Fun fact

I probably won’t be publishing in the very top journals any soon.

So within a Horizon Europe-funded project we have new results, they look very promising, and of course we would try to publish them in the highest possible ranking journal. However, the Horizon Europe open access mandate requires immediate OA availability of final full-text, no embargo.

So today I was checking our options. In the top IF journal in our category: Nature Sustainability and Energy & Environmental Science we would have to pay between 10000 euro and 2800 euro for this. Well, thank you very much.

Yes, I could have put 20k euro in the project budget and I would be well covered. But honestly: why? Let aside for a sec the ethical considerations (funneling public money directly into the pockets of private publishers to generate a pdf file for me), we can pragmatically budget them for much needed travels and salary.

So here you have it

Consider I work in one of the EU countries with probably best publishing deals overall. I guess I should conclude that EU projects and top-ranking journals are not very compatible.

Anyway, plenty of other publishing options, but this is not free from consequences unfortunately, given how research evaluations work.

The consequences

Here is the evil circle of grants and papers. You need articles in top journals to show a good CV, which in many places including EU funding is what evaluators look at. Good CVs get you grant money, and you need a lot of those to run a big project that makes breakthroughs, and delivers results that can potentially be published in top journals.

You don’t need to be an expert in system dynamics to understand this is a reinforcing loop. When you have the grant money and the results, but you can’t publish them in the top journals, you maybe don’t break the circle direclty but at least you weaken the force of the loop. In the long run, it has consequences on your chances of getting new grant money, until the circle finally breaks and you are in trouble (no money, and no papers).

Not so fast

I am perhaps giving the impression that when you have very good results these will be automatically published in a top journal and that top papers will automatically get you some grants.

But, of course, reality is not so simple. A lot of other factors are at play here - including a generous dose of chance - that complicate the process and make it much less logic and linear, but this is material for another post.