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Post-acceptance and publication

Indexing and abstracting of your article

Every article is published on microbiologyresearch.org and we disseminate the article metadata to large general platforms like PubMed and Google Scholar, to specialist abstracting and indexing services like CINAHL, to library discovery tools like EBSCO Host. We have also signed up to newer services like ReadCube, which go beyond traditional abstracts into advanced search technologies. We do that to make it as easy as possible for people to discover your work, no matter the starting point of their research. For information about which services take each of our journals, please check the About pages: 

Depositing your author-accepted manuscript

The Microbiology Society encourages authors to deposit their author-accepted manuscript (AAM) either in their institutional repository or in a recognised subject repository such as PubMed Central, known as Green Open Access. Authors are entitled to deposit their AAM on the day of publication (sometimes called ‘embargo-free’), under a CC-BY licence. For more information on our deposition policies and our archiving statement requirements, see our Publishing Open Access page.

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Promoting your article

What you can do

We love tweeting about your work, but it’s much more effective if you work with us on the message – so when you submit a revised article, why not provide a tweet or two that we can share with our Communications team? And if you have a Twitter account, make sure you tag @MicrobioSoc when you tweet about your article so that we can retweet it for you. 

There are many other ways for you to promote your own work. Start by making sure that the bibliography on your institutional or other websites is up-to-date, including links to the full text of your article on microbiologyresearch.org. You could also speak to your organisation’s Communications team about putting out a press release of your own. We also support sharing your article via other social media forums beyond Twitter. You can find the Microbiology Society on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. 

Open Data and open methodologies play a part, too. Archived and linked permanently to and from the article, data and methods become part of the scientific record as well as a route for discovering articles. 

For something with impact beyond the scientific community, we encourage you to try Kudos, a free service which lets researchers explain their work in simple language before they share it. The Kudos team say that sharing these plain language summaries can help boost readership by around 23%. 

There is also ScienceOpen, a free search and discovery engine which lets scientists share, comment on and rate publications. As an author you can use ScienceOpen to add plain language summaries, thumbnail images, and keywords to your article before sharing it widely with other users. 

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Top tips

Keep it simple 

With millions of posts being shared across social media platforms every day, it’s best to keep your post simple. Convey your message in a concise way, using keywords that will grab readers and spark their interest. Try using interesting formats such as questions to engage a reader’s interest. Just don’t forget to include a hyperlinked DOI, taking the reader to the full text of your article! 

Use hashtags 

Hashtags emphasise your post’s relevance and help with outreach, and are a great indicator of what is topical or interesting: trending hashtags give an idea of what people are talking about. If your article is particularly timely or topical, find the appropriate hashtag and add that in. Our journal hashtags are: 

Use mentions  

Mentions help to highlight your post to specific users. Maybe mention your institution, or a co-author? Always remember to tag @MicrobioSoc on Twitter and we will share your tweet with our community of scientists interested in microbes, their effects, and their practical uses. 

Include images 

A picture says a thousand words and will help your post to stand out. According to a study conducted by Twitter, tweets with images get 35% more retweets than those without images, and each of those retweets opens up a whole new audience viewing your post and potentially reading your research. 

Get involved 

Social media is a great way to connect with fellow scientists in your specific area of study, or a broader field of science. Get involved in discussions in the comments section; the more exposure you have, the more likely people are going to see what you’re posting. This is also a great way of increasing your network and meeting new scientists.  

See the impact

Our journals have been integrated with Altmetric, allowing you to see the attention that your article has gathered online. The Altmetric donut uses different colours to help authors and readers quickly visualise the ways in which a research paper is being discussed. The different colours demonstrate the range of ‘attention sources’ with blue representing Twitter mentions, red a traditional news source, purple for a reference in a policy document etc. Clicking on the donut allows authors and readers to find out more details about each mention, including the source and where in the world it came from. 

Finally, remember to support the scientific community. If you read an article that you find particularly interesting, do your part to promote that research group’s work too! 

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Corrections and retractions

Authors or readers may spot fundamental errors in an article, figure or dataset post-publication. If they do so, please contact the publishing team at [email protected]. For more information, see our Post-publication issues section on our Ethics policies page.  

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Letters (to the Editor)

Occasionally a reader may wish to write and publish a Letter regarding a published (Version of Record) article – this may be supplementary or critical. In either case, if the Editor-in-Chief believes it to be a substantial contribution to the literature, we will accept such Letters. The corresponding author of the original paper will be informed, and provided with the Letter pre-publication so as to offer a response or rebuttal. In these cases, both papers will be held so as to publish together. 

For readers who wish to comment on a preprint that is undergoing peer review in Access Microbiology, we encourage them to contact the author with the feedback so they may improve their article during the revision process. Alternatively you may contact the Editorial Office and request to be invited as reviewer of the preprint to provide more detailed, transparent feedback. Requested reviewers will be considered based on the type of feedback and any potential conflicts of interest.

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Name changing

In cases where a listed author on a paper has changed their name, for whatever reason, we can amend the publication record to reflect as such. If an author has such a request, please do contact us at [email protected]  

The office will check that the requesting email address matches the email of the original published author, or if not, that it is a verifiable institutional address. If the office is unable to verify the email address, they will ask the author to use their existing login on Editorial Manager and to make the change on their profile directly. We will not ask for evidence documenting a ‘legal’ name change. This varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.  

Authors may wish to inform their co-authors of the change, so that they use an updated offline copy or change the way they cite the publication. Or requesting authors can rely on a notification from us to the corresponding author alone and the updated online version.

If the author wishes to inform their co-authors, they may ask us to delay the update to allow time for these communications. If they do not, or do not respond to our queries regarding notification, we will inform the corresponding author once the update has been made.  

Once the correction has been made, we will trigger a re-export of the article to all of our indexing platforms.  

Please note, we will keep a copy of the original article, to be able to demonstrate what versions of the article have been published at any given point, should that be required (e.g. for legal purposes). The original version will not be made publicly available once the change is made.

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