Authors are at the heart of academic publishing, but their voices are underrepresented in discussions about improving the academic publishing system. To understand the viewpoints of authors on various aspects of academic publishing and the challenges they face, we developed a large-scale survey entitled “Author perspectives on the academic publishing process” and made it available in December 2016. The survey has received 8,795 responses; this paper is based on the interim results drawn from 5,293 survey responses, and presents some interesting and thought-provoking trends that were observed in the authors’ responses, such as their interpretation of plagiarism and decisive factors in journal selection, as well as their thoughts on what needs to change in the publishing system for it to be more author-friendly. Some of the most important findings of the survey were: (1) the majority of the authors found manuscript preparation to be the most challenging task in the publication process, (2) the impact factor of a journal was reported to be the most important consideration for journal selection, (3) most authors found journal guidelines to be incomplete, (4) major gaps existed in author-journal communication, and (5) although awareness of ethics was high, awareness of good publication practice standards was low. Moreover, more than half of the participants indicated that among areas for improvement in the publishing system, they would like to see changes in the time it takes to publish a paper, the peer review process, and the fairness and objectivity of the publication process. These findings indicate the necessity of making the journal publication process more author-centered and smoothing the way for authors to get published.

中文翻译：

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作者对学术出版的看法：大规模全球调查的初步观察

作者是学术出版的核心，但在关于改进学术出版系统的讨论中，他们的声音没有得到充分体现。为了解作者对学术出版各方面的看法及其面临的挑战，我们开展了一项名为“作者对学术出版过程的看法”的大型调查，并于 2016 年 12 月发布。该调查已收到 8,795 份回复；本文基于从 5,293 份调查回复中得出的中期结果，并展示了作者在回复中观察到的一些有趣且发人深省的趋势，例如他们对抄袭的解释和期刊选择的决定性因素，以及他们的想法关于需要在出版系统中进行哪些更改才能使其对作者更友好的内容。调查的一些最重要的发现是：(1) 大多数作者认为稿件准备是出版过程中最具挑战性的任务，(2) 据报道，期刊的影响因子是最重要的考虑因素对于期刊选择，(3) 大多数作者认为期刊指南不完整，(4) 作者与期刊之间的沟通存在重大差距，以及 (5) 尽管道德意识很高，但对良好出版实践标准的意识却很低。此外，超过半数的受访者表示，在出版体系需要改进的领域中，他们希望看到发表论文所需的时间、同行评审过程以及发表过程的公平性和客观性方面的变化。