8 July 2021

In June 2021 the MIGREC project held its second Publishing Seminar on the theme ‘Publish or Perish: publishing internationally’. The seminar was led by ELIAMEP team members of MIGREC, Dr. Ioannis Armakolas and Dr. Julianne Funk, who are also editors of the journal “Southeast European and Black Sea Studies” (SEEBSS). The three sessions of the seminar were held online and attended mostly by University of Belgrade MA students, PhD candidates and professors, but also other MIGREC team members from ELIAMEP and SEERC. The goal of the seminar was to grow participants’ capacities to produce more appealing research outputs for prominent international scientific journals.

Guest speaker at the first session was Giulia Guariento, Portfolio Manager – Area Studies, Taylor & Francis Group, who focused on journal ranking and impact factor. Guariento elaborated on two main topics: the relevancy of the impact factor and journal ranking and the benefits and disadvantages of the metric and exploring alternatives. The session aimed at helping early career researchers to avoid common pitfalls during the publication process. It covered basic dos and don’ts and publication best practice checklists.

The second session featured Dr. Sabine Rutar, an Editor-in-Chief of “Comparative Southeast European Studies” and concentrated around open access (OA). The session was devoted to the discussion of the pros and cons of open access publishing. Dr. Rutar shared her experience and advice as an editor of international open access journal where participants may want to publish in future.

The third session of the seminar featured Madeleine Hatfield, Founder and Editor of Yellowback with the presentation “Being peer reviewed and becoming a peer reviewer”. This session considered how the journal peer review process works what to expect and do when you receive peer reviews on your work, why you would want to do a peer review yourself and how to become a peer reviewer.