Publishing Process

Data Sharing

All data and code associated with a manuscript should be made publicly available in an appropriate data repository with a corresponding digital object identifier (DOI) upon publication.

Relevant scripts and any newly developed software packages should be made publicly available on our group  GitHub  account. When publishing a paper that links to a GitHub repository, you should use a  DOI generated from Zenodo .

For sharing the results of DFT calculations, the generally recommended venue is  NOMAD  given its simple drag-and-drop interface. For other, more general-purpose data files, the recommended venue is either  Figshare  or  Zenodo  depending on your personal preference.

Expect this process to take at least a week or two of your time to do well. Accessible data sharing is a crucial component of doing good research in the group and should not be an afterthought. It should be much more than a simple data dump; we abide by the  FAIR  (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Guiding Principles.
If doing machine learning, read and abide by " Best Practices in Machine Learning for Chemistry ."

Authorship

We aim to be fairly generous with authorship by default. If someone else did something for you in a given manuscript or if something could not have been done without someone else's assistance or ideas, they should be added as a co-author. When in doubt about who to include as an author or if there are any concerns about authorship order, let's chat.

If you haven't already made an  ORCID , consider making one so that this can be linked to your name when we publish.

Software

In general, I prefer manuscripts to be written in Microsoft Word. However, if you strongly prefer LaTeX, then please use  Overleaf . No Google Docs (sorry!). Please also make sure that you are using a reference manager. I generally recommend using  Zotero , but Princeton has a site license to  Readcube Papers  if you prefer.

Where to Submit?

Choosing where to submit a manuscript can be a challenging task and is something we will decide upon together. In general, the main society publishers such as ACS, RSC, APS, AIChE, and AIP are excellent choices for submitting manuscripts. Additionally, the Nature-brand journals, Wiley, and Cell Press are also good choices. We generally will avoid Elsevier journals unless it is part of the Cell Press family or is an invited special issue. We will never publish with MDPI. I may have ideas about where to submit a given work, but don't hesitate to make suggestions as well. See  📖⁠⁠Reading the Literature⁠  for some specific examples of journals you might consider.

We strive to make our work openly accessible to as many readers as possible. Unless we have good reason not to do so, when we submit our manuscripts to a peer-reviewed journal, we will also deposit a copy on a pre-print server, such as ChemRxiv or arXiv. This ensures that a copy of our work is freely accessible, and it serves the added benefit of being able to potentially solicit feedback from a broader audience. If the manuscript is submitted to an open-access journal, then this step is less crucial but can still be helpful for sharing the work with the world earlier than otherwise would be possible.

The Publishing Timeline

The publishing process can take a rather long time, so don't be discouraged. The various stages are described below:
I'll ask you to "brainstorm the story" for your paper. That means you'll try to identify the ~6 figures that you'll include in the main text that will best highlight your exciting results. We'll discuss this decision and refine how we want to write the manuscript from a narrative perspective.
Once we have agreed upon the narrative layout, you'll draft the figures for the main text. We'll iterate on the figures until we are both satisfied.
Either concurrently with Step 2 or afterwards, you'll start drafting the text itself. I recommend starting with the Methods first so that you don't forget to include anything important. As you finish sections or subsections, we will chat about them to make sure we're on the same page.
Once you have a complete draft, I'll go through it and provide comments and suggestions. You can expect a lot of edits in return. This does not mean you did anything wrong! Even the best papers will receive plenty of comments, with the goal of strengthening the overall work. We may go through this process a few times until we've converged on a document we are both ready to send off into the world.
If you haven't already done so, you'll host the data/code in a publicly accessible repository, which you'll reference in the manuscript itself.
We'll send the manuscript to all co-authors for their feedback. You'll incorporate any requested changes.
You'll send me all your files, including the Word (or LaTeX) files for the main text and Supporting Information and a separate  .zip  folder containing the high-res figures included in the main text.
I'll give it a final read-through, and with that, I'll upload it to a pre-print server and send it off! It's at this stage that you can include the manuscript on your CV by linking to the DOI of the pre-print and mentioning it is under review.
At this point, the editor-in-chief of the journal will receive the manuscript and will likely send it off to an editor. In most cases, the editor will decide within about a week if the manuscript will be sent out for review. If it is not sent out for review, we will need to find another journal to submit the work to. If it is sent out for review, we will wait anywhere from a month to a few months to receive the reviewer comments.
We'll address any comments/concerns raised by the reviewers, making sure to enable track-changes in the document to highlight all changes and preparing a separate document containing a point-by-point reply to the reviewers. All co-authors are involved in this process.
You'll send me the revised manuscript files and point-by-point reply, and I'll send it off!
The reviewers will likely re-review the edited manuscript, and hopefully it'll be accepted!
With an acceptance in hand, the manuscript is officially "in press," and you can mention this on your CV. A week or two later, we'll receive the "galley proofs," which is the journal-formatted version of the manuscript. All co-authors will be asked to go through the proofs and provide any remaining typographical edits, which I'll collate and submit to the journal.
A week to a few weeks later, you can expect the article to be online! At this point, will have a DOI but may not have page numbers yet. For our purposes, we can consider this done! We'll share the work with the world through social media and other means, and we'll celebrate!
The page numbers and full citation will be added when the issue itself is published, usually a few weeks later. That marks the end!