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Continuing to gather responses to the Guardian article by George Monbiot on the broken model of academic publishing, we asked Ken Wissoker, Editorial Director at Duke University Press, to wade into the debate. Here’s what he had to say:

I thought Monbiot’s article was very valuable for getting the word out about how the big publishers – especially Elsevier – but also Taylor and Francis and Wiley-Blackwell have extracted as much money as possible from university libraries. Elsevier pioneered this, coming up with big packages of journals that universities needed and pricing them as high as possible.  Universities with researchers in those areas (mostly science and medicine) had to pay or they weren’t supporting their professors. Since every journal was unique intellectual property, there was no competition and no market. If a library wanted to cancel a journal, Elsevier didn’t lower the price of the collection. This really was wealth extraction in a frightening and damaging form. So the article’s account of all that was a good wake-up call for those, including many academics, who were not aware of these changes over the last ten or fifteen years.  He is totally right about the infuriating way these arrangements cut out anyone without access to a university library. Read more

In his Guardian article, George Monbiot makes an excellent case against the existing academic publishing industry. Knowing that Martin Paul Eve would have much to say, we asked if he’d like to address Monbiot’s points in advance of his talk at the UKSG next year.

George Monbiot builds a good case against the corporate publishing machine that dominates the academic world and his article has had portions of the Twittersphere buzzing. I am due to speak in the opening plenary of the UK Scholarly Group conference next year – the biggest gathering of librarians and academic publishers – to make a similar argument: we don’t need academic publishers. While I won’t reiterate every aspect of Monbiot’s piece, there are several aspects, here, that are worth unpicking, especially where I diverge from Monbiot’s stance.

Firstly, Monbiot approaches, but never directly engages with, the driver of prestige in academia. He mentions the necessity of publishing with high impact factor journals and states that we can “start reading” new OA journals, but can’t “stop reading the closed ones”. Actually, we can, but only if people stop publishing therein. This will not happen in the UK because of the Research Excellence Framework and its insistence that the higher “impact” band a journal, the more weight a piece will have. This is a delegation of the critical task of the researcher into the arms of a commercial entity. While peer review serves as a useful filter, merely trusting this, based on journals which achieve their prestige based on rejection rates, is a foolish move, driven by the equally foolish baseline of a research assessment dependent on corporations. The REF, alongside competition for academic jobs, drives this system.

Secondly, publishers are able to use institutional libraries as a shield to hide a researcher’s autosubversive behaviour. Consider that, by publishing in a closed, proprietary journal, a researcher actually limits his or her own access to material by constricting his or her own institution’s library budget. This is not how it appears to the researcher, though, because the spend is at one remove. Researchers publish for prestige and it is the library’s fault if material is not forthcoming. Open Access supported by commercial entities does make a researcher aware of the problems, because in this case they will be asked to pay up front. However, most reactions from researchers to this tend to be: “I don’t want to pay, let us revert to the model where I didn’t pay”. In this way, publishers have built a “command and control” system for an entity that functions, in its obfuscation, distribution and resilience, in a mode most akin to a piece of computer malware. Libraries must educate researchers of their own complicity in this web. Read more

As a Geographer I am very proud to say that today I will be representing PhD2Published at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference. I have been asked to be on the panel for the Postgraduate Forum Annual Conference Training Symposium (PGF-ACTS). The purpose of the postgraduate forum is outlined below: Read more

Today’s post comes from Dr. Claire Warden and considers how to spend your time while moving from PhD to published. Claire is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her first book, British Avant-Garde Theatre is out with Palgrave next year. You can follow Claire on twitter here.

While commenting on a draft copy of my book, my wonderfully generous proof-reader made me rethink my use of citation with the following soupçon of wit:

“Quite a lot of references to what other scholars are doing. Sometimes these get rather too close to the ‘as Dr Dryasdust has said, “Shakespeare lived before the steam-engine”’.

The point being, citation in a book is substantially different from citation in a thesis. Dr Dryasdust’s comment is factually correct but we do not require the good doctor to tell us! And this gets to the crux of the difference between a thesis and a book: the former is written for examination, the latter is written to be read.

The humorous comment also points to a broader issue: the PhD-to-Book process is one of learning, personal development and transforming the way you write. While I completed my PhD in 2007, my first book will only hit the shelves (or shelf on my less ambitious days) next year. This might seem like a large gap and, as I finish the final draft, it certainly feels as if I have spent half a lifetime on it! But, as the story above shows, there is merit in taking your time over this process. There is a great deal of useful material on this site about the PhD-to-Book process, so what I want to do is focus on what to do while you’re waiting. Obviously honing our writing skills and ignoring Dr Dryasdust’s unnecessary interruptions are vital, but what else can be done? Read more

Weekly Wisdom #52 Don’t forget to work on your CV, it needs to be just as pretty as the rest of your pitch!

Weekly Wisdom #50 Start planning your second book!

Today’s guest post comes from Agata Mrva-Montoya. Agata is an archaeologist turned editor, currently at Sydney University Press and interested in books, publishing and social media. Here she gives tips on turning your thesis into a book.

Congratulations! After years of doing research and writing, you finally joined the ranks of freshly minted PhDs. You even have an endorsement from your examiners – ‘this work is brilliant and should be published’. So you send it in to a publisher, then another one or two. And your proposal gets knocked back, time after time. Why?

Publishers rarely consider unrevised PhD theses. A dissertation in social science and the humanities is written with a different intent and structure to a book, and for a different audience. Your thesis may be brilliant ­­– well researched, well referenced and well organized – but what the publisher sees is a manuscript that is too long, with tedious and predictable structure, full of jargon and repetitious announcements of intent, and so many quotes and references that it reads like compilations of facts and regurgitated opinions.

So before you send your dissertation to another publisher, you need to revise it, rewrite it and turn it into something that someone, apart from your long-suffering supervisors and briefly accosted examiners, might actually want to read. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #49 Make your book the one you wish had been available when you were researching your thesis!

Today’s guest post comes from Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Tim is a freelance copy-editor who has been making academic authors more stylish for longer than they realise. You can follow Tim on twitter here.

Style? Simple: it’s Bryan Ferry, Oswald Boateng suits, Coco Chanel, the E-Type Jaguar. Right?

Well, for an editor ‘style’ also conjures up images of reference books, dictionaries and lists of acceptable abbreviations. It is – as far as such as thing is possible – a way of codifying certain characteristics of how an author writes, or how a publisher or journal would like to be represented.

A publisher’s stylebook is a guide for editors that gives definitive answers to most of the questions they will face when editing a text: 19th century or nineteenth century? Postmodern, post-modern or post modern? US or UK spelling (or U.S. or U.K.)? The idea is to make the whole text a consistent and even read, and to present it in a professional light. It goes further than pedantry: in large reference works, for example, it’s useful to have every instance of a person’s name, for example, spelt the same way. (This is especially important with the move to electronic searches.) Read more

Here’s a lovely and creative a guest post from Pete Langman – an academic with his pen in a lot of inky pies. Pete muses (and meta muses) on what it’s like to try and work across a range of writing sectors today while lamenting a distinct lack of permanent lectureships .

It’s the beginning, isn’t it? It’s always the bloody beginning. How to start writing a piece? Since I became Dr Langman I have wrestled with this conundrum on many occasions. Here is a selection of recent first lines:

ThumP!

ThUmp!

CruMp!

CruuUnChH! Read more

Weekly Wisdom #48 If the jobs aren’t out there, pour your energies into getting your book pitched and written!

Weekly Wisdom #47 Be conscious that a book has a complicated life-cycle which your editor is responsible for. The work doesn’t stop when your book hits the book shops!

Sarah Caro, author of How to Publish Your PhD has kindly offered us this six-part guide on revising a thesis for publication as a book. Over the coming weeks she’ll be explaining how to understand what type of book you can produce as well as discover ways of shaping it up into a more book-like body of material.

As final summary of how to revise your thesis into a publishable book:

• Do be aware of the stylistic and structural differences between the different genres of academic writing.
• Do identify those features which are original to your thesis and those which are common to the genre so that you can work to enhance the former and minimize the latter.
• Do remember that a journal article needs to be focused, concise and is geared towards a highly specialized audience so you don’t need to spell everything out.
• Do bear in mind that in a monograph theory, data and methods should be synthesized and integrated into the text rather than merely described. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #46 Meet everyone you can in your field, and make an effort to understand their research before assuming yours is relevant!