Just a quick entry because work doesn’t leave me much time but I got a pleasant surprise on my mail box this morning.

The problem with scientific work is that you are all the time involved in several papers. They each go through many revision stages before being submitted to scientific journals. A few month later, the first round of reviews come and you know if your work has been rejected or accepted with minor to major revisions. Then, you discuss with your co-authors the best strategy to answer the critics and improve the paper and you re-submit it. It may (or not) be accepted several month later and you are then ask to improve the quality of the figure 7 to 600 dpi, make more explicit the caption of the table 2 and brush off the English in section 3.2 etc… Basically, when you get the proofs of your paper for revision, you already don’t want to hear about the paper anymore and, by the time it’s effectively published, you already almost forgot about it because you are working on 3 other ones…

That is, of course, if you are a somewhat exprienced scientist. I don’t have yet so many publications under my belt (got one more accepted last week though ^^) but I currently have 4 papers submitted or under revisions and a couple other more in preparation. Basically, I just entered that crazy loop which makes you forget about the paper that just got accepted because you have to deal with the new ones. Moreover, the fact that publications are nowadays mainly exchanged via PDF and not under printed versions makes your work that more imatterial.

And then, you go to the office and check out the mail box (waiting, for example for the last book of Maliki) and you find a printed version of Marine Ecology Progress Series where you just had a paper published a couple of weeks ago…

I didn’t expect MEPS to send me a hard copy of their issue where I had my article published. I have to say it’s a good feeling because it’s the first time I can touch my paper and really realize it exists. Kind of wierd to explain but, busy and stressful as this week is going to be, that surprise was really a good one!

EDIT: The paper can downloaded in pdf from here if you are interested: http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v385/p15-32/

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