Guiding Personas for Continuous Science
Understanding the needs, challenges, and motivations of six key groups shaping scientific communication and collaboration.
Journals, Societies, Preprint Servers
Journals, preprint servers, and scientific societies play a central role in how research is vetted, shared, and rewarded. These actors uphold publication standards, shape peer review processes, and facilitate scholarly discourse. As expectations around openness and interactivity grow, they face the challenge of evolving legacy systems without compromising trust.
- Gatekeepers and distributors of scientific communication
- Set norms around publishing, peer review, and evaluation
- Operate across commercial, nonprofit, and community-run models
- Often support community building and standard-setting
- Uphold the quality and credibility of published research
- Support community-driven publication standards
- Increase reach, impact, and discoverability of science
- Adapt to evolving research outputs and formats
- Legacy publishing workflows resistant to change
- Financial pressures and tensions around open access
- Reviewer burnout and maintaining trust in peer review
- Difficulty integrating code, data, and interactive content
- Gaps between infrastructure and publication systems
- Workflows that support structured and modular submissions
- Efficient, transparent peer review
- Provenance, PIDs, and metadata standards
- Metrics beyond citation count
- Support for non-traditional outputs (e.g., datasets, software)
- Risk-averse and slow to adopt innovations
- Tightly linked to academic prestige and policy
- Influenced by editorial boards and disciplinary norms
- Varying openness to experimentation depending on governance model
- Publisher platforms and editorial board meetings
- Preprint platforms and infrastructure partners
- Societies and their annual meetings
- Conferences on scholarly communication (e.g. SSP, COASP, FORCE11)
- Metadata and peer review initiatives
Bringing the Persona to Life¶
Journals, preprint servers, and scientific societies play a central role in how research is vetted, shared, and rewarded. These actors uphold publication standards, shape peer review processes, and facilitate scholarly discourse. As expectations around openness and interactivity grow, they face the challenge of evolving legacy systems without compromising trust.
- Age: 39
- Editor
- Originally from Ukraine, Lives in UK
- Fisheries scientist
- Open and enthusiastic, enjoys cooking and big books
- Passion for oceans and marine ecology
- Moved away from research to bring more research to more people; in particular wants to help early career researchers to share and gain credit for their work
- Help scientists communicate with each other and make the field cohesive
- Spend time with people in her community
- Hear about new ideas, not just the research results
- Find reviewers
- Manage the process of her job
- A platform to reach the target readership and researchers submitting their work
- Quickly and easily filter out papers from an ethics perspective
