PSC-F01 — Foundations of Scholarly Publishing

What this course is about

Scholarly publishing is the system through which research becomes knowledge that others can rely on. It is also an industry with commercial interests, an incentive structure that rewards volume, and failure modes that researchers encounter without ever having been taught about them. This foundation course explains how the system actually works.

How the course is structured

The opening sessions map the actors and their interests: authors, editors, reviewers, publishers, funders, librarians and institutional administrators. Each wants something different, and most of the system’s odd behaviour becomes explicable once those interests are visible.

The middle sessions cover the mechanics — journal selection, the submission and review process, what peer review can and cannot detect, revision and response to reviewers, and the practical meaning of authorship, credit and conflict-of-interest disclosure. Students work with real reviewer reports, including badly written ones, and draft responses.

Later sessions address open access and its several business models, preprints, licensing, research metrics and their misuse, and the predatory publishing operations that target inexperienced or pressured authors. Recognition of the warning signs is treated as a core competence.

What you will be able to do

You should be able to select a suitable venue for a piece of work and justify the choice, prepare a submission that will not be rejected on technical grounds, respond to review constructively, understand what a licence permits, and evaluate metrics critically rather than deferring to them.

Who it suits

Postgraduate students preparing a first submission, early-career researchers under publication pressure, supervisors who must advise on venue selection, journal editors and editorial assistants, and librarians supporting research services.

The course opens the curriculum of the School of Publishing & Scientific Communication and follows naturally from research training in the School of Research Methodology & Academic Practice. KBA13’s own imprint and submission guidance sit under Publishing, and the catalogue is in the Academy.