How to get your research published?

A primary criterion for publishing a paper is novelty of its data. This extends to the introduction and discussion of the paper. These can not consequently be cut and pasted from published literature, not even from the author's previously published papers. The journals typically require the authors to confirm that their submission is unique and that the data are new. Violations of these rules may today result in retraction of the paper after publishing, even years or decades after its publication, if plagiarism or self plagiarism is later detected. One must also be certain to submit only unaltered images and data. Many universities and some journals provide today on‐line tools that can be used to check whether the manuscript has borrowed verbatim from the literature. The advent of on‐line manuscript review and publishing may tempt to copy from previous papers without rephrasing or attribution, habits which should carefully be avoided. On the other hand, electronic publishing is low cost and easy to start, which recently has resulted in proliferation of so‐called "predatory" gold open access publishers. Guidelines are discussed which may help authors to identify such publishing forums and to avoid plagiarism.