Scientific publishing

Things to keep in mind before and while you are trying to publish. Please extend with your advice.

Open access

• Open access means not only free to read but also free to reuse under certain conditions (this will be beneficial not only for the reader but also for you - the author - when you reuse figures for presentations, reviews,..)
• Open access articles are read and consequently cited more often [we need a reference here]
• If open access is not an option, you may be able to publish a pre-print version of your article which will be freely accessible.

Text formatting

• Most journals will force you to submit a Word document :-/ Some are more progressive and allow other word processors like LaTeX, OpenOffice,..
• Special characters like the Greek letters α, β,.. often cause problem when moving text between computers. Journals may require you to convert them to alpha, beta,.. Unicode is probably the best way to encode you text.
• The references need to be formatted according to the journal requirements. Let your bibliography software (EndNote, BibTeX) do the job for you. EndNote comes with many bibliography styles and additional ones can be downloaded. Many authors before you and some journals have prepared BibTeX styles which you can reuse.