ANU Open Research collections provides an online location for collecting, maintaining, and disseminating the scholarly output of the University. This service allows members of the University to share research with the wider community. Digital Collections accepts journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, working or technical papers and other forms of scholarly communication such as poster presentations. It is also a repository for digital images of manuscripts and photographs in University research collections.

In particular, the ANU Library strongly promotes the work of postgraduate students through their posters and conference presentations via the ANU Digital Collections project.

The Crawford Higher Degree Research (HDR) Committee is chaired by the HDR Director, covers HDR matters and makes decisions on student scholarships and visiting fellowships where appropriate.

​The committee meets every second month, directs the School’s HDR-related activities, and designs and implements relevant policies. The committee also makes decisions on student scholarships and funding requests. Representatives on the committee include the HDR Convenors from each of the Crawford streams (POGO, RE&D, NSC, ACDE), the PhD Academic and Research Skills Advisor, the HDR Administrator, and HDR student representatives. Meetings are held every second month, except (typically) January.

​PhD students have at least one female representative on the Crawford School HDR Committee, with a maximum of two representatives.

​Periodically, the HDR Committee seeks a new student representative or representatives. Students nominate themselves for a position on the HDR Committee and fellow students vote on those nominations in a first-past-the-post poll (conducted anonymously online). To sit on the HDR Committee you must be willing to:

• Attend HDR Committee meetings

• Seek student opinion on issues and matters that concern them in order to accurately represent those opinions

• Present student views and perspectives

• Represent student interests

• Respond to student requests for representation

• Report back to students about issues raised and determined by the HDR Committee that affect them

• Making yourself accessible to students who would like the Committee to consider a particular issue, and present those issues to the Committee

The runner-up in a poll may act as back-up for those times when the representative(s) is unable to attend HDR Committee meetings. If you become unhappy with the job your student representative is doing for you, you may petition the HDR Committee to have the representative removed and the position re-advertised.

You should have a clear understanding of authorship credit for any joint-authored paper you contribute to. In particular, you should agree prior to writing who will do what, and what the author order will be. The Vancouver Protocol provides some uniform requirements for submitting manuscripts and presents a useful guide to determining authorship. Consider pointing to these guidelines in discussions with co-authors (including your supervisor, if your supervisor is a co-author) before you start writing. This will establish transparency in author contributions. The Vancouver Protocol states, in part, that

• All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. 

• Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions 1) to conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data, and 2) to drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, and 3) on final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author.

• Editors may ask authors to describe what each contributed, this information may be published. The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the co-authors. Because the order is assigned in different ways, its meaning cannot be inferred accurately unless it is stated by the authors. Authors may wish to explain the order of authorship in a footnote

​

Crawford has an engagement team that runs most of Crawford’s events, manages the homepage of the school website and runs Policyforum.net. The engagement team is essentially a one-stop shop for communications. If you are awarded a scholarship, are invited to present at an international conference, make a breakthrough in your research, would like to write for Policy Forum (or the magazine Advance) or have any other newsworthy event, please let the Engagement Team know about it. Martyn Pearce (martyn.pearce@anu.edu.au) leads the team and will be happy to hear from you with anything newsworthy. Please keep the team informed of news – it helps let the broader Crawford community know about the contribution PhD scholars are making both internally and externally, as well as being a boost for your profile.

The Engagement Team also lead the Strategic Engagement Committee (SEC). SEC meets monthly to evaluate proposals from across Crawford School for support for events. The SEC was established to make the event co-ordination process more formalised and to encourage planning and forethought. Every event that requires staff time from the Crawford Engagement Team or resources (audio-visual, etc.) has to be approved by the committee. To propose an event, a form must be submitted at least five weeks prior to the event, detailing all the logistical needs, the target audience, what outputs might be generated, media and communications potential, and range of other factors. The committee usually has six members, including a PhD representative.

NECTAR is an independent space for Early Career Academics at The Australian National University. They are a direct channel of communication between ECA and the University Executive, effecting change to ensure ANU is an attractive workplace for early career academics.

The HDR Update provides regular information on research training activities available throughout ANU. Research students and supervisors are sent the HDR Update at the start of every month. If you think you are not receiving the HDR Update, please contact researcherdevelopment@anu.edu.au.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCiD) is a global initiative that provides researchers with a free, unique identifier that can automatically link and attribute your research activities to you. It helps to track and link grants, papers and other activities and ensure all your work is correctly attributed to you, helps others find your work, and helps the University identify your work. By registering you automatically link to your research outputs from Scopus and Web of Science. The ANU Library sometimes runs ORCiD sign-up sessions at which you can get help registering for an ORCiD and have any questions answered. Check the ANU Library’s events page for details.​

Why does the ANU want every academic to register for an ORCiD number?

Major funding organisations are increasingly using ORCiDs to distinguish clearly between researchers and populate lists of publications and research work in application portals. In a joint statement, the NHMRC and the ARC lauded the use of ORCiDs in ‘[f]acilitating disambiguation of researchers and research outputs’ and ‘[e]nabling the linking and reuse of high quality, persistent data (e.g. publications, grants)’. More and more researcher platforms and information systems are drawing information from the not-for-profit ORCiD database, as it has the reputation for being the most accurate and transparent. Eventually, the upcoming ANU Research Information Management System (RIMS) Program will also sync with ORCiD.

​Once you have your number, it is important that you first add your ANU employment details and grant the ANU access (make it public) in order for the University to be able to integrate your profile fully into its researcher network. Works (Publications) can be imported a number of ways. You can directly import your data from your Google Scholar account and your Endnote file via BibTeX. You can also import any publications listed on Scopus, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) National Collections Registry and CrossRef, to name only a few. Please see the site for a complete list of compatible databases. Works that cannot be imported from other sources must be entered manually. Please contact CAP Research Services Staff if in doubt. Funding must also be entered manually, although ORCiD is currently developing greater compatibility for importation of funding entries as well.

ORCiD is integrated with HORUS: in the self-service portal, click on 'Talent Profile' to add or edit your ORCiD. ANU encourages all researchers, including PhD students, academic staff and research-active professional staff to register for an ORCiD identifier.

​Contact cap.research@anu.edu.au if you have any questions or need any assistance

Dr Google says (or did at some stage):

“Google Scholar Citations provides a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.

​Best of all, it’s quick to set up and simple to maintain, even if you have written dozens of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time, and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can even choose to have your list of articles updated automatically — but, of course, you can also choose to review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time.”

• The Drum. Send your pitch to drum@abc.net.au

• Foreign Policy

• Policy Forum

• DevPolicy blog

• The Interpreter

• The Conversation

• Al Jazeera. Send submissions to Op-Ed@aljazeera.net

• The Diplomat

Useful X (previously Twitter) feeds and hashtags include

• @thesiswhisperer

• @ANUCrawford

• @ANUasiapacific

• #phdchat

• #ecrchat

• #writingtips

• #acwri

• #phdadvice

• #phdforum

You can sign up to Conference Alerts Monthly in your discipline and get info on conferences into your inbox. Otherwise, try these:

• Civsec. Civil Security and Civil Defence

• Australasian Aid Conference. Runs every February at ANU

• Australia Conferences

• World Water Week

• World Water Congress

• International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (various conferences)

• International Conference on Macro-Economic Modelling

• International Studies Association Annual Convention

• Cycon US

• World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research conference

• International Convention of the East Asian Economic Association

• AARES conference AARES conferences are good for PhD students working in Agriculture and Resource Economics, especially those wanting to network and find future academics jobs.

Contributed by Tim Legrand, Lecturer & PhD Program Convenor National Security College. Thanks, Tim!

​Publishing scholarly research is the primary way that new academic research is disseminated. Publishing articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals is one of several means of publication (monographs, book chapters and conference papers being some others), and in the social sciences it is increasingly imperative for academics to place their research in journals since these are proxy measures of the quality of your research.

​ERA 2010 Ranked Journal List

In their latest, 2015 list, the ARC have abandoned the ranking element (although most academics still use these as indicators of quality), and opted to maintain simply a long list of recognised journals. You can find a copy of the spreadsheet listing all journals in the ERA 2015 Journal List.

​There are some major pitfalls for you to avoid in journal publishing. Over the past decade or so, a number of unscrupulous publishers have caught on to the growing pressure for academics to publish their work, and have set up online ‘journals’ that solicit article submissions from academics for a (hefty) publication fee. These have been labelled ‘predatory journals’, since they generally attempt to induce young or inexperienced researchers to submit their work and pay ‘publication fees’ that range from $100 to $1000 by emailing them directly (spamming, really) calling for submissions. Usually describing themselves as ‘Open Access’ (and to be clear, there are some very good quality genuine journals that are open-access!), predatory journals look otherwise respectable: i.e., have an apparent editorial board, ‘peer review policy’, attractive website, scholarly-sounding title, and so on. However, such journals are manifestly not peer-reviewed. Anyone with the right cash and a manuscript that may or may not be plagiarised can publish with these journals (since these exist only online, they cannot be shut down or otherwise sanctioned for not meeting scholarly standards). There is no process of copy-editing or quality control. In short, they are exploitative.​

How do I know that a journal is reputable, i.e., recognised as scholarly journal?

Check the ARC ERA 2015 Journal List (link above). If it is not listed, then you should assume (to be on the safe side) that is not recognised as a scholarly journal. As mentioned above, journals not on this list are not automatically predatory, (i.e., see below on new journals) but your safest bet is to stick to the ARC list. If you’re at all unsure, ask your supervisor.​

What if it is a new journal? i.e., it commenced after the last ARC ERA process?

There are new journals starting up all the time. They take a few years, at least, before they are recognised as rigorous outlets, so in this time they seek to build up a good academic reputation by inviting publications. Generally, they will be based out of a reputable publishing house (i.e., Taylor and Francis, Sage, Cambridge, etc) or a recognised learned society (i.e., the British International Studies Association publishes a well-regarded journal called the Review of International Studies). Crucially, they will always have peer-review processes in place, and never (ever!) ask for a fee for your work to be published. There is a whitelist of new open-access journals maintained by the Directory of Open Access Journals. This is a site that quality checks journals. If your journal is on that whitelist, it’s probably a new journal that hasn’t yet made it onto the ARC’s list.​

What’s the hoopla about being ‘indexed’ by a journal database?

How long do you have? Fundamentally, being included on a scholarly database ‘index’ is marker of the quality of the journal. Being ‘indexed’ by Thompson Reuters or Scopus or PubMed (there are lots) means that the indexing service has checked that the journal is rigorous, peer-reviewed and is of sufficient reputation to merit inclusion in their index. Doing so makes the journal more accessible to the scholarly community and provides assurances of quality. So the indexing services act as quality assessors, and offer metrics on that quality (‘Impact Factor’ is one such measure). These can be difficult sometimes to use, so for simplicity’s sake I recommend you stick to the ARC list.​

What should happen when I submit to a reputable, peer-reviewed, and ARC-recognised journal?

The process of getting research published is hugely time-consuming, but rather rewarding if and when you are successful. These are the approximate steps:​

1. Write your paper (this can be a horrid and soul-destroying process)

2. Identify a journal that publishes research of the sort you have conducted, and is recognised by the ARC.

3. Align your paper with the preferred ‘house style’ (i.e., reference style, spelling and grammar conventions, etc.) of the journal (listed on their website)

4. Submit the paper (often via a website called ManuscriptCentral) removing all references to your name (or anything that could identify you). Include a separate cover sheet with these details. These instructions will be given to you at the time of submission.

5. The editor reviews your paper for alignment with the journal’s aims and for overall style; if they think it is in the journal’s referred range of research, they send it to two peer-reviewers.

6. The peer reviewers receive your anonymised paper, read it carefully, and make one of the following determinations: (i) Reject; (ii) Revise and Resubmit (this means the paper is generally acceptable, but has a few significant shortcomings that should be revised before resubmitting); (iii) Accept with minor revisions (Hooray! They like it, but just want you to tweak some bits and pieces. Usually typos, referencing errors, or grammatical problems); (iii) Accept with no revisions (This is the Holy Grail. Perhaps only 5% of papers are in this category).

7. The editor makes their decision based on the peer-reviewers’ recommendations. If there is a discrepancy between recommendations, then they will either make her own decision or send the paper out to another peer-reviewer (or more). My personal record is 5 peer-reviewers who argued over whether or not to publish my paper, but I’ve heard of more!

8. If you are accepted, you will receive an email informing you of this achievement along with instructions on what is needed to bring it to publication. Generally, you will receive proofs with required ‘corrections’ within two months or so. You also must sign a copyright release.

9. Your article gets published!

10. You start on the next article.

I’ve submitted to a journal that is not on the ARC 2012 list, and now they have asked me to pay a fee before publication: what should I do?

Run a mile. Withdraw your paper and find a paper that is on the ARC list. If your work is (a) original and (b) interesting, there are a dozen other ARC-recognised journals that would be interested (and will never demand payment).​

Are you sure? Are there any other ways I can check to see if a journal is unscrupulous?

Yes, there is indeed: check Beall’s list, which identifies all such dodgy publishers. Some of the publishers in fact have several journals, so do check links that approximate to the name of a journal you are concerned about.​

But this journal says it is indexed by Google Scholar!

Google Scholar’s indexing service doesn’t filter out dodgy publishers (since they are many!). Being indexed by Google means nothing.

​I submitted my paper to a journal and it got accepted! However, they’ve asked me if I would like to pay for ‘Gold-Access’? What is this?

This really is heart of the whole problem.​

If you follow the publishing process outlined above, your article will appear as a PDF in the journal’s latest Issue (journals publish several issues a year) and be printed in the hard-copy of the journal (though not necessarily these days). Access to journal articles is generally restricted to subscribers to these journals: the subscriptions are really expensive, and usually it is universities who pay these fees to allow academics and students to access the published research. For example, look at the articles listed at the bottom of an academic’s email. If you are not on a University campus and you click any of the hyperlinked titles, you’ll get to a paywall (academics don’t like this, incidentally, but that is another issue). There are ways around this: for example, in my email signature I include ‘free download of pre-print version’ links at the end of each article, which is a non-formatted version of the article that I am allowed to distribute from my own website.​

Gold Access is a relatively new mechanism that scholarly publishers have introduced to allow research to reach a wider audience. So, to re-state the above, when you publish with a journal your work then becomes available only to subscribers of that journal. ‘Gold-Access’ is a means for the major publishing houses to increase their own revenues, by asking for additional payment from the author in advance to make the article open-access to the public. This is where the predatory ‘open access’ model has managed to induce some confusion amongst some academics. There’s much more to this debate, though, than I have time for here. Suffice to say: if you can publish for free (albeit the work is held behind a paywall) this is normal for a reputable publisher.​

Why should the public have to pay to download journal articles at all?

Good question. We should all be up in arms about this.

​What’s the bottom line?

Publishing your research in a peer-reviewed journal is a real achievement. To ensure that you do not fall victim to the ‘predatory journals’ out there, look for these ‘red flags’:​

• The journal sent you an email inviting you to publish

• The journal asks for payment before publication

• It is based in a really obscure university

• They accept your paper in number of days or weeks (for reference, my fastest time from article submission to ‘accept’ was 3 months; my slowest, 9 months)

• The journal undertakes little or no copy-editing

What if I’m still confused?

A good rule of thumb is that if you are in any doubt about the authenticity of a journal, then don’t publish with them. There are thousands of journals that are easily checked and verified for academic rigour. These are the ones that you should target.