EDITORIAL Publishing in an era of excess

Why publish? Probably there are as many answers to this question as there are authors. Accordingly, I answer from my own perspective, as a scholar employed in a university, a journal editor, and a science educator for 47 years. Throughout my career, my purpose in publishing was to share what I had learned from my research with the science education community. I enjoyed writing for journals and books and have not personally felt pressure to publish in order to keep my employment, obtain salary increases, or be more competitive for jobs. Simply put, I continued to do research throughout my career and to the extent possible I wrote regularly for publication. It is difficult to say how successful I was in maintaining balance in terms of the requirements of being a university level teacher/ researcher. However, among the pearls of advice I was given during my doctoral studies was to routinely do research on my own teaching. The purpose of the advice was to use research to improve practice, but following the advice made it possible to maximize connections between teaching and research and not to feel that those activities were competing for my time. In the sections ahead I address the pressures on scholars to publish in high impac