The University of Michigan Library Copyright Office provides help with copyright questions for University of Michigan faculty, staff and students. Please email us with questions or visit our website for more information.
Journals may have a column or an associated publication with broader or more accommodating submission standards than those expected for formal articles that provide publication opportunities for early-career scholars. There are excellent journals with varied levels of review that provide a range of publication opportunities. For example, KinoKultura features content by leading scholars -- with a single peer review that simplifies submission and acceptance. Depending on your goals, multiple publication options may be available to you.
Authorship for the purpose of credit differs from authorship for the purpose of copyright. If multiple people create a work, only those who contribute copyrightable elements are considered authors for the purpose of copyright law. See our guide on Who Holds Copyright for information about authorship for copyright.
Decisions about who deserves authorship for a journal article vary -- depending on journals/publishers, disciplines, and even individual research groups. Authors should make a substantial intellectual contribution to the article. Some journals require the contributions of each author to be explicitly stated. In 2013, NISO created the CRediT Taxonomy to capture the variety of authors' contributions. Consult individual journals to see if these criteria are in use. For instance, see Holcombe, A. (2021, September). Authorship: Giving credit where it’s due. American Psychological Association.
The first and last author positions are often considered the most important, but this differs depending on discipline. For example, in many scientific disciplines, the principal investigator is the last author while the graduate student or postdoc who did most of the work is the first author.
The corresponding author is the point of contact for the journal editor and readers who have questions about the manuscript. Usually, but not always, the last author is also the corresponding author.
"Preregistration" is the practice of making research questions, hypotheses, methods, and analyses publicly available in a fixed and persistent way before conducting a study. Preregistration is appropriate for all kinds of research: qualitative or quantitative, confirmatory or exploratory, observational or experimental. One of the places you can preregister your work is with the Center for Open Science. They describe some of the benefits of preregistration as:
For guidance on how to preregister, see Center for Open Science. (n.d.). Preregistration.
For an overview of preregistration, see:
You may be required to submit a "data management plan" to the funder as part of your grant proposal. It describes the data you expect to collect and generate in your research and how it will be cared for and made available to others. Whether required by a funder or not, a data management plan can help you plan how your data will be preserved and shared.
A data management plan can also help to meet University of Michigan requirements for appropriate management of research data. Visit the University of Michigan Research Data Stewardship Policy (released in 2023) and Research Data Stewardship FAQs (part of the U-M Research Data Stewardship Initiative) for more information.
Visit our website on data management plans or one of the guides below for more information:
For more information on sharing your research outputs, see the sections in this guide for Depositing Your Work Open Access and Sharing Your Data.
Our guide on Open Research and Scholarship includes links to additional resources and services to support sharing results of research.
If you are writing an article, depending on the circumstances (and the policies of journals where you seek to publish), you may consider posting a preprint of your work. A preprint is a manuscript version of an article that is shared on a public server before it has been peer reviewed or accepted by a journal for publication (this qualifies as Green Open Access; for definitions and more information, see our guide on Open Access). Some of the benefits of preprints include:
If you are considering posting a preprint, ASAPBio offers an extensive FAQ on preprints and a directory of preprint servers.
Publishers and journals have their own requirements for manuscript and citation style. Typically, you can find these requirements on the journal's Instructions to Authors page, and you can follow examples of articles published in the journal. However, the required manuscript style may be different from the style of the published article in a journal. Some general style guides/manuals are referenced below:
To help you format your manuscript and bibliography quickly and easily, you can use citation management software. For information, visit this Manage Citations with Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote guide.