I suppose that your paper has been accepted for publication in a scientific  journal. You successfully rebutted all the comments of the referees. Great.

But now, what do you do next?  Just and wait and sit for you to become famous automatically? It depends on the quality of the paper. If this was just a middle-of-the-road paper spending time on its promotion seems a waste. But what if you are very proud and you are convinced this really is an important result? An interview on national tv would be great.

Target group
Whose attention would like to draw? Colleague scientists, science writers, or the public at large?

Editor is also eager
Nowadays journal editors also are eager to promote their best papers. So when you submit your paper, or after your paper is accepted, you are usually requested to summarize the importance of your paper in laymen terms. If the journal is part of a large publishing house they will have a website that highlights their best papers; some papers will be selected to feature in their rss-feed, and if they have a monthly glossy your paper might feature in there.

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Summary
Reed-Elsevier’s daughter Elsevier has introduced as an experiment a new way of publishing science. The “paper” is now basically a website, in which the idea of a linear text is abandoned. The web interface implements access to text fragments, graphs, supplementary material, interview with an author, through hyperlinked tabs and mundane hyperlinks. In my opinion this development is a step backward and scientist should avoid publishing their material this way.

Elsevier’s solution to a non-existing problem
Scientist agree that way too many papers are being published. In addition commercial publishers keep on launching new journals in an already overcrowded market. The desktop-publishing  innovation has radically improved the productivity of scientists. There are many factors that hamper the progress of science, but the alleged inadequacy of present-day science publishing is not one of them.

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