As I hoped, while chasing fireflies like a little child, not sure which one to go after, I got closer to one. It was not a firefly at all, but a small window of light. The light from the warm home spilt out and I was drawn magically towards it. Inside was a grandma telling a story.
I leaned closer, pressed my ear to the cold windowpane. It was a beautiful story. There were heroes and villains. There was plot and intrigue. There were wrong turns, treacherous paths and surprises that spring upon you. There were genes that saved and genes that killed. There were drugs that killed the genes that killed.
Proofs and controls and alternative hypothesis intruded. But we emerged gasping, but with a beautifully crafted story. It was the sweat and blood of craftsmen and craftswomen who struggled, who lost hope, who lost interest, who nearly left and who wouldn’t leave. It was precious. It was our baby and we needed to bring it out into the world, quickly.
I woke up next morning to swat the fireflies away and to pen the story down, in crisp, no-nonsense prose. Peppered the manuscript with the right proportion of ‘interestingly, ‘surprisingly’, ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’ ‘our results suggest’, ‘we demonstrate’ and other politically correct phraseology. I snuck in a ‘we wondered’, and my student protested. But I stuck to my guns.
We began scouting for journals. We began scouring the net for ‘impact factors’, for ‘scope of journals’, for ‘instructions to authors’….and then hit upon ‘publication charges’. Yes, I had published before, that was part of my resumé that got me this chair, this office and these brave warriors who will risk their scientific training on what might be my misguided fancies. But this told me how working as a post-doc in a successful lab doesn’t prepare you fully for ‘making’ a successful lab.
So, suddenly the whole lab is talking about publication charges. How shocking it is that we have to pay to publish and pay to read. About how we have to shop for the right journal and the right price to get our work ‘reviewed’ and perhaps published. We have had the debate, resigned to the reality and have shopped for the cheapest ‘good’ journals. Now we look at journals as snooty, generous and good but unaffordable. With this more grounded and ‘developing-world’ outlook on science publishing we forge ahead with our precious story.
We are ready to send our labour of love to the big bad world to be admired and found faults with or perhaps be ripped apart by the wolves out there. With trepidation we hit the ‘submit’ button and close our eyes in silent prayer to the various atheist, monotheist and multitheist gods up there.
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