Falcon River Biomedical Communications

Journal Sherpas

Scientific Editing Services to Make Publishing Scientific Papers Easier and Take Less of Your Time

Serving Biotech and Pharma Industry Scientists

$2000 NO-RISK TRIAL GUARANTEE

(301) 468-9510 • tom@falconriver.com

Do you…

• find it hard to get manuscripts published because writing takes too much time away from other duties?
• need help highlighting the novelty and significance of your work?
• need help persuading editors and reviewers?
• need help for yourself or a colleague with English?
• need someone to handle publishing tasks for which you have no time?

Help is here.

This is Tom Hollon. As a former scientist and since 1998 a writer and editor, I can make publishing easier, less frustrating, and less time consuming for you and your colleagues. If publishing is important to your career and your company’s prestige and scientific reputation, I can help.

To make publishing easier, I can:

• edit your science papers into the formats of the journals of your choice
• make sure manuscripts highlight the novelty and significance of your work
• use my knowledge of how the submission process works to help you write more persuasive pre-submission queries, submission cover letters, and responses to reviewers
• ease your burden as a lab director by helping your junior colleagues with the early drafts of their scientific papers
• help scientists with writer’s block, scientists whose first language is not English, and scientists who for cultural reasons are reluctant to highlight the significance of their experiments.
• advise on how to write interdisciplinary papers, where review criteria of several disciplines have to be satisfied.

In addition, if you have a backlog of papers to publish, I can help your researchers speed up manuscript production and keep track of their progress for you.

In short, I can save you time in publishing papers and make you more persuasive with journal editors and reviewers.

You can sample some of the publishing advice I give my clients by clicking here: “Publishing Papers—10 Tips”.

3 Manuscript Editing Service Options: Choose the One Right for You

Option #1: Spelling&Grammar. This is the least expensive manuscript editing option because it requires the least amount of work. Spelling errors will be corrected and ungrammatical sentences will be rewritten.

Option #2. Readability Editing. In addition to correcting English spelling and grammar, this editing service will make your scientific paper easier to read. Long, difficult-to-read sentences will be broken into shorter, more easily read sentences. Awkward sentences will be rewritten. Unnecessary words will be deleted.

Readability editing requires more work than the Spelling&Grammar option and is more expensive. Readability editing makes many science papers 5 to 10% shorter.

Option #3. JournalSherpa Editing and Advisory Service. JournalSherpa is a higher level service where I or my associates are available by email and phone to guide and advise you in getting your work published in the best journals possible, and with the least amount of frustration.

Your manuscripts will receive an even higher level of editing attention.

And if there are publishing tasks for which you have no time, we can handle them for you.

JournalSherpa service is like adding a mountain sherpa to your
expedition. An experienced editorial guide and helper takes over some
of the heavy lifting and lightens your load.

For you, publications for attaining recognition in your field and
climbing the career ladder become easier and take less of your time.

For your company, easier publishing elevates researchers’ moral,
helps attract more high calibre researcher employees, and enhances
the company’s scientific reputation.

The JournalSherpa Advisory Service. As an example of how this works, if you have a paper that has just been rejected, we can talk over what you should do next. If you want, I’ll read very carefully your correspondence with the journal editor and reviewers and make recommendations.

Whatever publishing issue you’d like to discuss, I am here to listen. If I don’t know the answer right off the bat, I will do my best to find it quickly.

JournalSherpa Editing. This goes beyond editing English and improving readability to the indispensable next step: editing your scientific paper according to the editorial guidelines of the journal of your choice, and identifying and correcting problems that might cause reviewers to reject your paper.

Unpredictable peer review criticisms are unavoidable, of course. And anyone publishing frequently has suffered reviews that are incomprehensible, even insulting (in which case I can help you respond to reviewers diplomatically).

A detectable manuscript weakness, however, is an avoidable weakness. Among the many are gaps in logic, using laboratory slang instead of correct terminology, failure to describe key controls, describing experiments in Results without explaining why they were done, and beginning the Discussion with an overlong recap of the Results. Any weakness I find I will help correct.

JournalSherpa editing begins with an examination of the Author’s Guide of the journal you feel is most appropriate for publishing your paper.

The Author’s or Editorial Guide will be available on the journal’s website and will describe the kinds of scientific articles the journal accepts, the maximum lengths of science manuscripts and abstracts, and other guidance information. Often I receive manuscripts to edit that are too long or in other ways in conflict with Author’s Guides instructions. Discovering problems early makes them easier to solve.

I will then edit your manuscript in three passes.

The first time through your manuscript, I will do a small amount of editing, but my main goal will be to understand what the paper is about. Unless I understand your paper, I cannot help you highlight the significance and importance of your discoveries.

The second time through your manuscript, I will look for problems in how the Abstract, Introduction, Results and Discussion are organized. Wherever something seems missing, confusing, or in the wrong place, I will suggest how the problem might be fixed in the next draft.

And when important data or an important point fails to receive the emphasis it deserves, I will suggest how to improve its presentation.

The third time through, I will edit for clarity and readability line by line, correcting English, rewriting awkward or difficult-to-read sentences, and deleting unnecessary words.

JournalSherpa Service Handles Tasks You Don’t Have Time For. Is too much to do and too little time to do it a way of life at your company?

Then you probably have publishing tasks that go beyond editing scientific manuscripts and no time to get them done.

Assign them to me. I’ll get them done for you. For example, here are of some of the extra tasks I’ve handled for clients:

• researching references
• advising on and editing rebuttals to reviewers
• writing first drafts of manuscript submission letters
• helping an author decide what to write
• evaluating journals under consideration for submission by comparing their Author’s Guides
• coordinating assembly of a review article with sections from multiple authors
• fitting new material into a manuscript when an author decided to change the manuscript’s focus
• comparing an author’s manuscript to a just published paper to help the author explain to an editor why he was not scooped

Let me be your sherpa. I will lighten your load, save you time, get your papers moving, help your publishing career, and help you help your company.

Just tell me what you need.

Receiving and reviewing your edit. Regardless of the service option you choose, Spelling&Grammar, Readability, or JournalSherpa, your edited manuscript will be proofread before it is sent to you.

Unless you choose otherwise, your edited and proofread science paper will emailed to you in two Microsoft Word documents. One will have Word’s Tracking feature turned on to show in red and blue letters the changes I made. The other Word document will turn Tracking off to show only the finished edit.

All editing changes to your science paper are suggestions you are entitled to overrule. After all, the paper is yours, so final decisions about editing must always belong to you. If you disagree with an editing change, I will change it back to the way it was before, at no additional cost to you.

When you receive your edit, please read it very carefully. In spite of great care during proofreading, an error may still slip through.

Please mark any proofreading errors in ALL CAPS or colored letters or color highlighting and they will be corrected right away at no additional cost. In fact, for every proofreading error you catch you will receive a $10 credit against your bill.

If my services and guarantee sound right for your needs, call me at 301-468-9510 or email me at tom@falconriver.com.

I look forward to working with you.

Tom Hollon, PhD