 Welcome to this presentation with simple advice on getting your paper published. I've published many papers, I've reviewed for many journals, and I'm an associate editor. I tell you this not to brag, but to point out that what I'm about to talk about is based on experience with the peer review process from all three perspectives. I'll start by talking about pre-prints and journal selection, talk about how you can help the editor help you, the peer review process, how to write a good point-by-point response, and some last steps to take care of before publishing. First of all, consider pre-print. By pre-printing, you can make manuscripts available before peer review. You simply upload your manuscript to a pre-print repository such as Bioarchive and thereby you give earlier access to your work, you make it open access even if the final paper is not published open access, you make it possible for people to cite your work and make it possible for yourself to cite your work in your grant proposals. These days almost all journals accept pre-prints so there's really not much reason to not do it. The first step in getting your work published in a journal is to select a journal to submit it to. Be realistic, read the scope statement of the journal and look at the past publications from the journal. Does this journal publish the kind of work that you're about to submit to it? If not, it's the certain way of getting a quick editorial rejection without any input from reviewers and you've simply wasted your time. You also want to think about visibility. Will people be able to find your work where you're about to publish it and will they have access to it? For this reason, you want to publish in journals that are indexed in PubMed and ideally publish open access so that everyone has access. Definitely, you want to avoid predatory journals that are not indexed in places like PubMed and you want to avoid obscured closed access journals where few people would have access to actually read the paper even if they wanted to. The next thing you want to do as an author is to help the editor. Remember, a happy editor is a good editor because the editor is the person who decides whether your work gets published in the journal. It's hard to find reviewers and for that reason as an editor it can be very tempting to make an editorial rejection thereby saving yourself the work. So, as an author, suggest reviewers and make good suggestions. People who are likely to accept the invitation. People who are qualified to review the work. People who would have an interest in the work. Don't suggest a list of noble laureates that's useless to me as an editor. Don't suggest your friends. They cannot be neutral, unbiased reviewers of your work. Suggest someone more junior who would have the time to review it, who's doing related work and who would see the value in what you're doing. Let's say the editor sent your manuscript out for review. The reviewers wrote their reports and now you got the chance to respond to the reviews. First of all, take a deep breath. Reviewers are wrong at times but they're not uniquely stupid. So if they misunderstood what you wrote, it's probably because your text is not clear. Respond to all the comments. Respond to everything. Act on the comments. It can be as little as clarifying a misunderstanding by rephrasing a sentence. But do something. Don't try to just talk your way out of it by writing a response to the reviewer and doing nothing in the manuscript itself. Remember the goal is to convince the reviewers and to do that you want to address all their concerns. It's also your chance to improve the manuscript. Secondarily, you want to convince the editor. You want to make it as easy as possible for the editor to press the accept button by having the editor look at the response and say the author has addressed everything from the reviewers. I don't even have to send it back to the reviewers. Shorten the paper. Often the peer review process ends like this. Congratulations, your paper has been accepted. There are just some last few formalities that you need to take care of first. One of them being shorten the paper by one third. Before you scream, remember this is your chance to improve the writing. It allows you to make it more concise and better. It allows you to move some things to supplement that were perhaps not that important. Including some of the things you added to the manuscript only to please the reviewers. Remember at this point nobody but the editor is looking at it. Shortly after your paper has been formally accepted, you will typically receive page proofs and you need to check these very carefully. This is your last chance to fix mistakes. Both the publisher's mistakes and your mistakes. The publisher may do bad reformatting of tables. I've seen that many times where complex tables get formatted wrong when they reformat it to the journal standard. You can have low quality figures where the resolution is really bad. You can have wrong figure references typically made by yourself when you were doing either response to the reviewers or shortening the paper right before getting accepted. Wrong citation formatting. Often you use a citation manager and forget to look at the actual reference list to make sure that everything looks right. And mistakes in formulas. Again, something often introduced by publishers when they're typesetting the manuscript. That's all I have to say today about getting your work published in a peer-reviewed journal. If you want to learn more about how to write scientific articles, I suggest taking a look at this presentation next. Thanks for your attention.