MODERATOR:
Jennifer Deyton
Senior Partner, J&J Editorial, LLC
Cary, North Carolina
SPEAKERS:
Clarinda Cerejo
Editor-in-Chief
Editage Insights
Editage, Cactus Communications
Mumbai, India
Bryan Hamman
Freelance, Research Affairs
Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen University
Khon Kaen, Thailand
Julie Nash
Senior Partner
J&J Editorial, LLC
Cary, North Carolina
REPORTER:
Jennifer Deyton
Senior Partner, J&J Editorial, LLC
Cary, North Carolina
Clarinda Cerejo presented empirical data obtained from an extensive survey of international authors on pain points for researchers. Cerejo addressed author perspectives on what is broken in the academic publishing process using empirical data collected from 5293 respondents organized by survey language, profile, and country. Cerejo was able to use the data to answer relevant questions: What do authors struggle with most? What aspects of manuscript preparation are most difficult? Where do authors seek help during the publishing process? How do authors chose a journal for their manuscript? Cerejo’s presentation can be downloaded here.
Bryan Hamman is a professional ESL copy editor focused on science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) Asian authors. He offered great insight in language barriers and the anatomy of the paper and some great tips for publishers, editorial offices, and Editors-in-Chief regarding author guidelines. Bryan focused on the impact culture has on the perception of plagiarism. He discussed the cultures and languages of Southeast Asia that are distinct, although Thai and Laotian are related. All of the languages use phonetic alphabets, but only Vietnamese uses Roman letters—the other languages are based on Sanskrit characters, which may not be obvious. Burmese, Laotian, and Thai are tonally similar to Chinese, while Vietnamese and Cambodian are not. There is an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in which English is the lingua franca. However, English is far from a common tongue, and mastery of the spoken language, let alone writing competency, is rare. Manuscripts therefore usually have the grammar of the native tongue with nonstandard punctuation (or none at all) because there is no punctuation in these tonal languages. More problematic is that so-called sentences frequently lack a verb. Hamman’s presentation can be downloaded here.
As President-Elect of the International Society of Managing & Technical Editors (ISMTE), Julie Nash recently attended the 2017 ISMTE Asia-Pacific meeting in Beijing and presented some of the things she learned in planning, presenting, and attending a meeting developed for and with an Asian scholarly publishing congress. Her portion of the presentation shifted to a meeting she led as President-Elect of ISMTE. She began with a slide entitled “All Eyes on Asia: A Case Study in Singapore and China.” She then reviewed why ISMTE’s leadership wanted a meeting in the Asian-Pacific region. She also looked at who attended their meetings. She described what they expected, as well as what they learned. She then discussed how they could now use the information they learned for future meetings in the Asian-Pacific region. Her interesting conclusions supported the ISMTE’s efforts to continue hosting meetings in the Asian-Pacific region. Nash’s presentation can be downloaded here.