Cynthia Coulter (Hudson County Community College), Chair and Gracemary Smulewitz (Rutgers University) Co-Chair of the Research Committee, presented a seminar entitled, “Fostering Research Success: Getting Published, Collaborating, and Winning Grants” with the gracious help of several Elsevier staff. The program was well attended, with approximately thirty people ranging from faculty, librarians, and graduate students, coming from large Research Institutes, small Community Colleges and state institutions.

Morning experts included Elizabeth Perril, Executive Publisher at Elsevier, who gave a very detailed description of what to do and what not to do when trying to get your research published. Coming from the medical field, Elizabeth described her own experiences and then expanded to incorporate how any author, from any discipline, might approach the manuscript writing and promotion process.

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Dr. John Buschman, Dean of University Libraries at Seton Hall University, added his expertise as Section Editor for the Journal of Academic Librarianship and as part of the Editorial Board of Library Quarterly. He gave great insight into what editors look for, what to avoid in a manuscript, and the protocol for submitting manuscripts to publishers. His experience as both author and editor was an invaluable additional to the panel. 

The morning discussions included questions and comments about open access journals, predatory publishing, publisher contract negotiations, and variations of copyright agreements. Audience members voiced their personal fears of the publishing process, such as knowing what journals to submit to, whether their research topics are unique enough, and the length of the research and writing process being problematic to a manuscript’s currency.

The afternoon speaker was Dr. Holly Falk-Krzesinski, the Vice President for Global Academic & Research Relations at Elsevier. She gave a spirited review of what Team Science is, how it is being employed in the research world, and the trend toward research collaboration. Holly talked about the multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approach to research, and how a multi-faceted knowledge base can help better explain phenomena. She also spoke of conflict management within a team, the importance of accepting and understating different disciplines’ frames of reference and pyramids of importance, and time elements (both constraints and advancements) involved with researching as a group.

The afternoon finished with a warm thank you to the Elsevier staff, including Lindsay Gay (Customer Marketing Manager), Sarah Buchala (Account Manager), and Lashaon McGee (Senior Customer Marketing Manager). A survey was sent out to the attendees, and Cynthia and Gracemary look forward to hearing some feedback about more seminar topics of interest, and how the program was received. Both Elizabeth Perril’s and Holly Falk-Krzesinski’s presentations will be available for review and placed on the Research Committee’s webpage at: http://cus.njla.org/content/research-committee   

Cynthia asked all librarians in the audience to consider joining the Research Committee, which promotes the research efforts of Librarians and Library Scholar in New Jersey. Hopefully, the NJLA/CUS and ACRL-NJ Research Committee will grow in size and be able to offer more programming in the future.

Cynthia J. Coulter is Chair of the Research Committee.  She is a librarian at Hudson County Community College.  You can reach her at ccoulter@hccc.edu (link sends e-mail).

Gracemary Smulewitz is the Co-Chair of the Research Committee. She is the Head of Distributed Technical Services at Rutgers University.