Publishers and Early-Career Researchers Working Together: Guiding Initiatives

This article summarizes the outcomes and outputs of a workshop at the 2024 Researcher to Reader Conference that explored the perspectives of both publishers and early-career researchers (ECRs) on existing ECR–publisher initiatives. The workshop identified several challenges of current initiatives, including those from technical, engagement, financial, and evaluation perspectives. A large part of the workshop was dedicated to cocreating possible solutions, and this article uses both the identified challenges and solutions to offer recommendations to guide current and future ECR–publisher initiatives. Introduction Both commercial and nonprofit publishers increasingly recognize the significance of engaging with ECRs to attract new authors and reviewers, build loyalty, and gain fresh perspectives that can inform new policies from publishers. But what is in it for the ECRs? Working together with a publisher can boost the profiles of the ECRs involved and help them advance their careers, as well as help them to develop skills that are, or will be, important to them as academics. However, to ensure that ECR initiatives within the publishing industry are mutually beneficial, it is crucial to set the right goals; identify, anticipate, and address the main challenges; and learn from past initiatives—what did and did not work well. A workshop held at the 2024 Researcher to Reader Conference in London (https://r2rconf.com/) explored various (current) ECR-championing and training initiatives (here referred to as ECR–publisher initiatives). For the purposes of the workshop, we defined ECR as postgraduate student up to researcher within 10 years of their PhD award date. Also, in […]