How to publish a scientific paper: Maximizing impact

Create a personal research communication strategy:

1. Register for an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). ORCID enables you to link your publications to a persistent searchable ID.

2. Make your work Open Access: "...accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average." (Piwowar et al. 2018).

• Publish Open Access; see:
  • Publisher OA Agreements and Discounts for UC corresponding authors (some agreements include LBNL)
  • UC Berkeley Scholarly Communication Services: Open Access
• Deposit a preprint in a disciplinary Open Access repository (e.g., arXiv, bioRχiv, ChemRxiv, medRxiv).
  Releasing a preprint is associated with more attention and citations for the peer-reviewed article (Fu and Hughey, 2019)
  Note: Make sure that the journal you are submitting to does not consider a preprint to be a form of prior publication.
• Deposit a postprint in PMC to fulfill funder public access policies (some publishers do this automatically).
• Upload author's final version to the eScholarship Repository in accordance with the UC Open Access Policy
  • Publisher copyright and self-archiving policies: Sherpa Romeo
  • Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research (effective 2026): "...all peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or co-authored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research [should be] made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication."

3. Share your data to increase your work's visibility:

• Good data practices (Dryad Repository)
• FAIR data principles (GO FAIR)
• re3data (Registry of Research Data Repositories)
• NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing (effective January 25, 2023):
  • Requires Data Management and Sharing Plan as part of the application for NIH grants
  • Scientific data are defined as "The recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate and replicate research findings, regardless of whether the data are used to support scholarly publications."
  • Data should be made available at the time of publication or by the end of the award period, whichever comes first

4. Talk up your paper with colleagues and at conferences

5. Promote your paper on social media (blogs, Twitter, etc.)

For more information:

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