A Commentary on Academic Publishing: Insider Tips

LOGOS: Journal of the World Book Community, 2007

Publishing Research Quarterly, 2010

This book lives up to its promise of giving useful insights to authors who are deciding the best form of publication for their work and for their careers. Learning to appraise one's dissertation in terms of the interests of a larger audience, knowing when to excerpt and publish in collections or journals, understanding the issues of copyright and fair use, deciding on when to self-publish-all this is helpful. Likewise, the editorial process, from acquisition to press-ready materials, is covered thoroughly, if awkwardly. Variations on themes are revealed and discussed. The aptly titled subchapter, ''What does your publisher want?'' orients the reader to the place of academic publishing in the larger publishing world. Yet, like a mine salted with a few gems, this book tantalizes without fully delivering. This is unfortunate. The subject deserves a more useful exposition, and the authors clearly intended better (they tell us so in an odd apology midway through the text). Scholars faced with the apparently arcane procedures of publishing are often frustrated, finding themselves in need of guidance and succor. Promotion and tenure depend upon publication, and competition for the attention of editors in one's field increases daily. Yet the process is simple and simply explained. Gerald Jackson and Marie Lenstrup, both publishing professionals, make it seem more difficult than it really is. Authors must understand their audience, and firstly it will be the acquiring editor who serves as proxy for potential readers, including our reviewing peers. Most editors are accustomed to receiving proposals that are utterly unsuited for their presses. They are genuinely ecstatic when a proposal fits. Even then, the distance between initial presentation and publishable work may be great.

2005

papers.ssrn.com

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Publishing Research Quarterly, 2007

The match between contemporary book publishing and academia would appear at first glance to be the most natural of alliances. No other subgroup of the general population is as likely to deal with publishers in the capacity of author, contributor or reviewer, and no other profession would appear as predisposed to bibliophily as the humanities academic. In the twenty-first-century research-intensive university, publishing quantum is the indisputable currency of hiring, promotion and grant decision-making, with books enshrined as the highest accredited research output for humanities scholars. Yet, until recent years, publishing has constituted the academy's medium for research dissemination rather than its explicit subject, 1 Over the last fifteen years or so, publishing courses have begun to multiply internationally in the post-secondary education sector, appearing first in the guise of vocationally-oriented certificate and diploma courses in institutes of further education, and only more recently (and tentatively) infiltrating the postgraduate coursework and doctoral programmes of internationally recognised research universities. 2 The research quantum imperatives of such institutions have combined with the pre-eminence of theory in the humanities over the last decades to exert pressure upon publishing studies. The field is currently experiencing a sense of urgency arising from both scholars and their institutions to reconfigure itself as a critical--rather than merely a descriptive or vocational--field) As so recent an entrant to academic environments on any terms, contemporary publishing studies may justifiably find this new demand that it generate a coherent theoretical paradigm and research methodology forthwith somewhat confronting.

American Journal of Sociology, 1995

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Social Science Research Network, 2023

Context and Purpose: The increased focus of higher education institutions on research andlatelyon societal challenges and real-world problems, the importance of academic rankings for financing and international competitions and the research and publication oriented professional advancement criteria transformed academics into publishing hunters. The world of academic publishing is wild and dangerous, due to the massification of research. Aims and objectives are often confounded with means, quantity and quality (already difficult to assess) don't always walk together, stakeholders have conflicting interests, the old linear models of publishing are replaced with intricate looped and interconnected ones, leading to academics publishing more and achieving lessespecially from a societal perspective. The aim of the present study is to summarize the main challenges of the publishing process, together with the pathways chosen by academics to overcome these difficulties. Design/methodology: A meta-analysis of recent studies on academic publishing was performed, together with a nethnographic exploratory approach on publishing patterns in economics and business; informal talks with academics from business and economics fields from several Eastern EU higher education institutions were used, as well. Findings: The inventory of challenges includes individual factors (personality and individual morale, goals, knowledge and status, preferences and habits), institutional factors (university and strategy level), social structures and infrastructural level factors (open access, technological disruptive innovations, new social contract for research, preprints), as well as professional culture type of factors (peer-review issues and various biases, alternative research assessment methods, predatory journals, predatory informal rules). Several pathways chosen by academics were observed, leading to hypotheses formulation for future research. Limitations: The study is exploratory, based on a conventional sample of academics for the empirical part and has an emic, potentially subjective approach. Originality/value: The study touches a delicate and controversial subjectacademic publishingand brings together both positive and negative aspects for existent pathways, offering a ground for future research.

Research and our experience as writing instructors tell us that effective writers evaluate their own writing by drawing on two main resources---content knowledge and discourse knowledge. Graduate students are generally quite confident in the former and often unaware of the subtle but powerful role of the latter, which includes a knowledge of audiences and metalinguistic knowledge about writing genres, especially specialized disciplinary ones. Because we recognize the increased pressure on graduate students to publish (and therefore, implicitly, to be aware of both content and discourse), we have designed and taught a graduate-level course in Academic Publishing. In our paper we will discuss the theoretical underpinnings for the course, the course contents, and the evaluation of the course by the first group of graduate students who enrolled in it in the fall of 2000. We will also discuss lessons learned and improvements we hope to make in subsequent iterations of the course.

2017

A Pocket Guide To Academic Publishing is a short handbook on the basics of how to publish your research and what to pay attention to. It is written for early career researchers and draws from the author’s experience as a researcher himself as well as his role as Editor of an academic journal. While mostly making use of issues related to social sciences, this book is also of interest to natural scientists as it provides deep insights into how to make your life as an up and coming academic author easier.