Add that, that why the rationale is good because then that sets the stage. Unless the reader understands why this paper is important, they might stop reading it and go on to the next paper. So, the body. Now, the body of the paper can be different whether it's a technical paper with scientific analysis or whether it's a non-methodology paper with treatment, whether it's a, it might contain time periods, materials, practices, substrates, but in any case, the body needs to be structured so it has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. And what I have put down here is materials and methods, the data and the results. That all applies to more the technical side of a paper. And again, past tense, past tense. And if there were problems with the results, if something didn't come out, that needs to be presented within the body. And then once the body is presented, all the data is out there, you can go to the discussion. And the discussion is where you as the author make a critical examination of your results, compare it to other results that have been found in the field and discuss, did this method work well? Are there other methods that could have worked better? And what else could and could not be determined and the negative results can be presented at this point and say, is there something that you can learn from obtaining the negative results? And then once you've finished the discussion, you can go to the conclusion. The conclusion needs to summarize. It's essentially like the abstract, only more extensive. You can have two or three paragraphs. You're gonna summarize the purpose of the paper, what was done and why. You're gonna be very clear about the results of the paper and what was found. And then you're going to again contextualize. You're going to say, how does this benefit or apply to the conservation field? And many authors like to indicate at this point what further studies could be done to expand this set of information and to other areas, illustrations. So, I tend to see us to say you can't have enough illustrations. However, I have seen papers, usually presentations presented with all of the slides that are too many illustrations. The images, figures, the table, all need to be focal points. That the reader can flip through and get a good impression of the paper. It will summarize the data in a single chart or figure and show the importance of the characteristics of an object or a treatment with arrows pointing to the areas of interest or what the reader should be looking at. The captions must be complete. Must tell the reader what they're looking at. It's enough information about that particular chart or that particular photograph that they don't have to thumb back through the paper and try and find, okay, that's where they cite figure one. Let me read that paragraph and figure out what this is. It needs to be complete, so that people that like to grab the journalist that comes in the paper copy and thumb through and look at the images and see what's going on in the paper can decide whether that paper might be worth reading. There are people that do that. So, and then, as Senchita mentioned, JAIC, along with other journals, has a specific format that needs to be followed, and this can be found at each of the journal issues that can also be found online. And there's formats for the references. We like to have a suppliers list to let people know where the materials were purchased, and we like to have a biography of the author. So, what happens to an article once it's submitted? Well, let me get my cursor over here. I hope everyone can see it. Once everything is transferred online now through the Mani Publication website, and once an author uploads manuscript, it goes to Bonnie Noggle as the AIC Communications Director, and Bonnie will look at it, and she'll have two main questions. Is this article in English? And second, does it relate to conservation? And believe it or not, there are both cases. There have been some papers that Bonnie, turns back at that point. Oh, third thing, she checks to make sure everything is complete as far as all the things that we require for a JAIC article. And if it's complete, then it goes to the editor-in-chief and the senior editor. Both of these editors read the paper and decide which associate editor would be the best to handle it because the specialty groups in AIC are so diverse. It really takes a broad range of knowledge to cover each particular area. And so we do have associate editors specializing from each of the specialty groups, and as well as one was just added for preventing conservation to handle that are more familiar with that type of information. And once it goes to the associate editor who reads it, the associate editor has the option to reject it outright. And this is rarely done, but it can be done in a case where the associate editor is too embarrassed to send that paper to a reviewer. Too embarrassed to take a reviewer's time to read that because the associate editor's very much value their cultivated field of reviewers and do not wanna waste anybody's time. However, I've been editor-in-chief for 12 years. I think during the 12 years, there might have been three papers that were rejected without ever going to reviewers. And you have to remember that the joint decision, three people have already read it. The editor-in-chief, the senior editor, and the associate editor, it was assigned to. So that's saying two thanks, province, is that we do get good submissions and that we value the time that an author has put in to write the paper. And so as far as reviewers, each of the associate editors tends to build their own list. They often can look at the references that are enlisted at the end of the article to get ideas for more names. In the Manny website for an author to submit, there is the option that the author can add to a free name of recommended reviewers. And that's something that to be considered. People that would like to become reviewers should note who the associate editor is and their specialty group contacts them, let them know they're very interested in reviewing a paper and that they realize they don't have a lot of experience in the field, they feel this will give them a better perspective on journal articles, and even if they're a third editor, they would like to be included. So we do recommend that every associate editor find at least two reviewers. Some of them often do find three, especially if the article bridges between one or more specialty groups and they find a third reviewer. Each of these transfers of the paper takes time, 30 to 60 days. I think the reviewers are given 60 days. Once the paper goes through the reviewer, it goes back to the associate editor who makes the initial decision and writes their commentary on the paper. Then it goes back to either the editor or chief or the senior editor who have split all the submissions into and selectively taken one half of the papers. And the editor and chief and senior editor then write the letter to the author that contains the decisions of the paper, the recommendations as far as changes, and the comments from the reviewers. And the author is given anywhere between 30 and 90 days to revise the paper and resubmit it, and in which case it goes back to the editor and chief and to the associate editors. It does not go back to the reviewers. And the editor or the senior editor and the associate editor decide whether all the corrections were made, whether that's sufficient, whether there's something else that needs to be done. Anyway, this can be a back-and-forth process. It usually doesn't go over three times, in which case the paper is finally accepted. It goes to Manny for copy editing and layout and proof production. At this point, it goes back to the author and to Bonnie and to the editor and chief or senior editor all at the same time. And the changes, all of which are supposed to be minor at this point go back to Manny to be put into the proof and then it's sent to publication. At the same time, it is put online. So in general, the papers tend to take about a year to two years to go from the first submission to the final online publication. This has fed up a little bit because of the online transfer. We no longer have to mail everything out. However, that is lengthy, and some people do want the papers published faster. One thing I always like to encourage is that submissions are welcome from the postprints of each specialty group, and they do need to be put in J-E-I-C format, but that's one area where it can be published previously and then submitted to J-E-I-C. So my last slide is just a set of references. Again, for the wonderful website at Bates University and then for some newsletter articles, one of which is a classic, and I realized it wasn't available on the A-I-C website, this Judy Bishop article from May 2000 on what constitutes authorship. So I have given a PDF version to the organizers of this webinar in hopes that it will go online. And that's all I have. Thank you for your time. All right. Thank you, Michelle. We've run out of time, so we won't be doing a Q&A session, but you guys have covered many of the questions that were submitted to us in your presentations. I just want to thank you all, Carolyn, Sanjita, and Michelle. We're going to try to get that article, that Michelle reference up on our Wiki page. And that's all for today. Thank you.