In a previous post for PhD2Published, I mentioned that I would be talking in a symposium at the Society for Research into Higher Education Conference 2012.

I went last Friday (14^th December 2012) and really enjoyed the experience. Professor Pat Thomson started with a really interesting talk about her project with Inger Mewburn (aka The Thesis Whisperer) about analyzing blog spaces for academic purposes, followed by Dr Jeremy Segrott who presented our talk about #acwri. Andy Coverdale spoke next about the use of social media and the way in which it aids the research process for PhD students, and then I concluded the session with discussion of how PhD2Published is an empowering space (for me in particular as Managing Editor) and one outside of institutions that is transforming academic knowledge production.

We seemed to get a good response to our papers from a really engaged audience, which was encouraging and we all commented on the strangeness of meeting face-to-face having ‘known’ each other on Twitter for so long (there is proof in the slightly blurred photo in the Storify below!). The symposium was the first real opportunity to meet up directly as a group and to share our experiences and reflections on social media use as academics.

Below is a Storify of some of the Tweets from the day that we Tweeted directly from the symposium to give an idea of what the papers were about and what we discussed:

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of representing PhD2Published at the Society for Research into Higher Education Conference 2012. I am taking part in a symposium organized by Professor Pat Thompson of the Patter blog called ‘Feral spaces? Social media as higher education practice: Blogs, wikis, and twitter feeds with a pedagogical intent’. Pat herself will be talking, as will Andy Coverdale, a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University, UK and Dr Jeremy Segrott, my Acwri partner in crime. In the paper I am presenting, I will talk about the online participatory culture that has been created by feral spaces such as PhD2Published and that is representative of a now well-established online academic movement that is shaping new practices of knowledge production. Being online has created feral spaces like PhD2Published that are borderless and unregulated and that bridge social differences and disciplines. I reflect on this and how this movement is transforming academic knowledge production by creating a community of ‘prosumers’ (or the wonderful academics who write blogs, or share news, knowledge and ideas via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook). I will explore the role of PhD2Published in generating pedagogical content concerned with academic publishing from the perspectives of an expert community of academics of different career stages and will argue that PhD2Published is a unique platform that can be used by its Managing Editors (currently me) to engage in this participatory culture, with the guidance of its founder Charlotte Frost, to reskill and share expertise. I will also reflect on my own involvement with PhD2Published and the way in which it has allowed me to respond to the fast paced, ever-evolving and increasingly competitive academic environment.

I will report on the outcomes of the symposium when I return,

Anna

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

SHARE. Pay it forward by sharing your own writing and publishing experiences. Over the last few years, academics at all stages of their careers have been able to network more and more widely using new digital communication technologies and social media. This work is not only useful but necessary. Frankly, there is still too much gate-keeping and secrecy in academia, so the more transparent we all are about our processes the better. As educators, it really is our job to foster the growth of others. If you help someone else get published, that is a career-success for you too.

What else does it takes to be a hackademic ? Click here to find out.

(C) Google

Today’s post by +Daniel Spielmann invites you to find out if Google+ could be a useful addition to your Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and provides some tips to get you started. Daniel is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg, Germany, focussing on the use of ePortfolio in the training of peer writing tutors. He is interested in academic writing and digital literacies and in the connection of both.

It is November, the month of #acwrimo and #digiwrimo. Many academics engage in digital writing using Twitter and writing personal blogs but in this post I explain why I am one of a growing number of Google+ users and why I think, for many academics, it is worth checking out, especially if you haven’t given it a try yet.

What is G+ and why is it different to Twitter?

“Personally, I love G+ because people I’m connecting with here help me be ‘who I want to be’ – and faster than I could possibly do on my own.” (+Meri Walker)

On Sept. 20th I took part in the PhD2published Twitter live chat on academic tweeting where I mentioned some of the issues I have with Twitter and compared it to Google+. Some of you may not have heard of G+ or even realize its potential for academic writing and networking.

Well, G+ offers a set of joint services which foster interaction. You can share text messages and comments which – different to Twitter – are not restricted to 140 characters, which allows for a much more natural flow of communication; however, some people interpret the character limit on Twitter as beneficial, because it supposedly forces you to be very precise about your message. For me, that’s not enough. Sometimes there is a fine line between “concise” and “truncated”. Is everything exceeding 140 characters just “intellectual ‘baggage'” as @markhawker / +Mark Hawker tweeted with a smile during the aforementioned chat, or is it rather that not until we cross restrictions like the one imposed on us on Twitter that research and academia become most interesting? How important is the 140 character limit to you?

Another G+ property is that discussions are easier to keep track of, because they are not all over the place as they are on Twitter; following longer discussions is much more convenient and, in fact, from a user perspective the platform seems far more conducive to focussed discussion, rendering it a solid tool for academic exchange.

The observations mentioned – the absence of a character limit and the more traceable organization of conversations – may contribute to the fact that communication on G+ is often perceived as more lively and yielding than on other networks (although you can cross-post from G+ to Twitter, you should keep in mind the two different types of network you are feeding, see also d) below).

When you share pictures or videos on G+ your readers will see them directly in their stream, not just a link to them. Links are not subtracted from your character limit because there is none. Sharing and linking are therefore much more fun, which makes me think G+ is also of great service to the practical application of the “Power Law of Participation” in which Mayfield describes the stages that lead us from a collective intelligence to a collaborative one.

Furthermore, with G+ Hangouts real time video conferences with up to ten people are as easy as pie. The integration of Google Drive (and other Google services, for that matter) allows you to work with others on the same document while ‘hanging out’, which makes it a great tool for collaborative digital text creation as in online writing groups or multi-author writing projects, for example. How can we harvest this potential for #acwrimo and the time after?

Here are some tips to get you started on G+:

a) Build your personal profile. Ask yourself: Why are you on G+ and what do you hope to gain from it? What people do you want to get in touch with and what should they know about you? Fill your profile with information about what you do and what your interests are, don’t leave it blank.

b) Simple but effective: Use the G+ search box to find people and content that match your professional interests. Be creative about search terms, explore.

c) Think about circle management. On G+ you group people you follow into different circles. The circle feature allows you to be very specific about what information you share with whom and it is also very helpful in improving the quality of your G+ stream. Circles will need some time to get used to, but once you discover the potential, you’ll surely get the hang of it. This video helps you get started with circles. I also shared two posts on G+ (1, 2) to help your thinking about circles.

c) Don’t just share any content, share interesting content that fits the professional profile you aim to create of yourself.

d) Don’t just share and be done with it – when try to give it a personal touch by commenting / giving your opinion on what you are sharing. Your readers wonder: What do you think about what you are sharing? Letting people know gives you a much bigger chance of inspiring feedback. Including your personal opinion in your share will also help you to tie your thoughts together when you browse your own stream a few months down the line.

e) Make your postings interesting, show you care about others’ opinions, ask questions.

f) Improve your posts’ readability through structure and use the formatting options in G+: a “_” in front and at the end of a line of text will set everything in between in italics, “*” gives you boldface and “-” strikethrough.

g) You can mention other plussers by typing “+” followed by the name of the plusser you want to refer to. That way, this person will be notified that he or she has been mentioned.

h) Interact with people on their posts, say thanks, leave comments. G+ is not about reading, it’s about interacting. Be positive and inspiring.

It works, if you let it.

Now, after about 16 months with G+, I honestly believe something would be missing if the service were gone for good. Every time I look at my stream, I learn. G+ is what I recommend to social media reluctant colleagues who show the willingness to try at least one single network. It would also have been the ideal tool to have used two years ago when I taught a core seminar on autonomous learning. I promoted the use of Google Wave instead which did serve a purpose pre-G+.

As with any other social network, you have to be active if you want to be able to judge the benefits. No matter if we are talking Facebook, Twitter or G+, you have to engage with others in order to build a network that reliably supplies you with meaningful information. For me, G+ does that in a less stressful manner than other networks. And as with any other network, engagement takes some time; trust is not built in a day. So if you want to give it a try, be serious about it, because the bottom line is: You yourself decide what you get to see in your stream – valuable information or just the ordinary distractions.

For some examples on how G+ connects people, have a look at this posting by +Andrew Baron with lots of thoughts about the use of G+ or  +Melony Ritter inviting support for her 1st grade class learning about geography. If you are a speaker of German, +Stephanie Dreyfuerst’s post could be a good place to post your first G+-comment. Or why not add a G+ post about #acwrimo yourself? What differences do you encounter when sharing your #acwrimo word counts, excerpts, writing prompts, habits, projects, feedback and motivation on G+? What are possible G+ benefits for #acwrimo? Just use the Twitter hashtag in your G+ postings and let’s get the discussions going. The opportunities for interaction on G+ are certainly there for the taking!

Today’s post is about writing for non academic audiences. Marcia Hughes, the post author is one of the founders of the Boulder Group Ltd, a communications consultancy founded in 2007, dedicated to working with universities and higher educational institutions in the delivery of knowledge to wider audiences.

If you’re passionate about communicating your research with as wide a public as possible, then the chances are you’re already presenting your ideas clearly and simply to diverse audiences outside of academic walls. Hopefully, you’re also benefiting from your public engagement.

As a journalist and reporter with the BBC for nearly 15 years, I had to ensure my ideas ‘educated, informed and entertained’ the public. I found it rewarding making programmes for a general audience to absorb and appreciate.  Working mainly for Business and Financial News and Current Affairs, I had to turn quite complex issues into accessible listening and viewing for TV and Radio. I quickly learnt some important steps for engaging a general audience:

• Developing a clear and simple narrative for the audience to follow
• Choosing interesting case studies (voices) with relevant human interest or experiences
• Making sure interviews with experts outlined key themes in a straightforward way
• Removing any jargon or specialist speak
• Using simple and concise language and using short sentences

Of course, it wasn’t always plain sailing. At times, appealing to this unknown “general audience” felt like being in the firing line from a group of people with the same “Am I bothered?” attitude as the infamous teenage girl played by Catherine Tate. Reaching out to the world beyond my like-minded BBC peers and financial experts took me out of my comfort zone. It constantly challenged me to think more simply and develop a much more open mindset every time I thought of a new programme idea:  Why am I making this programme; Who am I really trying to reach? What do I want to say?

These questions centre on two key areas: Audiences and Messages. They are as important and relevant to an academic individual writing for ‘non-academics’ as they are to a journalist.  What are the potential audiences are out there for you? What are their needs? What are their interests and values?  What are your key messages? Why does your research matter to them?

The more you ask yourself these sorts of questions, the sharper your focus. The more straightforward your communication, the more likely your research will resonate with a non- academic audience.

At the Boulder Group Ltd we are committed to supporting individual researchers, academic professionals, and post-graduates in their communication with the wider world. Our founding belief is that the knowledge created in our universities and HEIs, and the great ideas of researchers deserve a much bigger audience and greater appreciation.

Our service Researcher AM focuses on Audiences and Messages. It gives one-to-one help in audience engagement and current thinking on public engagement in order to help you define your research’s key audiences and choose the most appropriate means of communicating with that audience.

Contact Marcia: marcia@bouldergroup.co.uk

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

HACK YOUR PRODUCTIVITY. There are all sorts of ways you can be extra efficient with your writing time. Setting specific writing times and sticking to them can be very effective in boosting your output, but here are some other hacks: 1) Write first thing when you get up before you have time to be distracted by email or the newspaper. 2) You can even harness your addictions by writing a certain number of words before allowing yourself coffee or tea; 3) Write last thing at night when everything is done and it’s quiet. 4) Use a writing app that helps filter out distraction. After just a few minutes of use, full-screen mode can feel like you’ve gone to writing heaven, and there are many apps that will even pare your screen down to just words on a page relieving you of all that urgent and endless formatting. 5) Write collaboratively with someone in the same document – even at the same time – halving the writing time and stress. What else do you need to do ?

In her second post, Karen Strickland outlines the benefits of collaborative writing groups that involve a range of International scholars. She finishes by providing some great tips for International writing that we are sure are perfect for #acwrimo! Karen’s full bio can be read here and you can also follow her on Twitter @strictlykaren. 

I am currently participating in a collaborative writing group (CWG) as part of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). ISSOTL set up nine CWGs in Spring this year, each led by an experienced author. Group members were invited to apply via the conference website and in April we began planning our articles via an online learning space. In October at the conference itself, we had two days group working time where we revised our draft outlines, developed the theoretical underpinning a bit more and peer reviewed other group outlines as well as had our paper outline reviewed. This process is very different to anything I have experienced before as the co-authors were all strangers to me, and all are from countries other than the UK, therefore cultural views and ideas of the paper topic were coming from very different lenses. At times this could be challenging but ultimately it was rewarding as I found myself viewing things more openly and gaining insight into the worlds of others. The two days we spent in Canada together helped immensely with the group gelling together, and overcoming some of the challenges of communicating with strangers asynchronously.

The benefits of this approach, I think are that we shared a passion for the topic of the paper and the international authorship has ensured that the paper truly addresses the issue from an international perspective.  The potential drawbacks maybe that for the shyer or less mouthy participant, views may be overshadowed, however I found the experience to be collegiate with clear differences of opinion and experiences but an understanding that all may coexist without one being right or wrong.

With mutil-authored papers like this one there are a number of considerations such as what platform to work on, achieving a consistent “voice” and negotiating authorship. We had the online space provided by the McMaster University but agreed to use Dropbox to work on the paper as drafting and version control would be easier using a cloud based platform.  One person has been designated “editor” and will review the paper for clarity of expression and blending the writing to ensure it reads as one paper.

As for authorship, I think it is always wise to discuss this early in any grouping or partnership, as who will be first author and thereafter can be a contentious issue. One of the issues that faced us was that the journal we will be submitting to will adopt the American Psychological Association (APA) referencing system. This means that the final two authors will be et al’d. It is worth bearing in mind all such issues when negotiating authorship and considering each individual’s contribution may be the best and fairest way of deciding with a caveat that order may be reviewed once all the drafting is done.

Our paper is not yet complete but what have I gained from the experience so far? Well, this was a very new approach to writing in groups for me and I now have some fellow co-authors internationally who I know have shared interests. Who knows, perhaps we will write again together?

Tips for international writing:

1. Agree on a focus and journal early on
2. Set deadlines
3. Decide on language and spelling. English is most common but American English or English needs to be agreed
4. Negotiate contributions: sectioning the article (may need to be done once you have an outline)
5. Discuss and agree authorship
6. Select an online platform that allows easy access for all contributors
7. Set up a discussion site and agree how often each participant should log in to discussion areas
8. Where possible set aside time for synchronous discussion, either face to face or online via Skype or similar
9. Select an editor who will pull the article together so that it reads as one article and not a disjointed piece of writing

It’s November, it’s #acwrimo, it’s that time of year when we academics are looking for best forms of practice when it comes to our academic writing. Karen Strickland, Senior Lecturer & Senior Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University reflects on her experiences of face to face and online writing groups for providing support and time for writing. You can view her Linked.in profile here and follow her on Twitter (@strictlykaren).

Do you struggle to write on your own, watch deadlines pass you by and never quite get round to turning that thesis or conference paper into an article? Collaborative writing might be just the approach you need. Collaborative writing groups are a useful approach which can help you develop your experience of writing for publication and help you meet deadlines and targets for writing.

Writing groups offer the potential for shared experience of writing together either on the same article as co-author, or as a buddy experience, working alongside each other to develop unique articles. I have been interested in collaborative writing approaches for some time, as I think they are useful approaches which help to develop capability of newer writers and thus develop capacity. There are a number of ways you can write collaboratively such as co-authoring, writing in groups or signing up to a writing workshop or retreat. In this blog post I will share my experiences of a few of these approaches and suggest ways in which you can create opportunities for group writing. I have split these broadly into face to face and online groups.

Earlier this summer a group of staff from Edinburgh Napier attended a three day residential writing retreat.  The retreat was facilitated by David Baume PhD SFSEDA FHEA who is an independent international higher education researcher, evaluator, consultant, staff and educational developer and writer. The retreat allowed participants time to focus on preparing articles for publication or papers for conference presentation without the usual interruptions of daily working life. The format was a structured, facilitated retreat with opportunities for peer and facilitator support throughout giving a very supportive and collegiate feel to the event. The facilitator used his experience to guide participants in the peer reviewing and publishing process, from choosing the publication outlet to dealing with reviewer’s comments.

The first morning of the retreat, after a little discussion around the focus of our articles we were challenged to go away and write 500 words by lunchtime. We had to come back and report our progress, so the pressure was on from the start! The focus and setting of goals was crucial to the success of the retreat as we worked though the three days, revising and re-drafting our papers. By the end of the three days the participants all completed advanced drafts of their work. Overall this was a very enjoyable and productive experience.

The legacy of this retreat is that we have also continued to meet on a monthly basis on the first Wednesday of the month on the top floor of the library which has a computer room and easy chairs with uninterrupted views of Edinburgh Castle. This helps to provide on-going time for writing and the chance to meet up and discuss writing and peer review. Peer support really is the key to this writing group.

The value of face to face groups are that you get the immediacy of the group interaction, however you need to set ground rules, such as, how long to set aside for social chat at the beginning and end of the sessions. The social aspect of the writing group is worth emphasising but care needs to be taken not to let this eat into writing time.

It is not always possible to meet face to face, and it also limits the reach so how about online writing groups?

A colleague of mine at Edinburgh Napier University leads an open online writing course which has been offered over the past two summers for individuals who are interested in writing for technology enhanced learning.  This initiative was called WriteTEL and was led by Dr Keith Smyth. This initiative invited writers to plan, draft and review an article for publication, whilst being supported by a member of the WriteTEL team. A series of online webinars were provided, with guest experts who had considerable expertise to share in how to write for publication and get published.

This approach worked really well for individuals who perhaps had recently completed a project or had an idea for an article and just needed some support and guidance along with way. We also had participants from all over the globe. Time zones are an obvious challenge for synchronous webinars but recording the webinars meant that participants who were unable to log in could catch up whenever it was convenient.

What do these approaches have in common?

Goals for writing are set at the outset, for example:

• Deadlines; short and longer term deadlines with goals along the way
• Opportunities for review by a critical friend
• Peer support and sharing expertise

What can you do?

Find colleagues with similar interests and set up your own local group, you don’t have to meet face to face, why not use a blog or twitter like local #acwrimo?

This post is the third in our series by Jason Colditz that explores the new and complicated world of Open Access Publishing. Post One provides a general primer on Open Access for the un-initiated and Post Two explores copyright issues and the “Gold Rule”.

This post discusses alternate routes to making your research publications available to the public (“OA Green” model). This model allows you to publish in a variety of journals (even journals that aren’t Open Access) and then to publicly archive the manuscript so that others are able to read and cite your work. This builds on my previous post that describes copyright transfer agreements and OA Gold, and assumes that you have some familiarity with Open Access in general.

A Fairly Common Scenario:

You want to make your results freely available for others to read, cite, and build upon. Unfortunately, you can’t afford to spend a couple thousand dollars to unlock the published version to the public, or maybe you’ve made up your mind to submit your manuscript to one of those ‘really prestigious’ journals that don’t offer such options. After two grueling rounds of revisions and some tweaks from the copy editor, you have an article in press. Congrats – your department chair (or tenure review committee, if you’re so lucky) will surely appreciate your accomplishment! Unfortunately, many of the researchers/practitioners in your field don’t have a subscription to the journal that you’ve published in and they probably won’t wager US$30 to purchase the full-text, even for an article as potentially groundbreaking as yours (note: write a good abstract so that others are interested to read the full-text).  You want others to cite your article, but the journal doesn’t allow you to post the published version on your website for the world to see. You need a work-around, preferably one that doesn’t cause the publisher to take you to court for violating your copyright agreement. Some journals are more permissive than others when you want to share your work with the world, and you might still have a trick or two up your sleeve: time to review your copyright transfer agreement!

Your copyright transfer agreement specifies what versions of your article you may share, with whom you may share them, and when. If you haven’t yet signed a copyright transfer agreement (better yet – if you haven’t yet decided on a journal), you can look into the permissiveness of various journals/publishers at SHERPA/RoMEO. “Self-archiving” your publication means that you’re uploading an electronic version of it to a publicly available Internet archive. Journals/publishers may allow you to post your final print version to an archive for various reasons.  Best case scenario: you are mandated to publicly archive your works if your research was funded through the National Institutes of Health (in the US) or Wellcome Trust (in the UK), and publishers are required to honor these mandates. Some universities also mandate that your work is added to publicly available university archives (e.g., Harvard in the US). A growing number of universities have such institutional mandates, and you may be able to find your institution in the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP). In this case, you should consult with your university librarians to determine how they can help you to archive your publication. If you don‘t have a government or institutional mandate for public access to your article, you may still be able to share your research on an institutional, topical, or other Internet archive.

Many institutions have non-mandated archives listed on the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) (search for your institution from the search bar in the top right corner), which provide an opportunity to archive your work. At this point, every institution has different methods of collecting and distributing publications, and so you will need to conform to the regulations of your institution as well as those of the journal that you publish in.  ROAR also lists topical repositories that you can search for by keyword (e.g., “education”), but be advised that topical archives are sparse for many fields.

At this stage of the game, you may want to post a pre-print in an institutional archive or on your personal website.  A “pre-print” is a version of your article that isn’t the final published version.  Many journals will allow you to archive the semi-final version of your article before editorial changes (i.e., the version that was accepted, but not the version that was published). More stringent journals will only allow you to archive the version that you submitted before the first round of peer-review. Based on the version that you are allowed to publicly archive (if you are comfortable sharing that version), it will still be helpful for other scholars to access and cite it.  If you archive a pre-print, be sure to list the full citation for the publication up-front, so that others are able to cite the published version of your work.

“OA Green” gives you the opportunity to share your scholarly publications with anyone (and everyone) who is interested in reading them, not just the scholars at institutions that subscribe to the journal. This is important because journal holdings are shrinking at university libraries and your publications are important to a broader audience than the handful of research universities that can afford it.

Stay open!

Jason

Resources:

• SHERPA/RoMEO
• Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)
• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

Remember AcBoWriMo, last year’s experiment in a month-long writing productivity drive? Well, it’s back, bigger and better than ever – but without the ‘Bo’!

The idea hails from NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) an initiative designed to turn the whole of November into a month-long write-fest for current or would-be novelists. The idea is that you set yourself the task of writing 50 thousand words in November alone and bingo, you’ve got yourself a whole big chunk of novel!  In 2011 I decided academics should give something similar a go and, I can happily report, it went brilliantly!

For AcBoWriMo, I invited people to join me in wearing comfy clothes, drinking a lot of coffee, napping at strange times and seeing how close we could each get to writing 50 thousand words. I admitted at the time that it was an insane target, but that it wasn’t the word count that was the point. Rather, it was a bid to gather people together for mutual support in the, at times, painfully difficult and soul-crushingly lonely task of academic writing. In the last year alone, I’ve watched with awe and excitement as so many academic communities have grown and expanded on social media platforms like Twitter (examples include #phdchat, #ecrbook, #digped, #fycchat with plenty more to be found here). Not to mention that our own AcBoWriMo off-shoot (and collaboration with Jeremy Segrott), the regular live Twitter chat on academic writing, #AcWri, has co-ordinated a huge amount of valuable discussion. Nice work Anna and Jeremy!

So I decided it was worth giving it all another go – with some revisions…

This year’s event will focus on ALL aspects of academic writing, and will encourage participants to set their own (wild) goals. As a result of that, and the strength of the AcWri community, it will be called AcWriMo. Just like Craig David, I copped some flack for the ‘Bo!’ part. Although I never intended to promote the idea that an entire academic book could be written in a month, by calling the event Academic Book Writing Month, it seems I over-emphasised that part. But we still want you to join in on setting yourself some unrealistic targets and fighting alongside us to achieve them.

So, here are the rules for #AcWriMo 2012

1. Set yourself some crazy goals. Try and come up with some outcomes that would really push you beyond anything you ever thought possible. I always said 50,000 words is a bit of a nutty goal for academic writing in one month (it works out at something like 2,500 words a day and that’s just bonkers) but if you’re bonkers, go ahead and set that target. Otherwise, think about how much you are comfortably able to write a day and set yourself the task of regularly exceeding that amount. If you can manage 300 words a day then we want 400, if you can do 1000, then we want 1500 – something like that. Last year, a lot of people preferred setting themselves a time-based goal. They would try to write for so many hours a day or week and often used the Pomodoro technique to count units of productive time. If that’s your thing, go for it! How about sneaking in an extra Pomodoro a day? Or, look at all the writing tasks you’ve got to achieve over the next few months and decide to get a set amount of them done in November. In the US it’s job season, so how about you count your job-letter-writing-time. Or article drafts maybe?

2. Publicly declare your participation and goals. You can do this by adding to the comments of this very blog post, by tweeting using the hashtag #AcWriMo, or by writing on our PhD2Published Facebook page. Being accountable is key to this working for you as a way to push yourself, but if you want to silently take part, at least tell a friend who is likely to hold you to it. [edit: you can now also add your goals to and keep track of your progress with Jenn’s AcWriMo Accountability Spreadsheet – thanks Jenn!]

3. Draft a strategy. This is essential if you’re going to make a success of this. Sitting down to write without preparation is the first step towards being struck down with writer’s block. We’ll be blogging and tweeting lots of ideas to help you, so before you start, work out a strategy for how you’ll tackle your set tasks. For example, establish how much you’ll need to write a day, and on which days you can definitely do this. Offload as much other work as you can, and get in some supplies (we recommend stocking up on decent coffee of course). Think about how you work best and adopt that approach from the start – this means planning everything from comfy clothes to reading sessions.

4. Discuss what you’re doing. OK so being on Twitter and Facebook with us all day isn’t acceptable – you’ve got work to do – but checking-in at certain times is imperative! We want to know how you’re getting on? What is working for you and what isn’t? We want you to tell us all if you need help with something but also to celebrate your successes with us too. And nothing is TMI when it’s AcWriMo because that’s the point: sharing!

5. Don’t slack off. As participant Bettina said of AcBoWriMo, you must ‘write like there’s no December!’ But guess what? If you work super hard now, there’s going to be more December to go round. Remember how December usually creeps up on you and suddenly its Christmas Eve and you’ve failed to buy gifts or take time out for yourself. Well, if you put the work in now, there’ll be so much December you won’t know what to do with it all!

6. Publicly declare your results – and please be honest! As a writing community, we’ll all benefit from sharing in your achievements, but it is also good to see what works and what doesn’t. And if you don’t make your targets, you’ll still be achieving the selfless goal of making the rest of us feel more normal – so it’s a community win/win really.

We’re raring to go, we hope you are too?! 🙂

This week the #Acwri live chat was all about using Twitter for Academic Writing. This chat was well attended and lively and encouraged a lot of discussion. A written summary of the chat can be read in todays post but if you would like to read the chat in full, which includes the key Tweets from the discussion, you can view them on Storify.

The conversation started with some reflection on why academics are using Twitter. Responses ranged from finding relevant communities of practice, keeping in touch with people efficiently and quickly, keeping networks alive, reaching a bigger audience, making connections across space and between groups, to be social, to find out about things and stay up to date, to share #acwri outputs, and to be at the intersection of multi-disciplinary conversations relevant to individual work. These responses indicate the diversity of reasons for using Twitter as an academic.

Others also consider it good for practicing concise writing (in only 140 characters), setting goals and asking questions. One user even argued that they use Twitter as a way of keeping notes (@strictlykaren).  This led to some discussion about using Twitter to link to other content, such as blogs, where discussion can continue elsewhere.

A significant thread of conversation in the early stages of the chat was that many enjoy live Tweeting from conferences, but also have some concerns about it. People question when it is appropriate to do it and how often, during a talk for fear of taking over Twitter feeds.

Challenges with Twitter writing were also explored. Errors in spelling and grammar were commonly discussed. One Tweeter felt that tweets were less coherent and bitty, rather than an argument (@spani3l). Some did not like when people swear and rant, and others dislike when individuals write lots of Tweets one after the other. @helen_kara responded to this well saying “Don’t drink (much) & Tweet”. This led to a conversation about how Twitter is used. Many use it semi-professionally or professionally. Consequently developing an academic identity on Twitter is important. Many are aware of the public nature of Twitter content and therefore the need for appropriate conduct. There was a difference in opinion about using Twitter only for professional discussion and sometimes for including more casual talk. An interesting distinction was made between the use of Twitter for work and Facebook for personal interaction.

The conversation ended with some discussion of the use of G+ (Google Plus) rather than Twitter for academic writing and communication. Conversation was described as much more natural and substantial on G+, despite the fact that less academics are currently using it than Twitter. There is some resistance to being on another social network but @spani3l likes the fact that it can be used for multiple tasks such as video conferencing and having more sustained conversations.

What are your opinions on using Twitter for academic writing? Does anyone have any experience of G+?

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

DON’T WASTE. Make sure that what you do outside of your professional life is both a respite and also feeds your academic work. If an extracurricular project you’re working on is monopolizing too much of your time, find a way to elevate it to a serious component of your research. For example, if you are an English professor and find yourself spending too much time making self-produced b-movies with your iPhone, why not do some research on the history of low-budget filmic experimentation. Find ways to instantly apply new discoveries or re-purpose tasks to add value. If you have a pile of grading to do, why not create a quick project that allows you to reflect on assessment? Did you just write a new bio for a conference? Where else can you put that new bio? Have you had an article rejected? Can you turn at least some of it into a blog post for a site with a large audience?

Want to be a full-time Hackademmic ?Get on track and read this tips.

This post is the second of a blog series focusing on Open Access publishing, written by Jason Colditz. For an introduction to Open Access publishing and what it is, you can read Part One of the series here. 

This post will briefly discuss author copyright agreements and provide resources to help you to make your published research publicly available (“Open Access Gold” model). This is the most straightforward way to bring your research to the public who benefit from it – sharing your final publication with the largest possible audience. This model allows for public access and allows researchers/authors/media to freely cite and report on the final version of your work. If you want to build your public presence in your field and broader scientific/professional networks, the public availability of your research should not be taken for granted.

Every time you create a manuscript for publication, you have to shop around for the “best” journal in which to publish your work. Maybe you’ve done this before or maybe you’re planning to publish for the first time. Either way, it is exciting – another notch on your CV and an opportunity to share your work with your peers in the research community and beyond. It can also be anxiety provoking as you consider the venues that are the best fit for the content of your manuscript, and those that demonstrate enough impact for your work to be appreciated. When you think about impact, it is important to consider the “prestige” of the journal as well as the availability of the final publication. The publisher may ask you to sign-away certain rights of your intellectual property that will limit the availability/usability of your work, and you need to consider what you are giving up in order to get your paper to press (i.e., is it still legally “your” paper after it is published? – often times not).

Copyright Transfer Agreements

Publishers require you to sign a legal agreement that determines how your article can be used and shared. Some publishers (e.g., Elsevier) have complex restrictions on how your article is licensed and shared, while others (e.g., Public Library of Science) pride themselves on broad accessibility of research articles, with authors retaining copyright. To understand the complexities of copyright transfer agreements, you don’t need to be a lawyer – the basic principle is that you (authors) may do whatever you wish with a manuscript until you agree to trade certain freedoms for the privilege of publication. Simply put, some publishers require you to give-up more freedom than others…

“Not all publication agreements lead to problems, but many do. Some publishers, including scholarly journal publishers, ask for only a limited right of publication and generously leave other rights with you. Other publishers, however, insist on an assignment of the copyright and leave you with little or nothing. If that is your agreement, you may have lost all rights to use even your own work.”

Columbia University

“When you assign copyright to publishers, you lose control over your scholarly output. Assignment of copyright ownership may limit your ability to incorporate elements into future articles and books or to use your own work in teaching at the University.”

Cornell University

If you want a broad reach for your research, there are several things to pay attention to when choosing a journal/publisher:

• Who owns the copyright to your published work (you or the publisher)?
• How soon (if ever) will the article be made freely available to the public?
• Are you permitted to post the publication on personal- or institutional websites?
• Can the publication be freely reproduced for educational purposes?

For some publishers, the answers to these questions are: “Not you – never – absolutely not – no.” If you should get your research well-read and cited, those aren’t the answers that you want to hear. Open Access (OA) Gold publishers, on the other hand, will tell you: “You own it – your publication is publicly available – share it freely!” If you want to know more about the copyright agreements for particular journals or publishers, the University of Nottingham hosts the “SHERPA/RoMEO” website to help you decode and compare copyright agreements for most popular publishers. When looking at OA publishers, you will want to keep in mind what I call the “Gold Rule” of OA publishing (buyer beware)…

The OA Gold Rule: You might pay for what you get, but you don’t always get what you pay for.

Several mainstream journals provide an option to publish the electronic version of your article, free to the public, at a price to the author(s). Some Elsevier journals, for example, charge a one-time US$3,000 (or more) fee to release the article publicly. While there is a definite advantage to opening up access to your research article published in a highly-ranked journal, is it worth the fee? Maybe not – Elsevier and similar publishers may still retain the copyright to authors’ works. This isn’t exactly OA Gold in a practical sense (if the publisher owns the copyright, they may still restrict how the article is used). If your research was funded through certain agencies (e.g., National Institutes of Health in the US, Wellcome Trust in the UK), it has a mandated public release date within 6 months or a year anyway. Is an earlier public release worth $3,000 from your research budget? If you’re not funded by one of the big players in research, can you afford to pay out of pocket or from institutional funds? (Wouldn’t it be nice?)

While there is movement towards reimbursing some of these fees at an institutional level (e.g., U.C. Berkeley), that is more the exception than the rule, and it contributes to further racketeering by some publishers who will retain the copyright to your article and charge your institution for unlocking your article (which the publisher may still own). This presents another set of ethical as well as financial difficulties.

On the other side of the spectrum of “predatory publishers” are those who don’t offer much in the way of prestige (or not even peer-review) but will still charge you for publication. They may tout prestige and OA but function more as publication mills. These are often called “vanity journals”, and they will publish just about anything if you are willing to pay the price. Watch out for these, or else you might pay out of pocket for a publication that you wouldn’t want to list on your CV (or that you wish your tenure review board hadn’t discovered).

Then there is the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an exemplar of OA Gold practices. Its interdisciplinary publication, PLoS ONE, boasts a respectable impact factor, peer review, and fully open publication terms. It charges less than half of the bottom-dollar Elsevier rate and will waive publication fees for authors who can not afford to pay for publication. This is one example of many journals (some with no fees at all) that adhere to best practices of the OA Gold model. If you want to shop around for reputable OA journals, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the place to start.

If OA Gold sounds a bit convoluted to you, you’re not alone! The publishing process is heavily politicized by powerful special interest groups that are more concerned with profit margins than continuity of scientific rigor and dissemination of knowledge (in practice if not in political activism). The process of OA publishing oftentimes runs counter to the traditional publication profit model and requires some ingenuity to navigate. OA Gold can be co-opted by publishers who don’t have the best interests of the research community in mind, and so you need to be an informed consumer when deciding to pursue the “Gold standard” in publishing your works.

Gold OA versus Green OA

Open Access is color coded to distinguish the two ways that you can get your research directly to the public. If you equate gold to money, you’re on the right track (though that needn’t be the case for many free electronic journals). Whereas OA Gold puts the finished (published) product in the public domain, OA Green can give you a work-around to get your research out there in other ways. Think of OA Green as the grassroots alternative to OA Gold. In the next post, we will cover the OA Green model that allows you (depending on the copyright transfer agreement) to archive a version of your article in the public domain.

Stay tuned, and stay open!

Jason

Resources:

• SHERPA/RoMEO
• Directory of Open Access Journals

Author’s Note: Mike Taylor, who provides an online oracle of Open Access activism (and sauropod vertebra pictures for paleontologists), was kind enough to comment on my original post’s use of “public domain”, which is a specific term denoting public ownership of works (i.e., a Creative Commons license instead of a copyright).  This is an important distinction to make when considering publisher copyright agreements.  The post has been edited accordingly and I hope to address this topic more fully in a future post.

Find out more about the OA Green model in the next in the series….Part Three of A Primer on Open Access Publishing.

Follow Jason on Twitter: @colditzjb

This post is the first in a series by Jason Colditz, who spends his days at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a full-time Research Coordinator (Department of Psychiatry), Teaching Assistant for the Dissertation Research Seminar (Department of Administrative and Policy Studies), and has consulted on several university-sponsored and individual research projects. In the Social and Comparative Analysis in Education graduate program, his comprehensive project focuses on policies and economics of Open Access publishing. In this set of blog posts, Jason extends a conversation started earlier on PhD2Published, introducing us to the world of Open Access publishing and exploring its implications for future academic publishing and careers.

Open Access (OA) publishing is a game-changer for researchers and academics who produce scholarly works.  While mathematics and physics have a rich history of making articles publicly available and medicine is moving in that direction thanks to funding mandates, OA is a relatively new development in social sciences and humanities fields. Over a series of posts, we will help you to understand the basics of OA, provide resources to help you make informed decisions about OA options, and consider the long term impact of OA publishing for emerging researchers and professionals in academia.

Background: Open Access as a Geopolitical Grassroots Movement

Recently, Open Access (OA) has received increased public attention on a global scale. The UK, Argentina, and others are moving towards federal mandates to make publicly funded research results available to the public, the US is under increased pressure to enact similar OA legislation, and advocacy groups are springing up around the globe. A driving force of this movement stems from universities and academic library associations that are unable to keep up with the hyperinflation of journal prices (i.e., “serials crisis”). The recent public mobilization arises from a growing awareness and discontent towards the unsustainability of journal publishers’ current business paradigms. In brief, for-profit journal publishers continually increase profit margins by charging the public to access the research that they have funded and by charging academic institutions to access the research results that they have produced. Researchers, librarians, and the public are uniting at a grassroots level, demanding a new model for sharing research results. Globally, researchers are boycotting publishing in Elsevier journals because of questionable business practices, and the public is petitioning the US government to mandate openness in publicly funded research results. As our global culture increasingly demands research findings to fuel innovation and social progress, and with technology making web-based electronic publications the norm, we are on the brink of shifting paradigms for sharing scientific knowledge…

Welcome to Open Access!

Simply put, OA is the free release of knowledge to the public who sponsor and benefit from it. This paradigm allows patients and providers to access medical research that informs treatment, allows educators to draw from relevant findings in teaching and learning theory, allows public policy makers and advocates to make scientifically grounded arguments, and allows scientists and the general public to stay abreast of current knowledge across all research disciplines. From an epistemological perspective, OA allows researchers to more readily access and build upon previous knowledge. From an academic career perspective, OA creates broader dissemination and citability of published articles. The only downside (if you can call it that) in moving towards a more open model of knowledge sharing is that publishers will need to adapt their profit models and academia will need to adapt to new technologies and develop new standards for evaluating the prestige of published works. This is similar to the process of adaptation that the record labels and musicians undertook when technology caught up to the recording industry. If we can learn a lesson from this recent history: don’t spend time and energy clinging to dated market conventions and do spend some time gaining an understanding of the emerging system. If you should adapt to emerging norms and remain competitive in open knowledge markets, the upcoming posts will help you to become confident in choosing appropriate venues for publishing your articles and will show you how to share your results beyond conventional publication channels.

Moving Along…

Now that you have some background, it is time to move into applications and provide you with some tools to make the publishing process easier. The next post will talk a little bit about author copyright agreements and provide resources to help you publish your research directly into the public domain (the “OA Gold” model). That will bridge us into discussing the “OA Green” model where authors publicly archive their published works. Finally, we will wrap-up with some practical considerations of OA, assessing article prestige (i.e., impact metrics), and how OA is contributing to new ways of measuring article impact and how that might affect your future academic career.

In the meantime, if you want to do your homework on OA, I recommend starting at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). If you do the Twitter thing, there are always interesting live updates on the #OpenAccess tag, or you can tweet @ColditzJB with questions.

Stay Open,

Jason

Follow Jason on Twitter: @colditzjb

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sindykids/3989867654/

Publishing and teaching can both terrify new academics, often to the point of paralysis. Their mutual support for one another is often frustrated by institutional demands. For example, the traditional workload split for full-time faculty at R1 institutions in the US is: 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. This division and its usual inflexibility highlights the ways that teaching and scholarly production are kept separate and distinct as forms. Yet, by looking at how publishing is teaching and teaching is publishing, we can lessen the anxiety around these activities and begin to notice how they are, in fact, co-constitutive practices. More than that, we can start to think about the open ends of these aspects of our work. The word “publishing” often implies some sort of finality, research that is finished or complete. This misses something vital about academic work.

This article on PhD2Published, “Publishing as Pedagogy” by Jesse Stommel, is both implicitly and explicitly linked to “Pedagogy as Publishing” by Charlotte Frost on Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology. As publishing venues, both PhD2Published and Hybrid Pedagogy, work to build scholarly community by creating open and ongoing conversation.These twinned articles, which were written together in a Google Doc, combine to introduce communities, points of convergence, and to create a collaborative dialogue on publishing and pedagogy from two complementary perspectives.

Since I first started teaching in 2001, I’ve spoken the words almost like a mantra, “my scholarship and teaching are married.” And it isn’t just that the academic writing I do is influenced by the work I do in the classroom, even though I’ve put some version of this statement in nearly all of the 200ish academic job applications I’ve submitted. Here it is, right out of my mouth (er, fingers), in the job letter that led to my recently being hired as an Assistant Professor at Marylhurst University: “My research has considerable influence on my teaching.” To speak frankly, this line is bullshit, something I felt pressured to write by colleagues and in a half-dozen academic job search workshops.

And by “bullshit,” I don’t mean that what I said was false. I mean that the phrasing was disingenuous. Put simply, my research is my teaching. For me, the two practices are inextricable from one another. When I was finishing my PhD, I didn’t “teach to my dissertation” as so many academics recommend. My dissertation was born out of my teaching, out of interactions I had with students and out of my witnessing countless interactions between students.

It would be an oversimplification, though, to say just that my teaching is a source (or even the primary source) for my published writing. I would go even further than this to say that teaching itself has become, for me, my most important act of writing and publishing. There is a way in which I author myself and my work in the classroom, but I also produce countless tangible artifacts in the service of (or as part of) the act of teaching. The syllabi I publish to the web (like this or this) are an example, living documents that evolve over the term (and hopefully even after the term is over).

I will even go so far as to say that my syllabi are peer-reviewed, not only approved by the various department chairs I’ve worked for but also reviewed by the colleagues I share my work with and by the larger scholarly community that use (and sometimes cite) the work I’ve done. The syllabi I create also evolve through careful work with students (who I consider my closest learning community peers).

The scholarly work I produce in collaboration with students doesn’t stop there. I create class projects that have students working closely with each other and with me. In 2011, while teaching multimodal composition at GA Tech (a required course for Freshman), I had classes of 25 students working together to produce a short horror film. One student, Ben Lambeth, chose to continue working on his class’s film after the semester was over, and I worked with him as an assistant editor (not as his teacher but as an artistic collaborator). Here’s a preview for the finished film, Zombie Proof, and a short behind-the-scenes documentary about its creation. At the same time,  I also worked on GA Tech It Gets Better, a documentary film I co-produced with yet another former student, outside any assigned class project.

As I’ve continued to evolve as a scholar and teacher, I’ve become more and more concerned with thinking about ways to make what I do in the classroom and what I do in the safe confines of a word-processing window more public. The impetus for my scholarly work and publishing is to do my pedagogy in much larger and more open spaces. I teach, because I have to, because it’s in my bones. I write, because it allows me to teach more and to teach more people.

One way I’ve worked to bring my teaching and scholarly lives into closer public conversation is to have my CV and Teaching Portfolio exist alongside one another on my personal homepage. I’ve also begun publishing more about pedagogy and my teaching practices, something I’ve formalized through Hybrid Pedagogy. Finally, I force myself to build my scholarly writing out of the work I do in the classroom and to share my scholarly work in the classroom. This is particularly possible when I’ve taught writing, where I am able to work with my students as part of (not just facilitator of) a community of writers. It is students in writing classes I’ve taught, in fact, that I credit for the completion of my dissertation.

It’s important for me, as a teacher and scholar, to be open not just with my intellectual and pedagogical products but even more so with my academic process and pedagogical practices. This intention has been the driving force behind my most recent scholarly writing / pedagogical project, Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology. An open-access networked journal, Hybrid Pedagogy creates meaningful connections between discussions of critical pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and online pedagogy. The journal also invites its audience to participate in (and be an integral part of) the peer review process, and thus makes transparent (and interrogates) academic publishing practices. In this way, Hybrid Pedagogy is a journal about pedagogy while also taking a pedagogical approach to publishing, by allowing its readers to peek behind the proverbial curtain of the publishing machine. In the wake of rapid changes in publishing, education, and technology, this kind of openness and transparency is becoming less and less an experimental indulgence and more and more a brunt necessity.