 Good news astro vlog fans today. I submitted a paper for publication Yes, I'm a dad and that is an awkward dance at this point in my career This is something I've done like a couple dozen times It's still not easy, but there's a bit of a routine to it I was reminded of an email that I had with a student years ago We had just submitted a big paper for publication and they wrote my email saying I don't know what you mean So you say we're having a paper referee and I thought of course we have to explain these things Let's just review how do papers go from ideas to journal articles Okay, step one is you have a great idea you work on it for a very long time possibly You make graphs you analyze data you make measurements, and then you write a paper But this is glossing over immensely this could take years to go from nascent idea to to a written draft And then you're done with like step one of ten step two is Submitted you submit it to a journal this usually means you pick one of the main astronomy journals now There's a lot of debate about which journal that's like a different video or series of discussions Usually you're submitting through an online website portal. You're uploading all the documents So this would be all the figures usually as PDFs and the manual the actual typed-up manuscript in astronomy This is typically in a language we call latech or la tech But never latex step to complete you have now submitted your paper to a journal step three The journal will assign an editor for a small journal There might just be one editor but for the big journals like the double s journals there are editors for all different subject matters stars galaxies cosmology Software this person's job is to shepherd the paper through this whole process to make sure that it's fair and rigorous The editor is your friend or at least should not be your enemy they can make your life way easier be nice to the editors Okay, step four the editor looks through your paper gives it a cursory glance to make sure it's not spam and Then tries to find a referee Now they're gonna look for somebody who works in the same sub-discipline or area that your paper is on Oftentimes there's only so many people who can referee a paper and half of them are on the paper Kind of develop a rapport with the editors and they sort of trust you to do the job But there's kind of an honor system going on here step five if the referee is available and willing is they will read your paper They're gonna go through with a fine-tooth comb when I'm refereeing a paper I'm checking the math looking at every table looking at every figure Critically examining all the results. I've had referees go through and even check my code sometimes All right, the referee has read it and step six the referee will write the report general practices is this is usually 10 or 20 issues these might range from small typos to Substantive ideas these should be productive suggestions like the kind you would give a friend or a colleague who is asking your advice That being said it can be combative and sometimes referees will feel personally slighted that you didn't that you didn't reference They're all important groundbreaking work But regardless the referee will the referee will write the report and send it to the editor Who will then send it to you and step seven you receive your referee report congratulations Your paper has now been refereed for the first time your job now is to go through and make all the changes Or at least address all the points the referee has raised you don't have to do everything the referee says these are suggestions They're not requirements if you disagree that's fine explain why you disagree I usually try to look at for every point that referee has raised I need to change something in my paper Even if the answer is like the referee just didn't get it That means that I have failed to make myself perfectly clear to one of my colleagues Then you write back your report now the report usually comes to you as a flat text file And you reply to the report in with detailed descriptions of everything you changed again in a flat text file Even though we're solving the mysteries of the universe astronomers usually deal in ascii files Okay step what about eight The referee will receive your reply and they either will recommend a publication Or they will say that it needs more work this little cycle can go on for a long time I've had it go on for four or five times. I know horror stories where people have seven eight nine ten rounds of refereeing At which point the editor will or should intervene to try to narrow the scope of what needs to happen But assuming the referee is happy with all the changes you've made then they will usually recommend paper publication And step nine once that recommendation happens the journal will almost always accept your paper for publication Congratulations. Your paper is now accepted or as we will say Impress the general wisdom is also that this is a good time to submit your paper to the archive or the open source Repository of papers it might have taken a few months to go from the submission to the end of the referee process And it might take a few more months to actually be finally published Submitting to the archive means that once your paper is accepted and kind of finalized It's not going to really change in substance And so it's ready to be shared with the community when you submit to the archive It takes like a day or two to get posted now the last step is the editorial step The journal is going to try to get rid of any typos or grammatical errors There's a little step for feedback, but substantively your paper is finished This last stage is also where you get the bill and let me say this whole process is very us Astronomy specific in other disciplines and in other countries. They publish differently We usually only have one referee in other fields You might have full referees another huge difference in american astronomy journals is that we typically pay what's called page charges This is a cost of publication. This is a whole other discussion We should do a video about but the long and short of it is a standard paper is going to cost you One to two thousand dollars It's a lot of money and I would never encourage you pay it out of pocket This is usually factored into our grants. So the same federal grants that are paying my salary We also budget in some money for expected publications. This part of the system stinks But there's no good viable alternative that has really been raised. Okay, and Last and certainly not least step 10 is your paper is finally published It's gone from submission to referee to reply Maybe back and forth a couple times and finally accepted through an editorial review then a long last published on the internet Again, this might take six months and from the point at which you started the project It could be years by the time your paper is accepted and published Usually you're halfway down the road working on a new project The last really interesting issue is the acceptance rate in astronomy papers in america. The acceptance rate is Incredibly high. I don't know what the actual number is, but it's probably over 95 percent of papers Submitted by professional astronomers get accepted eventually and I don't just mean in some journal Usually in the journal you've submitted it to part of this is due to the pay structure and part of it is cultural This means by and large that astronomers have more publications to their name than some other scientists at a given career stage Whereas some academics will spend years trying to get a single piece of work published I should be publishing several manuscripts I think it allows us to speculate more to be more imaginative, but it does kind of smack of pay to play Anyhow, that's a quick review of how papers go from Baby ideas all the way to full-fledged articles If you have more questions about how this process works or you want to talk about the money Or you'd like me to interview some of the people involved in this I'm always looking to learn more about how papers are published and how the journals work Drop a comment down below or hit me up on twitter And as always if you find these videos interesting or useful It means a lot to me if you can do the social media things like subscribe Share the video it means a ton to me to know that my work is being appreciated by you all. 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