This resource is licenced under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence by Claire Sewell, the Office of Scholarly Communication, Cambridge University Libraries.
Much like the research lifecycle explored in the unit introducing scholarly communication, the formal publication process has its own sequence of events. Academic works are likely to go through a period of review and editing before they are accepted for publication and this may happen several times with different publishers. This can be a frustrating experience for researchers eager to publish their work and move on to the next project. It is vital that both researchers and librarians have an understanding of the publication lifecycle in order to make the process as efficient as possible.
The main stages of the typical academic publication lifecycle are outlined in the short video below:
Of course, the exact nature of each stage will depend on a lot of factors such as the output being produced, the discipline the researcher works in and the type of publication. The graphic below explores the main stages of the publication lifecycle in more detail:
Obviously not all of these stages will be relevant to each researcher and each publication but it is a good idea to keep them in mind as you move through the rest of the unit.
