Be Visible : an expert advice on academic publishing strategies in a seminar held at IUT Library ICT Centre, Gazipur

Ahasan, Dhaka, 12 January 2019

The library of the Islamic University of Technology (IUT) has organized a seminar on ‘Academic publishing’ on 10 January 2019. Dr Omar Jah, Acting Vice-Chancellor of the IUT was the Chief Guest. Dr Jakaria Rahman, Bibliometric Analyst of the Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) was the resource person and delivered a lecture on ‘Be Visible: academic publishing strategies’. Dr Mirza Mohd. Rezaul Islam, Librarian of the IUT was the program chair.

The Chief guest appreciated the initiative of the IUT library for bringing in such a timely topic of discussion. He requested the resource person to ignite the discussion and give his expert advice to the participants. The program chair host the entire seminar.

The faculty members and researchers were enthusiastic about how the resource person diggings down the publication profile of the IUT since it established based on Scopus database, provided useful advice and enlighten them to target-oriented improvement in respective academic field accordingly.

The number of scientific publications published per year is over twenty-five lac, and the number of scientific publications in the world doubles every nine years. In this seminar, Dr Jakaria Rahman who is an expert in scientific publishing strategy and research policy has advised on how researchers can increase their chances of standing out from the crowd.

He gave some hands-on advice on how to think strategically when submitting articles, factors that make research more visible and influential, how to be at the top of search engine result, how to define the role of authors and contributors, how to solve conflicts of interest/competing interests, how to increase traceability and visibility through academic publishing in the Web of Science and Scopus index journals and conferences.

He highlighted the link between academic ranking position and research impact and utilization, academic reputation and international contacts and collaborations. There is a big potential to improve the impact of research by being more strategic in how the researchers publish. Finding the right journal will improve the chances of acceptance and ensure that the article reaches the target audience, he added.

He demonstrated how the academic social network provides a collaborative dimension and can enrich the discourse during the research process. There are several academic social networking sites where researchers can share articles and preprints, create discussion with specialists, find collaborators and promote their research.

The more links to a publication from different social media, the higher the chance that the publication will appear on search engine result pages said by him. Ignoring social media in the research process is like ignoring email in 1994, he added.

In addition, he discussed how the long-term reputation and career prospects sacrificed for immediate ‘‘gains’’ by publishing in predatory journals that put a permanent stain on personal and institutional academic reputation.

The seminar was followed by an open discussion where the participants asked numerous questions vibrantly to clear their concepts on the state of the art strategies of academic publishing and policies of different European universities and research organizations.

Later they expressed their appreciation to the resource person for his resourceful presentation and insightful advice. They thank the IUT library professionals for arranging the seminar on a vital issue of the academic world in the age of social media. They were very glad to attend this seminar and expressed appreciations to the organizers.

There were over 40 faculty members and researchers from the IUT present in the seminar.