Tips for getting invited to write for an academic journal

One of the fastest ways to have your work peer-reviewed and published in the best academic journals is to be commissioned to write for them! This can happen when a journal editor is interested in your work or opinions. In this post, we give you some tips to get noticed by editors eager to publish your ideas.

If you have been in academia, you are probably familiar with academic journals and the saying that academics “publish or perish.” Unfortunately, scholarly publications are still the main way that many scientific systems (institutions, funding bodies, metrics, etc) measure academic work and contributions to science. Often, the more that others reference your publications, particularly those reviewed by peers, the higher scientific systems perceive your contribution to science.

Publications in academic journals may be research papers or opinion pieces. While research papers directly present the methods and findings of research projects, opinion pieces convey the opinions of scientists on a topic that is important to the journal’s readership. Opinion pieces are usually grounded in cited research but are opinion-driven rather than data-driven. These are often judged differently within science: research papers, which present new data and knowledge, are generally considered to be more substantial contributions than opinion pieces. There are other types of scholarly publications, including but not limited to letters to the editor, perspectives, and reviews. This post refers to all types of publications, and presents our experience with an opinion piece.

Why is learning ways to accelerate your academic publications important? Often, publishing academic work can take years and many attempts. The most common way to publish an academic paper is that the authors choose a good outlet for their paper and submit it. However, there is a different way: commissioned articles!

What are commissioned articles?

Commissioned academic pieces are publications kickstarted by the journals’ editors. Like any publication, academic journals have editorial interests that they pursue, and they select publications to be published not only on merit but also in agreement with the topics that interest them.

Note we just made a very general statement. In real life, each journal has its own policies and is quite unique. For example, Nature Human Behaviour does not select empirical research papers based on agreement with topics of interest to its editors and limits commissioning only to opinion pieces. Other journals do not commission any articles. In our experience, and because high-quality peer review is increasingly more difficult to obtain while the number of publications submitted keeps increasing, most editors often apply their own set of criteria that can include subjective decisions about the future impact and innovation of a paper rather than judging its scientific quality.

Frequently, spontaneous submissions to the journal will not match what the editors are looking for. One way that some journals try to address this problem is by organizing whole issues collecting papers about the same topic of interest called “special issues.” You will see often calls for special issues. Those are different from commissioned papers and not the focus of this post. Another way editorial boards have to attract publications of their interest is to have editors looking for authors working on topics that interest them, reaching out to these authors directly, and asking them if they would like to submit their work about a particular topic of interest to the journal. When an editor reaches out to an author, one-on-one, not through a general call, and requests such a submission, the editor commissions a piece for the journal.

If the author accepts the invitation to submit a commissioned work, the piece goes through the rest of the usual review process at the journal, except that the author just saved one of the first barriers of the regular, unsolicited submission process because the editor expects the submission - they asked for it in the first place!

If you have published an academic paper before, you may be familiar with the term “desk reject” (that is, your paper is rejected without being peer reviewed, following solely an editor’s decision). One of the causes of desk rejects is that the journal editors are not interested in the topic of the article you submitted. Most of the time, there is nothing wrong with your paper; it is just that it is not within the editorial interest of the moment (yes, after all the excellent work you did 😞).

“Famous” (whatever that means) authors often contribute more commissioned articles than authors who are not recognized (yet? 🤞). In the same way that the rich get richer, this is one way that contributes to famous authors increasing their impact and becoming even more prominent. We know: unmeritocratic, unfair, and inequitable! Unless editors democratize commissions with those less often represented and not yet “famous” but as capable of original contributions. Nonetheless, to be able to achieve that, editors must be able to find us, the least represented scientists and technicians❗❗❗

MetaDocencia´s experience with a commissioned opinion piece

Recently, MetaDocencia had the enormous luck to go through an excellent experience of being commissioned an opinion piece for Nature Human Behaviour. It was a luxurious experience. We felt it was comparable to when, by chance, one day, we were mentally prepared to fly coach for 12 hours, crammed in a very tight plane seat, and, out of the blue, a crew member called our name over the plane speaker and invited us to move to business class, where we flew using a flatbed and arrived to our destination fresh and ready for work.

It all started when Charlotte Payne, Editor for Nature Human Behaviour, who honors MetaDocencia by co-authoring this post (yes, we are very excited to have her!), was preparing “ Navigating the AI frontier”, Nature Human Behaviour issue that focused on artificial intelligence. Charlotte was looking to have authors from all over the world in the issue and found the following tweet:

Charlotte was one of the 15 views of this tweet that ended up in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour about artificial intelligence and open science 🤯 Source: https://twitter.com/lacion/status/1679214269496279040

Charlotte read the whole thread, and found it compelling - she wanted to know more and felt that the readership of the journal would be interested in Laura’s views, too. She looked at Laura’s personal website and Google Scholar page to find out a bit more about her interests and expertise. She then emailed Laura for a short call to find out if she was interested in having an article commissioned at the intersection of artificial intelligence, open science, and ethics. Laura was highly interested, and you can read the rest of that story in this post: https://www.metadocencia.org/en/post/ai-nature/.

One key to this happy ending was that we could deliver the piece by the timeline that Charlotte needed. During our exchanges with Charlotte, we agreed on having access to a link to share our production openly, as the journal did not warrant free open access, and paying to publish it openly was not affordable to us.

In general, we had very fluid communication with Charlotte throughout the whole cycle of this publication, a first for us (with over 20 years interacting with journals!), and we attribute this to Charlotte’s openness and friendliness but also to feeling valued by being found and invited to contribute our ideas. These exchanges facilitated the creation of a summary of the article published in Spanish and added supplemental information where we translated the article fully into Spanish.

After this success story, the fastest way we have ever been able to publish an academic piece in our long publishing careers, and following our mission, we asked Charlotte to share with us her process to find authors like us to commission articles, and here we are sharing it with you.

Some tips so editors can commission from you, too 👇

We learned that Nature Human Behaviour is interested in increasing the diversity of the authors they publish. Without this policy and, more importantly, without the concrete work of persons like Charlotte to make it happen, the following tips and this whole blog post would be a pile of nice, worthless words.

• Don’t be afraid to speak up (online or in person) about issues you care about - no matter what your background and career stage. Editors are looking for new ideas and new voices, and your opinions matter.

• Be visible as a scholar online. Editors use social media, like Twitter, to find authors interested in diverse topics. However, more than just social media is needed. Editors need to be able to go beyond social media to find out who you are as a scholar (e.g., a website featuring your previous publications, a record on ORCID, Google Scholar, or some other record that there is an academic behind a social media account).

• Editors attend academic conferences on different topics and meet future authors from whom they commission articles.

  • When attending conferences in person or online, say hi, network with editors, and ask them what topics interest them!
  • If you organize conferences, ensure your event’s information is available online and on social media as much as possible so editors can discover what happens at the meeting even if they are not attending.
  • Sharing your presentations at conferences online and through social media, with presentations including contact information, also facilitates editors reaching out.

• Editors need an email address to contact you formally. Editorial policies and a ton of legal stuff bind them. In that world, email is the formal record. Pro tip: That form you may have on your website is bad news for editors; they need to be able to send an actual email, not just from a form on your website. We share your pain if you have a form on your website to avoid spam 😣

  • Ways to avoid spam include listing your email as username [at] institution [dot] edu or ude.noitutitsni@emanresu.
  • Editors will try to find emails at your institution’s website when one exists or at your personal website. If they do not find an email, what often is a fascinating lead to commission an article hits a wall and ends there 🧱

• If an editor approaches you, be honest about your interest in the piece. If they ask you to write about X, but you happen to have much more pressing opinions about Y - tell them! If you can convince them that Y is more important, they may well be happy for you to write about this instead.

• Be transparent about your capacity for writing. Editors understand what it means to be overworked! So, if you would love to write about X but cannot manage the timeline they suggest, explain this to them. Most academic journals work to longer turnaround times than fast-paced media outlets, so depending on the topic, journal, and circumstances, there’s often a lot of flexibility in timelines for commissioned pieces.

• After an editor successfully publishes your piece, if you belong to a minoritized group (for example, early career researcher, at a Majority World institution, first generation in academia), they may ask you for

  • Recommendations of colleagues and

  • Better ways to reach authors like them in the future

    🙏 Special ask: Dear colleagues, once we have the privilege to publish a commissioned article, let´s be very generous and take the time to share as much contact information from all the amazing colleagues that we know in our regions and networks as possible! MetaDocencia recommended Charlotte some authors and suggested fellow communities of practice such as OLS and The Turing Way Slack Workspaces as multidisciplinary spaces where she can network further.

Have you ever had a paper commissioned? Are you an editor who has more tips to add? Would you like to discuss further about this topic? Join our Spanish-speaking Slack workspace and tell us all about it!

This post has been made possible by NASA Grants 80NSSC23K0854 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.8215455), 80NSSC23K0857 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.8250978), and 80NSSC23K0861 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.8212072), and CZI grant DAF2021-239366 and grant DOI https://doi.org/10.37921/522107izqogv from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation (funder DOI 10.13039/100014989).

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Here is the citation we recommend you use:

Rajngewerc, M., Millán, J., Ación, L., & Payne, C. (2024). Tips for getting invited to write for an academic journal. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10630694