Grant report: Improving your chances of getting your work published

The Early-Career Researchers (ECR) workshop, „Improving your chances of getting your work published“ was held on August 13th, 2025. It was part of the program for the 11th Conference of the Scandinavian-Baltic Society for Parasitology (CSBSP11) held in Reykjavík (Aug 14th and 15th, 2025) at the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences of the University of Iceland. The workshop was run in collaboration with the Icelandic Ecological Society (Vistís).

Two Editors-in-Chief (EiC) of international scientific journals shared their insights and experiences with ECRs: Tomáš Scholz (EiC Folia Parasitologica) and Pedro Peres-Neto (EiC Oikos). Tomáš presented a talk titled „How to present scientific results: Publish or perish“ while Pedro‘s presentation was titled: „Publishing in flux: Navigating the changing landscape of academic publishing – the known and unknown backrooms of the publication system.“ The format of the workshop consisted of each EiC giving a 30-minute presentation followed by a 30-minute question period. After a coffee break, there was a final 75-minute discussion session with both EiCs contributing.

Several topics were covered during the workshop, including (among others) how to effectively summarise results in tables and figures, how to select journals for publishing your research, the importance of cover letters, and how to navigate changes to academic publishing, such as Open Access vs. Hybrid journals and how to avoid predatory journals.

The workshop was advertised widely through the CSBSP, NSO, and Vistis mailing lists. Overall, 31 ECR participated in the workshop. Most of these were participants from Iceland (13). Other participants were from Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lituania, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. Of the 31 participants, 27 attended in-person, while 4 attended via Zoom. It should be noted it had not been intended to present this workshop in a hybrid format, but once there was interest from NSO members based outside of Iceland, the event was adapted to offer this with a virtual option as well.

The feedback was very positive and both EiC appreciated the opportunity to interact with our ECRs in attendance (in-person and virtually).

This event was supported by the NSO Early-Career Researcher Grant 2025 awarded to Haseeb Randhawa.