Shhhhhh. Listen carefully. Can you hear anything? Look carefully. Notice anything different? What you can see and can’t hear is the heart-centred way of doing business. It has changed the way that we do business and it will change the way you publish your manuscript.

For a few years now we have been trying every trick in the book to increase our mailing list, increase our orders, increase this, reduce that. Check out our promotions page! But something wasn’t right. Not only were we not gaining much traction, we were wasting time and we weren’t achieving our ultimate goal…helping scientists publish their research.

So I decided to make a change. I introduced the heart-centred approach to everything I do. For me, that meant no more annoying pop-ups or ads. No aggressive tactics to get you to join our mailing list. No huge discounts to convince you to order. No time-limited offer to create urgency and play with your mind. Scientists are smarter than that. They do their research. They know what they need and when they need it. And they know a good thing when they find it. For those that like to plan ahead, we even introduced a discount if you pre-order.

From now on, we let our work do the talking. We also simplified our website with just a description of our editing services, so that visitors could explore at their own leisure and I started to blog more with helpful hints and tips about the publishing process. This change in mindset has been phenomenal! We have helped more scientists publish their papers in the last three months than in the last two years combined.

How does this help you?
Not everyone reading this needs editing services, and that is one of the beauties of our services. As a scientist you face a multitude of challenges that you need to be on top of: funding, tenure tracks, grant applications, supporting your students, running a lab, attending conferences, lecturing…and of course publishing your work. That is where we come in. You can let us take care of everything for you with one of our concierge services.

But back to the challenges, I think that a lot of these can also be eased by adopting the heart-centred approach. Ideally this should start at the very beginning of a research project, but more on that in another blog post. In this post, I want to focus on how you can adopt a heart-centred approach to publishing your article.

Why do you want to publish a paper?
To improve your publication record? To improve your chances of getting a promotion, a new job, more funding? There is no wrong or right answer. There is nothing wrong with wanting to get a promotion or a new job or more funding. But in a true heart-centred approach, the goal of achieving these things is to ultimately be able to do more good with your research. More funding means more money to hire a post-doc, increase the size of your research group, and ultimately to publish more results! And with more results published, you are helping more people. It is a snowball effect.

Who will benefit from reading your paper?
A research student, a postdoc, another researcher. Maybe even the editor or the peer-reviewer? There are many people that could potentially benefit from your published work. So start writing with that audience in mind. Don’t try to trick the editor or the peer-reviewer. Don’t embellish your results. Don’t hold back results. Approach your paper as a way of helping someone with that has the same problem that you were trying to solve. If you have learnt something from your research, you can be sure that your audience will also find it helpful.

The heart-centred approach is a way of thinking, acting, doing, living, working, playing, loving…from the bottom of your heart. Instead of focusing on what it is in it for you, focus on how you can help someone else. The rest will take care of itself. That is what we do! And it works!