Browsing the archives for the Pitching & Publishing tag

1Feb12 Josie Dixon – From Planet PhD to Destination Publication: A Traveller’s Guide. Part 1. Ivory Tower vs Shopping Mall
Posted by Charlotte Frost

This post is the first in a series by Josie Dixon, a consultant with 15 years’ experience in academic publishing, as Senior Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press and Publishing Director for the Academic Division at Palgrave Macmillan.  She now runs her own business, Lucian Consulting, and gives training workshops on publishing and other forms of research communication for postgraduates, postdocs and staff in over 50 universities internationally, alongside her training and consultancy work in the publishing industry. In this new set of blog posts for PhD2Published, Josie examines some of the polarities between Planet PhD and the world of publishing, and offers strategies for how to bridge the gap. 

In this series:

  1. Ivory Tower vs Shopping Mall
  2. Micro vs Macro
  3. Passenger vs Driver
  4. Process vs Afterlife
  5. Features vs Benefits

There’s a great article by Peter Barry which appeared in the Times Higher Education under the headline ‘Footnotes and Fancy Free’.  Among many useful insights, Barry caricatures very effectively two opposing worldviews or value systems in academic research.  For residents of the Ivory Tower, it’s all about pure intellectual excellence, never mind who (or what) it’s for.  For those who inhabit the Shopping Mall, there needs to be a clear benefit to an identifiable audience, and ultimately some form of commercial value for a paying market.  Barry diagnoses a fundamental problem in the fact that all too often PhDs (particularly in the arts and humanities) are supervised and examined by Ivory Tower standards, yet at the postdoctoral stage, researchers are suddenly pitched headlong into the Shopping Mall.  This is of necessity where publishers live, since their business is dependent on realising a commercial return on the investment that is made in every new publication. Continue Reading »

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30Jan12 Weekly Wisdom #72 by Paul Gray and David E. Drew
Posted by atarrant

WHEN WRITING THE NTH PAPER, MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE ISSUE CLEAR. It may be a carefully done experiment or an elaboration of the theory or a synthesis and interpretation of previous work. Whatever it is, be explicit in claiming it in the paper. The reviewers need to be convinced that the manuscript contains something new that merits publishing.


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25Jan12 The Now Frontier: Posting Dissertations Online
Posted by atarrant

A note from Anna: As part of a series of blogs on PhD2Published about Online Theses, Will Deyamport, III explains why he will definitely post his dissertation online. To engage in this conversation on Twitter please use the Online Thesis hashtag #thesisonline

Will Deyamport, III is an Ed.D student in Educational Leadership and Management at Capella University. He is the founder of peoplegogy.com, a blog that focuses on life and career developments. He is a monthly contributor to MyPathfinder Career Blog, where he writes about higher education. Currently, Will is writing his dissertation on how Twitter can support the professional learning needs of teachers.  You can follow him on twitter @peoplegogy.

This digital world we live in isn’t going anywhere. We pay bills online, we shop online, we make phone calls online, we date online, and now we’re streaming movies and going to school online. So why wouldn’t I post my dissertation online?

Has the academy become so insular that it has failed to understand and embrace the realities of this digital age? Has it become so arrogant that it believes that it can remain the sole guardian of academic knowledge? Or has the academy so blindly held on to its beliefs of what scholarly work is that it refuses to see this work being published on a daily basis on blogs around the globe?

Whatever its reasons, I plan to publish my dissertation online and here’s why:

  • I happen to have a passion for digital media and most of what I read is read online.
  • What I do and want to do for a career is done online. I’ve been a social media strategist, I blog, and I am earning my doctorate online. So for me the online space is a place of isn’t some separate entity. It’s a part of who I am and how I express my ideas.
  • I am a digital citizen. As such, I see the online world as the way for mobilizing the world towards a common humanity.
  • I routinely seek out information online. Whether it is via Youtube, LinkedIn, or my personal learning network on Twitter, I am able to gain access to experts from a variety of fields and disciplines.
  • I believe that academic knowledge belongs to the masses and should be made available and given freely to those who seek it.
  • My dissertation is on teachers using Twitter to support their own professional development.  The topic doesn’t belong is some bound book. It was meant to be posted online and shared with scholars and practitioners alike.

The ivory tower and those who worship at its feet need to understand that education is no longer insular. Holding information hostage does nothing for the academy or the betterment of society. In order to truly build a thriving academic knowledge-base and further the continued and expansive research expected in academia, technology has to be a part of how that research is shared and disseminated. Using emerging technologies, schools have the capacity to expose its students’ research to every corner of the globe. It is with this type of free exchange that the academy can reinvent itself and lead the way in today’s growing global economy and workforce.

Moving forward, I would like to see every doctoral student publish their dissertation on ProQuest or some other online platform. Just like TED has revolutionized the conference model, as current and future scholars, we have an opportunity to revolutionize the way people think, learn, and are taught about academic research.

No Comments Posted by in Academic Life, Future of Academic Publishing, Online Thesis, Publishers, Self Promotion
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19Jan12 Should you make your thesis more widely available online? Part 1
Posted by atarrant

A brief note from Anna: Being Managing Editor of PhD2Published has been a fantastic opportunity for me so far. It has introduced me to lots of interesting people and has helped me to think about key issues I am facing post-PhD. My current thinking is about whether or not to make my PhD thesis more readily available online. This post, which is the first in a series, explores this idea in more detail.

Impact has increasingly become an academic buzzword and requirement, which has led me to think much more about my PhD thesis, its accessibility and the impact it could (and should) have on a variety of audiences, both academic and public. I have heard from several colleagues that the only people who are ever likely to read the actual thesis are yourself and your supervisor (my family and friends certainly haven’t read it!). Frankly this seems wasteful and a bit sad (just look at the picture!), especially considering all of the hard work that went into it, including by myself, my participants and my supervisors. Even with the potential of developing publications and monographs from it in different formats, later on, in its unpublished form, my thesis is meaningful to me and took time and effort to construct.

This thinking prompted me to consider how I could make my thesis more accessible and more widely read, particularly in an age of social media and open access. Before launching into making it available online however, I wanted to do some research into the potential barriers to publishing online and the current debates that will inform this decision.

Following these musings, I posted this question on Twitter: “What are people’s opinions on making theses available online?” Several interesting and important issues and questions were raised. While limited,  there is already an emerging debate about the digital dissertation, which you can read about in this interesting and informative post by Alex Galarza for @GradHacker. There are several positives for doing this, and indeed many universities are now making it a requirement, if it isn’t already. @Gradhacker outlines that online material such as the unpublished thesis for example is still protected by copyright, useful to know if there is concern about the acknowledgement of your work. At the same time, in being overly cautious about protecting your thesis/dissertation you may risk restricting the development of your academic identity, online and otherwise. Furthermore (and some publishers may vary on this) putting your thesis/dissertation online may actually aid in the communication and appeal of your research to a variety of audiences and may even encourage sales of subsequent published work should you wish to publish it elsewhere in a different form. Twitter follower Christina Haralanova (@ludost11) has also received positive replies from people who have read hers.

Despite the many positives, I still think it is important to consider the range of different issues relating to putting a PhD thesis out there; issues that I will explore in a short series of blogs that will be posted here on PhD2Published in the coming weeks. These include posts I have constructed myself, and also opinion posts, and feedback from academic publishers. If any of this resonates and you have anything to add that has occurred to you, please do get in touch, either by Email or Twitter (@PhD2Published). Should you wish to join an online discussion on Twitter about the debate please use hashtag thesisonline (#thesisonline).

1 Comment Posted by in Academic Life, Authors, Future of Academic Publishing, Online Thesis, Pitching & Publishing, Publishers, Self Promotion, Uncategorized
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16Jan12 Weekly Wisdom #70 by Paul Gray and David E. Drew
Posted by atarrant

RECOGNIZE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WRITING THE FIRST PAPER ON A SUBJECT AND WRITING THE NTH ONE. Writing the first paper requires a special knack for originality that few people have. A first paper usually is not very deep, but it creates enough of an impact that others follow your lead and write deep, scholarly works. The advan¬tage of the first paper is that it is always referenced, giving you a long list of citations. If you are fortunate enough to have the knack, you will need to market your output carefully. Journals (and review¬ers) look for the tried and true. Journals, after all, publish almost exclusively on subjects they published previously. Tenure and pro¬motion committees will read the paper and say that it is trivial be¬cause they read the more careful papers that others wrote later based on your idea. It has been our observation that people who write first paper possess a different set of skills than those who write the nth ones and should leave the writing of the nth papers to someone else.

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19Dec11 Weekly Wisdom #67 by Paul Gray and David E. Drew
Posted by atarrant

PROTECT YOUR INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL WHILE TRAVELING.  You can publish your research findings in a journal after you presented a paper about them at a conference.   Be careful, however, not to present creative initial speculations and hypotheses,  that you are not yet ready to publish. They can be stolen by unscrupulous members of your audience.

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14Dec11 Adapting to Scientific Styles of Writing by Katherine Reekie
Posted by atarrant

Katherine Reekie is PhD2Published’s new Science Correspondent and she has recently joined Twitter as @katreekie.

Anyone who has ever read a scientific research article will be familiar with the somewhat formal and impersonal writing style in which they tend to be written. Adapting to reading this kind of prose can be a challenge. The way they are written can be very different to the informal style which tends to be used for most other forms of modern communication, and it is this “scientific style” which is in part to blame for the reputation of scientific articles being complicated and hard to understand. But how about writing it? It is unlikely that most people will have been required to write in this style before they are an undergraduate student, and even then it may only be for a project report in the final year. There is often no formal training for this kind of writing, and the degree of assistance provided can vary greatly. I know from my own experiences of editing undergraduate reports that one of the things which can be difficult to get across is the need for a specific tone and format, which is often in complete contrast to anything the student has written before. Adapting to this way of writing can also be one of the hardest parts of writing a PhD thesis or journal article, as it is something that scientists often pick up as they go along, rather than being taught.

So can the “scientific style” really be defined? It must be emphasised that the way in which research is reported tends to be guided by convention rather than anything else. In general, the tone is impersonal and devoid of opinion, factual and often highly technical. Scientific reports are intended to be functional, and the way in which they are written is designed to emphasise the facts without distracting from them with the use of flowery language.

Continue Reading »

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28Nov11 Weekly Wisdom #64 by Paul Gray and David E. Drew
Posted by atarrant

REVISE PAPERS  QUICKLY. As an author, you don’t help through time to publication if you take a long time between receiving reviews of your paper and submitting the revised manuscript.



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21Nov11 Weekly Wisdom #63 by Paul Gray and David E. Drew
Posted by atarrant

TURN YOUR REVIEWS OF OTHER PEOPLE’S PAPERS AROUND QUICKLY. Reviewing is both a scarce resource and important work. You will want your work reviewed quickly. You should offer the same courtesy to others. Don’t be too busy to review. Turn your reviews around quickly.


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14Nov11 Weekly Wisdom #62 by Paul Gray and David E. Drew
Posted by atarrant

PUBLISH EARLY AND OFTEN as they say in Chicago. Begin writ­ing for publication while you are still in graduate school. Data shows that people who publish while still in graduate school usually con­tinue to publish at a faster rate after they graduate than those who didn’t publish while still a student. Furthermore, published papers and monographs help you get your first job.

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7Nov11 Weekly Wisdom #61 by Paul Gray and David E. Drew
Posted by atarrant

WRITE A CROSS-OVER BOOK. Professors build their reputations by publishing articles and books in their specialty. Almost always, their only readers are other professors, graduate students, and their own family. Sometimes, however, a faculty member produces a successful crossover book, a work respected by, and receiving laudatory reviews from, his or her academic colleagues while also selling well with the general public.

Such books are difficult to write, however. If your book is to fly off the shelves at bookstores such as Barnes and Noble, it has to be both readable and entertaining. Few people reach the level of clear and creative writing required. Furthermore, even among highly skilled professional nonfiction writers, New York Times best sellers are rare. Nonetheless, some university scholars have written best sellers. They include  Peter Drucker, Margaret Mead, Paul Krugman, Gail Kearns Goodwin, and Stephen Hawking. We believe that professors who produce crossover books perform a valuable public service. Unless you become a world-class public intellectual like the people in the above paragraph, you may be denigrated by your academic peers as a mere popularizer. A false equation that does not work mathematically, but still describes the behavior of many misguided professors:  excellent technical productivity plus commercial success is respected less than excellent technical productivity alone.

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19Oct11 Pip Bruce Ferguson on “Getting Published” – a workshop for PhD students and staff at the University of Waikato
Posted by Charlotte Frost

http://www.flickr.com/photos/barbourians/5365888653/

This post is by Pip Bruce Ferguson, Teaching Developer at The University of Waikato. Hamilton, New Zealand”

Two weeks back I facilitated a workshop that was advertised to a combination of PhD students plus staff at this University, where I work as a Teaching Developer. While my unit doesn’t work directly with PhD students nor supervise them, we do offer ‘Supervisory Conversations’ in conjunction with our Pro Vice Chancellor (Postgraduate), and have done for a couple of years now. These have been an effective way of supporting our supervisors, but have rarely included PhD students. We offer them in a beautiful location on campus, away from main teaching rooms, and provide a finger-food lunch.

Hospitality is important in New Zealand, and getting away from the hustle and bustle of ‘normal’ work and having time to discuss and reflect is very important to our supervisors, who can participate in cross-disciplinary discussion at these events.

Because of the pressure for staff to publish under our Performance-Based Research Fund (the New Zealand equivalent of the U.K.’s Research Assessment Exercise, but funded by rating individuals rather than units) we decided to offer a workshop on how to get published. This was also advertised to PhD students, and the workshop attracted a significant cohort of these, mainly international students. As with the conversations mentioned above, we offered morning tea, some resources such as hardbound notebooks and highlighters to help with the inevitable handouts (!) and an environment where people could ‘come apart’ from their normal workplace. Continue Reading »

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13Oct11 Scientist Meets Publisher
Posted by Charlotte Frost

“Your manuscript has been accepted by the journal I own. Just sign here.”

1 Comment Posted by in Academic Life, Future of Academic Publishing, Pitching & Publishing, Publishers, Video
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6Sep11 Kevin Ward – Writing an Academic book – Some Thoughts
Posted by Sarah-Louise Quinnell

Following on from my appearence on the panel at RGS Postgraduate Forum – Annual Conference Training Symposium (PGF-ACTS) last week I present the first of three posts from the speakers on publishing. Todays post looks at writing and academic book and is brought to you by Professor Kevin Ward. Kevin is Professor of Human Geography at Manchester University and has been the Editor of Area a journal published on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) since 2010.

So, you’ve decided that you are going to write an academic book.  Well, here are five tips:

1. It is worth considering the sort of book you want to write.  Look at publishers’ websites and consider the following: 

- Does the publisher produce the type of book that you want to write in your field?

- Are hardback and paperback versions of the book published simultaneously?  If not, how many hardbacks does your book have to sell before the publisher will commission a paperback run?

- What marketing and distribution system does the publisher have?

- Does the publisher send out copies to academic journals for review?

- Does the publisher attend large academic conferences and participate in book exhibitions? Continue Reading »

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26Jul11 Dr Jigar Jogia – Advice From a Prize Winning Author
Posted by Sarah-Louise Quinnell

Over the last few months we have looked at writing and publishing journal articles from a variety of different perspectives but mainly in the social sciences so here is a post for the natural and clinical scientists amongst our readers. Todays post comes from Dr Jigar Jogia. Jigar completed his PhD in the field of Psychiatry and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, (King’s College London, KCL) in 2010. He is currently a Postdoctoral researcher in the section of neurobiology of psychosis (Institute of Psychiatry, KCL). He also lectures and delivers training to staff and students for the Graduate School Researcher Development Unit at KCL. Jigar recently won the Samuel Gershon Award for Bipolar Disorder Research, in this post he reflects on the importance of journal selection. 

Recently I have published some original data in a peer reviewed Journal Molecular Psychiatry which is the highest ranked psychiatric journal at present with an impact factor of 15.470. The impact factor is a measure of the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is commonly used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; with journals with higher impact factors deemed to be more important. My advice to young postdocs in any field wanting to publish their research is to be realistic about the strengths and weaknesses of your studies and select the right journal, it is one of the most crucial parts of the publication process but the importance of this step is underestimated by many. Selecting a journal whereby your research can reach your target audience and have a real impact in your field is vital for furthering your career as a postdoctoral researcher. Publishing in a good journal will add indirect credibility to your work and also introduce you as a new researcher in the field. Continue Reading »

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