Above, the SEARCA Style Guide is a thick 100-page manual addressed to authors submitting their papers for publication by the Southeast Asia Regional Center for Graduate Study & Research in Agriculture, SEARCA. The Style Guide is formidable, even daunting – and very heavy, literally, as it has thick paper dividers with labels. I am an Editor in Chief many times over, but I am daunted by this Style Guide. This is the latest edition.
As an author of a technical paper, are you brave enough to open the pages of the Style Guide – 100 pages and there is no index for locating an instruction with its exact page to check with?
Being a practical man, what did I do when I was Editor in Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, PJCS, the Journal of the Crop Science Society of the Philippines, CSSP? I wrote an entirely new Contributors Guidelines of only 2 printed pages, and that included how to format your References or Literature Review, a tedious process. I know. So what I did was I did the final formatting of those lists myself, never returning the papers for correcting their references notfollowing the guidelines. And I'm very fast, because I knew exactly how it should look like when printed – and I'm very fast when it comes to Windows and Microsoft Office apps.
And what happened when I did all that? Within 4 years, the PJCS became world class or listed in the elite international list referred to as ISI (now ISI/Web of Science/Web of Knowledge). And ISI is Heaven to journals and authors – they get international recognition, and if you are a faculty member of the UP System, you get a bonus of P50,000 for every technical paper you publish in an ISI journal.
Your journal is not for you; it is for authors. You have to help the authors in any way you can. After all, your journal owes its existence to authors! In short, when you are helping your authors, you are actually also helping yourself!
Now, you may say I am only talking about this to remind the world that I am a world-class Editor in Chief. Yes and No. I am writing about this because I want to help science bodies take maximum care of their technical publications, not allow them to wither and die.
As Editor, I am a digital surprise. I want to tell you that I have been using Microsoft Word as my desktop publisher in the last 26 years, and I have produced many books to show as proof of work.
Are you still publishing your journal using a desktop publisher that is as cumbersome as Microsoft Publisher, or PageMaker, or InDesign? Let this 79-year old help you!
To show how grateful I am to God as an Editor in Chief, for your group or office, including SEARCA, I am volunteering a full day's free lecture-workshop on technical writing, including desktop publishing a technical journal yourself. Email me if interested: frankahilario@gmail.com.@517
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