Scholarly Communication

Listen to this interview of Clemens Dubslaff, Assistant Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. We talk about the cultural dividing lines between researcher communities, and of course, how to cross those lines into whole new areas of research.

Clemens Dubslaff : "One particular thing I would like to see eXplainable Formal Methods (XFM) do is to revisit the many papers from the early 1990s and so on — papers from logic and programming, where we have many things ready already. I mean, these papers have, in many cases, already discussed explanation, even from the standpoint of philosophy. So, these...

Listen to this interview of Javier Cámara, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Málaga, Spain. We talk about the paper Cámara et al. Quantitative Verification-Aided Machine Learning: A Tandem Approach for Architecting Self-Adaptive IoT Systems.

Javier Cámara : "Yes, it had been an option, at one point during revising, to have the preliminaries up in the paper before the overview of our approach was presented. However, we felt that presenting the preliminaries after we have presented the bird's eye view of our approach was going to provide our reader with a rationale for why e...

Listen to this interview of Rick Rabiser, Professor for Software Engineering in Cyber-Physical Systems, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. We talk about the relationship of researchers in academia and industry, focusing particularly on the community researching into systems and software product lines (SPL).

Rick Rabiser : "When you write your paper, imagine you're explaining what you want to write down to someone in a meeting room on the whiteboard. Because this is what we do in research a lot — we try to communicate our ideas to our peers and collaborators, and we very often just do this on a...

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about publishing but were too afraid to ask.

Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book (Catapult, 2020) by Courtney Maum is a funny, candid guide about breaking into the marketplace. Cutting through the noise, dispelling rumors and remaining positive, Before and After the Book Deal answers questions like: are MFA programs worth the time and money, and how do people actually sit down and finish a novel? Should you expect a good advance, and why aren’t your friends saying anyth...

Listen to this interview of Marcos Kalinowski, Professor, Department of Informatics, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and also, of Daniel Mendez, Full Professor, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and head of Requirements Engineering at fortiss, Germany. We talk about starting a new track at a prestigious journal, with all the challenges and triumphs such a venture brings.

Daniel Mendez : "The reviewing and publishing of research is also a social process. And I know that Marcos and me edit looking for reasons to accept, instead of to reject a submission. And we are privileged to...

Listen to this interview of Dietmar Pfahl, Professor of Software Engineering, University of Tartu, Estonia. We talk about the interconnections between research and the communication of the research.

Dietmar Pfahl : "Reviewers need to be told — and told plainly — the actual relevance of the study. That is why authors will publish better when they really understand how, say, a new approach or technology or method, first off, changes how software is being done, but also how those changes open up new questions about, let's say, the quality of software. So, these authors understand all this, and crucially as well, the...

Listen to this interview of Junhua Ding, Professor of Data Science in the Department of Information Science, University of North Texas. We talk about the part that creativity has to play in the publication of impactful research.

Junhua Ding : "Engineering research is different from the sort of pure formal sciences of, say, mathematics, where there may be a theorem to be proved, and then researchers attempt to prove it, and in the process, they provide new methods or directions or even solve the problem. But in software engineering — well, of course, we can work formally, a bit lik...

Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to address growing numbers of high-needs patrons experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, mental health problems, substance abuse, and poverty-related needs, this book will help librarians build or contribute to library services that will best address patrons' psychosocial needs. Beth Wahler and Sarah C. Johnson, experienced in both library and social work, begin by providing an overview of p...

Listen to this interview of Bram Adams, Professor at the School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada. We talk about current developments in peer review, as it is practised in software engineering research.

Bram Adams : "As an editor, one thing you want to see in a review is a summary that clearly says, 'Okay, my overall scoring is this, and my reasons for that are (a) these few negative points but also (b) these few positive points.' But that, in my experience, is missing from reviews much more often than before. Now it is common for editors...

Have you been told your draft isn’t ready yet, because you still need to find your argument? We have all gotten that feedback at some point. But what we haven’t been told is how to find our argument. Today we return to The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023), with Dr. Katelyn E. Knox and Dr. Allison Van Deventer, to learn how to find and assemble an argument. Whether you are writing an article, dissertation or a book, this episode is the skills workshop you need!

Our guest is: Dr...

Often assumed to be a self-evident good, Open Access has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. it has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation culture and practices.

Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic, and Participatory Openness (Taylor & Francis, 2024) engages with these issues, recognizing that the global Open Access debate is now not just about publishing and business models or academic reward structures, but also about what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge, how we know and who gets to say. t...

Listen to this interview of Anthony Anjorin, a lead software architect at Zühlke Engineering, Germany; and also, Hsiang-Shang Ko, assistant research fellow, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. We talk about their paper Benchmarking bidirectional transformations: Theory, implementation, application, and assessment (Software and Systems Modeling).

Anthony Anjorin : "I really believe in the method called peer instruction in teaching. The basic idea is that experts, who deal with focused topics over long periods, are not necessarily best suited to explaining a thing simply and in just a few sentences. So, in this paper, we took this metho...

With My Gothic Dissertation, University of Iowa PhD Anna M. Williams has transformed the dreary diss into a This American Life-style podcast. Williams’ witty writing and compelling audio production allow her the double move of making a critical intervention into the study of the gothic novel, while also making an entertaining and thought-provoking series for non-experts. Williams uses famed novels by authors such as Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelly as an entry point for a critique of graduate school itself—a Medieval institution of shadowy corners, arcane rituals, and a feudal power structure. The result is a first-of-its-kind work that serv...

Predatory publishing is a complex problem that harms a broad array of stakeholders and concerns across the scholarly communications system. It shines a light on the inadequacies of scholarly assessment and related rewards systems, contributes to the marginalization of scholarship from less developed countries, and negatively impacts the acceptance of open access. To fix what is broken in scholarly communications, academic librarians must act as both teachers and advocates and partner with other stakeholders who have the agency to change how scholarship is produced, assessed, and rewarded. 

Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications (ACRL, 2024) by Monica Berger is...

Listen to this interview of Istvan David, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computing and Software, Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University, Canada. We talk about his coauthored paper "Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering – A Systematic Survey of Practices and Needs in Industry" (JSS 2023).

Istvan David : "When I read a paper, I like to have a visual excerpt of it — somewhere I can go to find the key messages. This is immediately what I look for, because we all use adaptive reading depth, right — that is, at first, we skim to look for the key visual elements, to find a...

How do you turn a dissertation into a book?

Today’s book is: The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023), by Dr. Katelyn E. Knox and Dr. Allison Van Deventer, which offers a series of manageable, concrete steps and exercises to help you revise your academic manuscript into a book. The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook offers clear examples, as well as targeted exercises, checklists and prompts to take all the guesswork out of writing a book. You will learn how to clarify your book’s core priorities, pinpoint your organizing principle, polish your narr...

What would it be like if scholars presented their research in sound rather than in print? Better yet, what if we could hear them in the act of their research and analysis, pulling different historical sounds from the archives and rubbing them against one another in an audio editor?

In today’s episode, we get to find out what such an innovative scholarly audiobook would sound like–because our guest has created the first one! Jacob Smith‘s ESC (University of Michigan Press) is a fascinating sonic exploration of postwar radio drama and contemporary sound art, as well as a...

Listen to this interview of Istvan David, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computing and Software, Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University, Canada; and, Houari Sahraoui, Full Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Canada. We talk about their coauthored paper "Digital Twins for Cyber-Biophysical Systems: Challenges and Lessons Learned" (MODELS 2023).

Istvan David : "Making Figure 1, and also all of the text that depends on it——this was one of the hardest parts about writing this paper. I remember, in the very first draft, we had another layer there of abstraction, but we saw that...

Listen to this interview of Görkem Giray, IT executive and part-time educator in the domain of computer science. We talk about his paper A software engineering perspective on engineering machine learning systems: "A software engineering perspective on engineering machine learning systems: State of the art and challenges" (JSS 2021).

Görkem Giray : "By the time I received back the reviews for this paper, I had been working on the topic for over a year. So, that's why, like so many researchers deep inside their topics, I had started to become blind. Therefore, it helps immensely to have out...

Listen to this interview of Redowan Mahmud, Lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Curtin University, Australia; and, Mohammad Goudarzi, Lecturer at Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. We talk about their paper iFogSim simulator for mobility, clustering, and microservice management in edge and fog computing environments (JSS 2022).

Redowan Mahmud : "The thing is, when a researcher starts writing, they start from their own perspective. So, in our case, we wrote our manuscript from the perspective of, 'These things are right, and those things are the limitations.' But in the review process, we...

Listen to this interview of Darja Smite, Professor of Software Engineering at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and also research scientist at SINTEF; and, Jarle Hildrum, Director, Deloitte Consulting, Norway; and also, Daniel Mendez, Professor of Software Engineering at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and as well, Senior Scientist heading the research division Requirements Engineering at fortiss. We talk about their paper Work-from-home is here to stay: Call for flexibility in post-pandemic work policies (JSS 2023).

Daniel Mendez : "Two key takeaways from our collective experience here are, No.1, figures don't need to be absolute — so, we should really focus...

In the fourth episode of Publish My Book, Avi breaks down the core components of a winning book proposal and identifies key questions you should be able to answer to effectively convey to your publisher why they should consider your manuscript. Avi shares why it is worth your time to introduce yourself to your target acquisitions editor in advance. He then takes a deep dive into the book proposal itself by addressing how you can craft each proposal section as strongly as possible. From the table of contents and proposal abstract to identifying which sample chapter to share and ho...

In the third episode of Publish My Book, Avi dives into one of the most important stages of the publishing journey: writing the book proposal. Avi poses a fundamental first step you should take before putting pen to paper - conducting a thorough market analysis of your research. By identifying key criteria in your market analysis, you will be equipped to more effectively present your target acquisitions editor with a convincing proposal that not only highlights your research’s impact but also why it can sell and how it can contribute to their existing portfolio.

Related resources:

In the second episode of Publish My Book, Avi Staiman explores how to determine if your research is best suited for a commercial or university press and why the distinction between the two categories is key to increasing your chances of publication success. Avi shares some important differences between these two publishing types by posing a series of critical questions aspiring authors should be able to answer about their research and publishing aspirations, including: Do I want to see my published book at an airport? By gaining an understanding of important terminology, including ‘trade publishing’, authors can continue to lay do...

In the first episode of Publish My Book, Avi Staiman offers strategic tips for identifying your target publisher, including: understanding where other titles in your research field have been published and how your research angle fits into existing series, using platforms such as the Association of University Presses and New Books Network to your advantage and introducing yourself to relevant editors to inquire about potential publishing fits.

Related resources:

Association of University Presses find a publisher matrix

Identify which New Books Network channel(s) most closely relates to your research field

...

Listen to this interview of Roberto Verdecchia, Assistant Professor at the Software Technologies Laboratory, University of Florence, Italy. We talk about his coauthored paper Building and evaluating a theory of architectural technical debt in software-intensive systems (JSS 2021).

Roberto Verdecchia : "In results sections, I feel it's rather helpful if, when writing, you sort of find a systematicity in the presentation. So, if you look at our paper here, each subsection has the exact same structure, where we start by describing a category first in general — you know, giving an overview of the category — then we cross-reference to a figure...

Listen to this interview of Marcos Kalinowski, Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We talk about his coauthored papers; When to update systematic literature reviews in software engineering (JSS 2020); Guidelines for the search strategy to update systematic literature reviews in software engineering (IST 2020); and Successful combination of database search and snowballing for identification of primary studies in systematic literature studies (IST 2022).

Marcos Kalinowski : "Genuine collaborations, ones which actually come out the context of ideas — even by coincidence and just because the work shared a common ground — this is the sor...

Listen to this interview of Tushar Sharma, assistant professor at Dalhousie University, Canada. We talk about his paper Code Smell Detection by Deep Direct-Learning and Transfer Learning (JSS 2021).

Tushar Sharma : "For sure, it is crucial that the authors provide information about what they did, but also they need to provide enough information about this implementation so that another researcher can use the details to go and implement the approach themselves. And critical here is not just the level of detail, but also the presentation of that detail. Because if it's not well structured, the risk is that a res...

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Cyril Heude (Sciences Po) to talk about all things metadata. What is metadata? How can researchers use metadata to help others discover their research? Cyril answers all these questions and more.

Cyril’s main activities as a data librarian consist of Data Management Plan advising and writing, administrating the institutional repository (data.sciencespo), training students and researchers, writing online guides, conducting events and workshops with laboratories staff, archivists and the data protection officer and participating in a d...

Listen to this interview of José Antonio Hernández López, postdoc in the Department of Computer and Information Science, Software and Systems, Linköping University, Sweden; and Jesús Sánchez Cuadrado, Professor, Department of Computing and Systems, Universidad de Murcia, Spain. We talk about their paper Word Embeddings for Model-Driven Engineering (MoDELS 2023).

Jesús Sánchez Cuadrado : "Actually, there are two target readers for our paper. One is anyone interested in the results because they are researchers who will try to improve what we have done or because they want to build better models. So, of course...

Listen to Episode No. 10 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and as well, John Jones, assistant professor at SUNY Cortland. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is Image as Form in a Transpositional Grammar: The Example of Photography.

Bill Cope : "Every time a new medium turns up, it does new things. So, in the case of photography — our example medium...

Listen to this interview of Courtney Miller, PhD student in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about her paper "Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions (ICSE 2022).

Courtney Miller : "One of the things I really enjoyed after publication was the interest of other communities in our work. I mean, just the summer after we published, I went and gave a talk at the Linux Open Source conference, and it was really great to learn that — there's a lot of duality of thought in this world, but there's a lot of pe...

Listen to this interview of Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science (Boston University) and Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science (Aspen Institute). We talk about his book The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019).

Lee McIntyre : "Scientists have an enormous role — and I'll even say, a responsibility, to make sure that their work does not end just with the discoveries, but extends, as well, to include the communication of those discoveries to their scientific colleagues and beyond them, to society more broadly. And I think...

The Comic Book as Research Tool contributes to a growing body of work celebrating the visual methods and tools that aid knowledge transfer and welcome new audiences to social science research. Visual research methodological milestones highlight a trajectory towards the adoption of more creative and artistic media. As such, the book is dedicated to exploring the creative potential of the comic book medium, and how it can assist the production and communication of scientific knowledge. The cultural blueprint of the comic book is examined, and the unique structure and grammar of the form deconstructed and adapted for research support. A...

The Little Guide to Getting Your Book Published (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) takes prospective authors from idea to draft manuscript to published book in a step-by-step process. The book advises writers on creating a book proposal and then how to find a publisher or agent. Whether a trade non-fiction work, monograph, or textbook, the book is guaranteed to motivate and inspire you to get started on the road to publishing today. 

Written by a book professional with 30 years of experience on hundreds of publishing projects, The Little Guide will help you decide which route is right for you: a big p...

Listen to this interview of Rajkumar Buyya, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, University of Melbourne, and Director there too of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Labs. We talk about collaborating within a discipline, collaborating across multiple disciplines, and also collaborating with industry partners.

Rajkumar Buyya : "I consider the research coming from my group not just as the publication of a plain paper, but also as what we call paper++ and by that we mean, a paper along with something extra. So, we publish a foundation paper but we also release our software via Open Source in the comm...

Listen to this interview of Claire Le Goues, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about writing to present versus writing to express.

Claire Le Goues : "Really, the very best natural writers that I've ever had in my group were not native English speakers. Because writing a good paper is very much not about idiomatic or expressive language. I mean, sure, there is a point at which grammar becomes prohibitive to understanding. I mean, it needs to be correct enough that we can understand it without ambiguity. But good writing — it's ab...

Today’s book is: Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012), by Helen Sword, which dispels the myth that you only get published by writing wordy, impersonal prose. Dr. Sword reveals that journal editors and readers alike welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Her analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a range of fields documents the startling gap between how academics describe good writing, and the prose they actually produce. Too few scholars were taught how to create accessible prose, a problem Stylish Academic Writing addresses by showcasing works from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences writte...

Listen to this interview of Diomidis Spinellis, Professor of Software Engineering, Athens University of Economics and Business, and as well Professor of Software Analytics, Delft University of Technology. We talk a lot about audience — especially how to reach them.

Diomidis Spinellis: "They say that traveling enriches the mind. I think that the same applies to working outside your own narrow discipline. You get to know different ways of conceptualizing problems, of attacking them — you witness the value in other methods or entire other structures for building up knowledge — and also, you may learn to appreciate things you've come to...

Using techniques garnered from startups and quickly evolving technology companies, in The Experimental Library: A Guide to Taking Risks, Failing Forward, and Creating Change (ALA Editions, 2023), Cathryn Copper explores how information professionals can use experimentation to make evidence-based decisions and advance innovative initiatives.

The last five years have demonstrated that sticking with the status quo is not an option; instead, as the experiences of many libraries have shown, those that experiment are better positioned to adapt to rapidly changing environments and evolving user needs and behaviors. The Experimental Library supports librarians as they draw from new approaches and t...

Listen to this interview of Emma Frances Bloomfield, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We talk about her novel analytical tool for helping you narrativize research! Bloomfield's new book is Science V. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators (U California Press, 2024)

Emma Bloomfield : "I'd love to see more direct incorporation of communication studies and communication skills into the science curriculum but also into a researcher's overall training as well. Because I think that researchers can be very good at communication, but unfortunately they're not specifically trained in it and they're not reall...

Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a specific inspiration: an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, a technological innovation—and from that starting point explores the object of the title, gleaning a singular lesson or multiple lessons along the way.

This interview discusses the series with one of the two editors of the series, Dr. Christopher Schaberg. Featuring contributions from writers, artists, scholars, journalists, and others, the emphasis throughout is lucid writing, imagination, and brevity. Object Lessons paints a pictu...

Listen to this interview of Miroslaw Staron, Editor-in-Chief of Information and Software Technology and Professor in the Software engineering division, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg. We talk about the collaboration and mentorship which publishing is meant to be.

Miroslaw Staron : "The communication through academic publication is of course important to every researcher's CV. But really, it's much more important for science overall. If we cannot communicate our ideas, then we cannot make those ideas available to the scrutiny of others. That is, if we are unable to show what we have actually worked on and which kind of meth...

Listen to this interview of Brandon Brown, Professor of Physics at the University of San Francisco. We talk about factoring in both message-sender and -receiver to your writing for STEM. Brown is the author of Sharing Our Science: How to Write and Speak STEM (MIT Press, 2023).

Brandon Brown : "I've seen so many different scientists and communicators, including Nobel Laureates, all the way to grad students who are struggling with the English — and it's just apparent to me that some people do have a much better sense of audience. And to my mind, that level of compassion, even perha...

Listen to Episode No.9 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois; and joining us, as well, is James Gee, Regents Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the generativity of machines.

James Gee : "I fundamentally believe that humans are a screwed-up species — one of the few specie...

Listen to this interview of Emad Shihab, Full Professor and Concordia Research Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, Canada. We talk about authenticating learning and unlocking potential in people — the true ways to innovate research.

Emad Shihab : "To build a vision, I always say, try to make it ambitious and then break it down. So, just saying, 'I want to change the world,' I mean, it's a great vision but the truth is, nobody knows what their part in that is supposed to be — how can they contribute to you c...

Listen to this interview of Rebekka Burkholz, faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. We talk about the composition of research groups and of research papers.

Rebekka Burkholz : "I have the feeling that this meta-reading becomes more important as a person's career progresses. Because early on, a researcher is typically very focused on the details of each paper and they try to understand what this method does and so on — and of course, researchers need to begin that way, really spending the time to attain to expertise in a particular focus. But with time, as a r...

Learn about the fascinating Ethno-Indology series now published at Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing which offers inexpensive peer-reviewed Open Access and Print-on-Demand publishing for scholars from all over the world.

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Are you facing writing roadblocks? There are many guides on how to make your writing match academic standards, so why aren’t there any on how to make yourself actually write? How can you get to PhDone if life keeps getting in the way? Can you get there if you are a care-giver? Facing illness, or work responsibilities? Dealing with anxiety? In the midst of a personal or a global crisis? What practical advice exists to help you get to PhDone in the real world? Scholar and author Dr. Briana Barner joins us to share the practical approaches that work...

Listen to this interview of Paris Avgeriou, Editor in Chief of the Journal of Systems and Software (together with David Shepherd). Paris is Full Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. We talk about peer review, journal editing, and scientific writing.

Paris Avgeriou : "I actually think that authoring and reviewing are very close to one another, because when you review a paper, you actually start thinking how to improve it — what the strong points are and also what the points for improvement are. So, by getting into this sort of mentality — that is, by noti...

Listen to Episode No.8 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. Today we welcome, too, Duane Searsmith, E-Learning Technical Specialist, Information Trust Institute, also at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the meaning of generation by machine.

It's stunning what Generative AI can produce, but what exactly is it there that is being produced? What does i...

Listen to this interview of David Shepherd, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Systems and Software (together with Paris Avgeriou). David Shepherd is Associate Professor at Louisiana State University. We talk about writing well, researching well, reviewing well.

David Shepherd : "No, with the manuscripts we screen and review and publish, it's not about language. So, we know that most scientists are writing in not their first language. And for us, it's just not about that. I mean, some of the best papers I've read even have some kind of weird phrases that make me think that maybe the...

Authorship represents a new area of policy-related work within higher education research administration, funding agencies, and scholarly journal publishing. Developing Authorship and Copyright Ownership Policies: Best Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) by Allyson Mower offers the unique aspect of combining details on copyright ownership as well as authorship into a single volume on best practices for administrators, journal publishers, research managers, and policy drafters within and outside of higher education. Discover more about the definition of 'author'--from data gatherer to writer--to inform policy development while understanding the interconnected relationships between authorship, copyright ownership, and scholarly communication. This book will also demonstrate ho...

Listen to Episode No.7 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is This is what language means.

It is text, and it is speech — but is not the two wholly as one. It is speech, and then it is text, or it is the other way around — but the two cannot be one, because between...

The Discourse of Scholarly Communication (Lexington Books, 2023) examines the place and purpose of modern scholarship and its dialectical relationship with the ethos of Enlightenment. Patrick Gamsby argues that while Enlightenment/enlightenment is often used in the mottos of numerous academic institutions, its historical, social, and philosophical elements are largely obscured. Using a theoretical lens, Gamsby revisits the ideals of the Enlightenment alongside the often-contradictory issues of disciplinary boundaries, access to research, academic labor in the production of scholarship (author, peer reviewer, editor, and translator), the interrelationship of form and content (lectures, textbooks, books, and essays), and the stewardship of s...

Listen to this interview of Christopher Reddy, environmental chemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. We talk about his book Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide (Routledge Earthscan 2023).

Christopher Reddy : "Communication definitely teaches us scientists things that we hadn't knows or appreciated, even in our own research. I mean, when you have to rethink about how and why you're doing something and what the outcomes mean, that is a series of mental gymnastics. And when we do gymnastics, we become fitter. We increase our longevity and have a richer and ful...

Listen to this interview of Prem Devanbu, Distinguished Research Professor in Computer Science, University of California, Davis. We talk about using cross-disciplinary pollination to interrogate ideas and also oneself.

Prem Devanbu : "Science is a social process. You put some idea out, and other people try to figure out if it makes sense or if you've made some mistake with it, or whether you've asked the right question and gotten the right answer. And then you go from there."

Here's the paper by Prem and coauthors which won the 2022 award Most Influential Paper at the International Co...

Listen to this interview of Katherine Firth, academic at, Australia. We talk about the necessary trouble that people have when they write new knowledge. We also talk about the unnecessary trouble that people have when they imagine that this first sort doesn't exist. Firth is the co-author of How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide (Open UP, 2018).

Katherine Firth : "Most people write to the computer screen. They write perhaps to their supervisor. But they don't actually have a concept of an audience beyond that, or their concept is just so huge and diffuse — Everybody in th...

Listen to this interview of Christian Kästner, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about reading papers, and how to do that while balancing speed and accuracy, and we talk about writing papers, and how to do that for a reader going fast and moving with purpose.

Christian Kästner: "I don't want my reader to be doing a lot of work synthesizing details across a paper of mine. I want to make it obvious what the key idea is. And honestly, I think we all have to, because otherwise, for example, the r...

Listen to Episode No.6 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and today as well, Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is How the hypothesis means.

What does out knowledge mean after it’s been hypothesized and tested? And what can we claim to know by having tested...

Listen to this interview of Natalie Aviles, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia. We talk about how organizations shape people, and how people shape science.

Natalie Aviles : "I think, in general, the more self-conscious that scientists can be about what motivates them, about what makes them happy, about what drives them — the more, then, they can try to imagine a future that satisfies not only their intellectual curiosity but helps them navigate, too, the very sort of prosaic conditions that they find themselves in on a day-to-day basis."

Works referred to in the interview:

Listen to this interview of Wouter Lueks, faculty at the CISPA Helmhotz Center for Information Security. We talk about getting into the reviewer's mindset, and also about research collaboration outside the walls of the university.

Wouter Lueks : "For first ideas, you don't need writing. You can stand in front of the whiteboard, make a couple of drawings, chat with people — and it's very engaging. But then at some point you somehow need to deal with all the nitty-gritty details — and all the nitty-gritty details typically means that your initial idea was wrong. And the only way that I have...

Listen to Episode No.5 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and also Gang Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is what decision means.

Decision is no simple matter, whether the decider in question is human or machine. In a sense, both are black boxes to us, and yet the...

Academic Librarianship: Anchoring the Profession in Contribution, Scholarship, and Service (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) by Marcy Simons is needed now as a response to how much has changed in academic librarianship as a profession (from the smallest academic libraries to large research libraries).

Much has been written recently about the status of the profession of librarianship, i.e. whether or not it should still be considered a “profession,” are the same credentials still required/enough, should things change dramatically in SLIS programs in response to the new normal, and what is the impact of hiring PhD’s in disciplines outside...

Can we have science without freedom of speech? Dr. Scott Atlas's professional work and personal experiences bring to light an important and often under-discussed element of speech: freedom of speech in the hard sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a host of new questions and concerns surrounding our medical system and government health agencies: as Special Advisor to the President and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from July to December 2020, Dr. Atlas was at the forefront of such debates. In this conversation, he discusses the importance of debate not only to science itself but also...

Listen to Episode No.4 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is whether A.I. can mean.

The short answer is yes, A.I. can mean... whatever we make it mean.

For instance, ChatGPT does has access to text on certain kinds of subject matter, like, for example, the assembly of explosives or s...

Listen to this interview of Rebecca Roache, coach and podcaster, and also Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. We talk about the application of philosophy to the problems faced by every academic every day.

Rebecca Roache : "I'd say that, for many of us, we got into our particular line of research because we were interested in and energized by the topics that we were researching. But at some point along the way, we started caring too much about the measurable outputs. So, we stopped caring about just being interested and drawn in to a...

Listen to this interview of Cristiano Matricardi, Senior Editor at Nature Communications. We talk about just how closely tied are the research and the communication of the research.

Cristiano Matricardi : "From my perspective, that is, as a professional editor, as someone who reads above 500 new submissions a year plus all the papers for due diligence — from my perspective, I see that too many of the submissions are trying to create good narratives to sell the work better — which is okay, sure, but we need to focus on results, and we need to ask just: 'What do you want...

Listen to this interview of Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière, co-authors of Equity for Women in Science: Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Advancement (Harvard UP, 2023). Cassidy is Professor and Tom and Marie Patton School Chair in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Vincent is Professor of Information Science at Université de Montréal, where he also serves as Associate Vice-President of Planning and Communications. He is Scientific Director of the Érudit journal platform and Associate Scientific Director of the Observatoire des Sciences et des Te...

Editor Abigail Bainbridge and contributing author Sonja Schwoll join this discussion of Conservation of Books (Routledge 2023), the highly anticipated reference work on global book structures and their conservation.

Offering the first modern, comprehensive overview on this subject, this volume takes an international approach. Written by over 70 specialists in conservation and conservation science based in 19 countries, its 26 chapters cover traditional book structures from around the world, the materials from which they are made and how they degrade, and how to preserve and conserve them. It also examines the theoretical underpinnings of conservation: what and how to treat, and th...

Privacy is not dead: Students care deeply about their privacy and the rights it safeguards. They need a way to articulate their concerns and guidance on how to act within the complexity of our current information ecosystem and culture of surveillance capitalism.

Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2023) edited by Sarah Hartman-Caverly and Alexandria Chisholm, can help you teach privacy literacy, evolve the privacy practices at your institution, and re-center the individuals behind the data and the ethics behind library work. Divided into four sections: What is P...

Listen to Episode No.3 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and as well, Kit Nicholls, who is Director of the Cooper Union's Center for Writing and Learning. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is Learning happens where there's meaning.

Bill Cope : "At root, what we're talking about in this conversation is some very old values. We wouldn't disagree much with...

Listen to this interview of John Bond, founder and publishing consultant of Riverwinds Consulting. We talk about the breadth of services and resources now on offer to publishing scientists — while the industry only grows broader and broader.

John Bond : "The one thing I would say helps specifically the middle-tier author (who'll, by the way, be most reluctant to try this) is this: Feel really comfortable sharing your early work on a more frequent and a wider basis. Because these authors tend to be quite shy about sharing work until they themselves think that it's absolutely perfect. And if...

Listen to Episode No.2 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about TMC — Too Much Communication.

In the 2000s, people complained about the demand to know more stuff. Not today.

It's amazing if you stop to think — if you can find the peace to stop for anything — but such a short time ago, media were about information. Now it's just...

Chris Hart, Director of Sales and Marketing, and Kim Walker, Director of Trade Publishing at Manchester University Press join Avi to discuss how MUP and other university publishers have changed their model over the last decade and put a major focus on trade publishing over the classic niche academic monograph. We also discuss how being the only academic publisher in Northern England forms a big part of the identity and content published by the press.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future?

In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary significance. Baillot marshals her considerable expertise in the field of digital humanities to establish a philological overview of the changing boundaries of ‘access’ to literary heritage over centuries, deconstructing the western tradition of archiving and ho...

Listen to this interview of Yang Zhang, faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. We talk about the centrality of text to the research process.

Yang Zhang : "Nowadays, especially when I talk with my students, you know, when I help them write papers, I can sorta estimate how many days or hours they'll need to finish a specific part of that paper. And if a student doesn't quite keep to that timeline, then I know I should check in with them to ask where they've gotten stuck and why. And this sort of ability is a...

Listen to Episode No.1 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about what meaning actually is.

Meaning is form, and meaning is function. Meaning is made, for example, when a scientist sees the image of a celestial object which till that very moment has been unseen by human eye. But meaning is also made by the novelist who just narrates thi...

In Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (MIT Press, 2016; paperback edition, 2023), Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not traditionally considered as archival. Archives now consist of not only documents and sites but also artworks, installations, museums, social media platforms, and mediated and mixed reality environments. Giannachi tracks the evolution of these diverse archival practices across the centuries.

Arc...

Listen to this interview of Dr. Miranda Vinay, full-time editor at Communications Engineering (a Nature Portfolio journal) and also currently Locum Associate Editor for electronics, photonics, devices, 2D materials, and applied physics at Nature. We talk about planning before writing, because it's the surest way to structure the arguments for the value of your research.

interviewer : "And you know, one of the main things that I think that gets missed in research training is just that, logical argumentation. I mean, one reason is probably that most people focus in on the language. They're thinking, 'Science is in English...

In this interview, we talk with Stefan Tanaka, professor emeritus of UCSD and a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993) and New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and his most recent book is History Without Chronology (Lever Press, 2019) which we discuss here! The host, Sarah Kearns, was introduced to Tanaka's work at a Digital History and Theory Conference and became very interested in becoming a "mystic" of scholarly communications and how narrative and comic books could facilitate a different understanding of history and time. The 1884 project is here. 

University Press Week 2023 will provide an opportunity for presses and their supporters to shout to the rooftops about the value of the essential work of university presses: giving voice to the scholarship and ideas that shape conversations around the world. Through a variety of publications and platforms, university presses and their authors cultivate and amplify a diverse, inclusive, and exhilarating range of research and concepts.

For a complete list of UP Week events, see here

For the gallery of 103 publications, see here

For the gallery as listed on Bookshop.org with buy buttons ne...

Listen to this interview of Konrad Rieck, Professor of Computer Science at Technische Universitat Berlin. We talk about enthusiasm in research and about researching with enthusiasm.

Konrad Rieck : "Personally, and as well for my research group, I can say that we try not to lose fun in the whole thing. Because, when a person decides to go for a PhD or for a master's, often there's something inside the person — they just really like the topic. For example, I really love computers. It's not that I do this to make money. Really, it's something personal. And it's fun...

Kicking off our new monthly series on freedom of speech, Keith Whittington and Donald Downs discuss the Princeton Principles for a Campus of Free Inquiry. These principles, outlined by a group of scholars convened by Professor Robert P. George here at the James Madison Program in March 2023, expand on the well-known Chicago Principles in ensuring campus free speech and institutional neutrality.

Professors Whittington and Downs are both among the original fifteen participants and endorsers of the Princeton Principles, and played significant roles in drafting the document. Keith Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics in the Dep...

Listen to this interview of David Evans, Professor of Computer Science, University of Virginia. We talk about what makes scientific reading different.

David Evans : "Most scientific papers are making some claim. So, the real goal as a reader is to understand, Do I believe them? Have the authors done what's necessary to make that claim and make it convincing? But there's another goal, too, and that is to understand, What can I learn from this paper technically — have the authors done something that might inform work that we're doing — do they have something that might provide understanding or pro...

Listen to this interview of Andreas Zeller, faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University. We talk about essence — that part of your research left when you've boiled it all down to the meaning.

Andreas Zeller : "I think of science as a social process. I think of scientists as social beings — as unsocial as we might sometimes appear to be. Because we scientists are all humans, and so we long for meaning in our daily work, which means too that indirectly, we long for recognition. So, our research is ju...

Listen to this interview of Bo Li, Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Chicago and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We talk about how your writing can help you think, and about how it can help you collaborate too!

Bo Li : "I think it's important to have a sort of research test to justify writing up and submitting a paper. So, I'll take the idea of the project and I'll write it down and check it against its story. So, that means, I'll check what the motivation is and what the im...

The Greco-Egyptian syncretistic god Serapis was used by the 3rd century BCE Ptolemaic pharaohs to impose Greek cultural hegemony and consolidate political power. The Alexandrian Serapeum, sometimes referred to as The Great Library of Alexandria’s “daughter library,” may be seen as an archetype for institutions where religion and secular knowledge come together for the reproduction of ideologies.

The Serapeum, however, is by no means unique in this regard; libraries have always incorporated religious symbols and rituals into their material structures. Very little research has been conducted concerning the sociocultural and historical impact of this union of temple...

In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typographical errors, add facts and citations, or clean up the prose on existing articles; others create new articles on topics they find interesting. In Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an...

The sixth episode of the CEU Press Podcast Series is all about the peer review process. Our guests are Rabea Rittgerodt, senior acquisitions editor for social/cultural history (19th-20th century) at De Gruyter and Jen McCall, CEU Press’s acquisitions editor for the Press’s history list. They talk to host Andrea Talabér about the ups and downs of the peer review process, how peer reviewers can give constructive feedback to authors and how authors can take on this feedback on board.

The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from cr...

Procrastination. Writer’s block. Feeling stuck. Are you struggling with the blank page? Today’s guest shares her methods that help writers move past these blocks by turning inward to discover their own writing process, and become the writer they already are.

Today’s book is Becoming the Writer You Already Are (Sage, 2022), by Dr. Michelle R. Boyd, which helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. In it, Dr. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: go...

The third episode of the CEU Press Podcast Series is all about the book proposal. Our guests, Laura Portwood-Stacer, publishing consultant and developmental editor, and Jen McCall, CEU Press’s acquisitions editor for history titles, talk to host Andrea Talabér about how to put together a book proposal package. In the discussion, Laura and Jen touch upon all aspects of the book proposal from choosing the right publisher, what constitutes the book proposal package, to what happens after submitting it.

The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a boo...

In the second Meet the Press episode of the CEU Press Podcast Series, Frances Pinter (Executive Chair, CEU Press) sits down with host Andrea Talabér (Managing Editor, CEU Review of Books) to discuss the Press’ home-grown Open Access (OA) initiative, Opening the Future. Frances explains how the model works, why it is sustainable and why it is beneficial for authors, presses and libraries. 

The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, prom...

Welcome to the first episode of the CEU Press podcast series! To start us off, Frances Pinter (Executive Chair, CEU Press) and Emily Poznanski (Director, CEU Press) sit down with Andrea Talabér (Managing Editor, CEU Review of Books) to talk about the beginnings of the CEU Press, its mission, how it has developed since its foundation and about the Press’s plans for the future.

Ever wonder what goes into publishing an academic book? The CEU Press podcast series aims to delve into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, getting peer rev...

Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem "truth decay" and Andrew J. Hoffman lays the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy. 

But, as he points out, academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis—a crisis of relevance. Scholarship rarely moves very far beyond the walls of the academy and is...

How can writing for the general public help scholars to democratize education? Today, The Conversation editor Emily Costello takes us behind the scenes of a “typical” day at her editor’s desk, and shares how The Conversation partners with academics to help them communicate their expertise to a general audience.

More about The Conversation: They publish articles written by academic experts for the general public, and edited by a team of journalists. These articles share researchers’ expertise in policy, science, health, economics, education, history, ethics and most every subject studied in colleges and universities. Some articles offer practical adv...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. 

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor...

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.

Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership.

Toward this end, they fo...

Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts discusses the how advancements in artificial intelligence are shaping academic publishing. Avi offers various solutions and remedies to concerns around misuse, in addition to offering several tools that can support academics in their writing and research.

Sci Writer

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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In the library profession, and in the world as a whole, the experiences of trans and gender diverse people often go unnoticed, hidden, and ignored. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2021) is entirely written and edited by trans and gender diverse people involved in the field: its fifty-seven authors include workers from academic and public libraries, special collections and archives, and more; LIS students; and a few people who have left the library profession completely.

Editors Kalani Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCracken share in this interview how this book is not in...

Niko Pfund joins the podcast to discuss the value of scientific content for building out Large Language Models and some of the challenges around tracking the quality and ownership of aggregated content from unknown sources. We also discuss potential avenues for collaboration between Generative AI companies and scholarly publishers.

Niko Pfund is Academic Publisher at Oxford University Press and President of Oxford’s US office.

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Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton UP, 2022), Jeff Deutsch--the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world--pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts--perhaps audaciously--a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations.

In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong ex...

Listen to this interview of Rachael Cayley, Associate Professor in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto, Canada. Rachael also blogs. Her Explorations of Style is a wide-ranging discussion of topics associated with graduate writing. In our interview, we talk about mindset and drafting and revision and structure and writing, writing, writing — basically, all the great stuff in Thriving As a Graduate Writer: Principles, Strategies, and Practices for Effective Academic Writing (U Michigan Press, 2023) for you, the graduate writer!

Rachael Cayley : "You should have an Introduction, and I believe strongly that you should write th...

Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Isabel Fletcher, and Catherine Lyall's Foundations of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research (Bristol University Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking reader designed to lower the barriers to interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research. Edited by experienced researchers from a range of different fields whose work grows out of the SHAPE-ID consortium, it paves the way for future scholarship and effective research collaborations across disciplines. For more on the SHAPE-ID project, including the toolkit and annotated bibliography referenced in this podcast episode, visit https://www.shapeid.eu.

Chapters in this book offer extracts from key academic texts on topics such as...

Does listening to an audio book count as reading? Can audio books help democratize education? Will more academic presses be creating audio versions of their books? Princeton University Press audio books editor Danielle D’Orlando joins us to share about the exciting future of audio books for academia.

More about PUP Audio: In 2018, the Princeton University Press team launched the first university press audiobook program, Princeton Audio. Four years and almost a thousand hours of published audiobooks later, they published their hundredth audiobook. Along the way, they have had the privilege of learning from their trusted partners in a...

Listen to this interview of Aaron Clauset, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute. Aaron is also External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We talk about what the science of science can contribute to your career in research.

Aaron Clauset : "In science, having good ideas is, in the end, the most important part. You can go a long way, in terms of surviving in the ecosystem of scientific research, on the basis of having really good ideas. Because those ideas can help you get to a good, r...

Listen to this interview of Nicolas Christin, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, jointly appointed in the School of Computer Science and in the department of Engineering and Public Policy. We talk about the luck it takes to succeed in research, and of course too about the initiative shown by successful researchers to seize that luck.

Nicolas Christin : "You will get a pretty good understanding of where some research idea has come from if you read the Introduction of the paper very carefully. Because the Introduction will typically start with either a sort of case study, 'Alright, so, x do...

In this lively and far-reaching text, Nick Witham (University College London) tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.

For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner - writers who, in the decades...

Listen to this interview of Yuval Yarom, Professor of Computer Science at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. We talk about how authors interpret the data and the facts, and we talk, too, about how readers interpret the authors' words about those data and facts.

Yuval Yarom: "I like to think that the question whether the Title is boring or not does not affect me, just like I like to think that advertising does not affect me. But, I'm probably wrong on both counts. I do try to read papers based on whether they're related to what I do. B...

Listen to this interview of Daniel Gruss, Associate Professor in the Secure Systems group at Graz University of Technology, Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications, Austria. We talk about asking the right questions when writing, for example, asking not "How should I write that?" but asking instead "How would someone else write that?"

Daniel Gruss: "Actual methods and results have almost no value if they don't serve a purpose, and the purpose in research is to show that some idea is valuable enough to be shared with the community — basically, that this idea needs to get int...

Listen to this interview of Thorsten Holz, Professor for computer science and faculty at CISPA, the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, in Saarbrücken, Germany. We talk about mentoring, collaboration, writing, and a little more about writing again.

Thorsten Holz : "I'm rather open in just sharing ideas with other researchers, even with researchers whom I haven't yet collaborated with. I haven't really had any bad experiences this way so far. Of course, from time to time, we've gotten scooped by other works. But in these cases, on the one hand, I don't think those other groups stole ou...

Listen to this interview of Peng Liu, Professor at the College of Information Science and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, and also Director of the Cyber Security Lab. We talk about cold proposals to potential collaborators, we talk about reading across areas and through time, and we talk about how to write as an author and how to write as a reader.

Peng Liu : "There's not really any one place a reader can go in a paper in order to find the critical insight. In my understanding, a reader needs to use a sort of synthesis-reasoning if h...

Listen to this interview of Sascha Fahl, Professor for Computer Science and Faculty for Usable Security and Privacy at CISPA, the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, in Saarbrücken, Germany. We talk about replicable methods, we talk about critical reading, and we talk about the necessity of a network to your research.

Sascha Fahl : "I myself practise — and I encourage my PhDs to practice it too — the zero-draft writing approach. This is the approach of writing early, writing often. Because it's just absolutely important to accept that what you initially write is not what's going to be submit...

Many library project plans, from small projects to institution-wide strategic planning committees, follow a linear trajectory: create the plan, do the plan, then review the outcome. While this can be effective, it also sometimes leads to disregarding new information that emerges while executing the plan, making the outcome less effective. Planning processes can also feel forced and predetermined if stakeholder feedback is not seriously considered. When this happens too many times, people stop offering their honest opinions and new ideas because they have learned that the planners do not really want to hear them.

Integrated Library Planning...

A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance.

In Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All (MIT Press, 2023), Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clea...

Listen to this interview of Mathias Payer, a security researcher and associate professor at the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Science, leading the HexHive group. We talk about research as a social activity — No researcher can go it alone!

Mathias Payer: "Reading and writing are integral parts to the research process. I would even say that there's a split one-third, one-third, one-third: for one-third, you're doing research; for the next third, you're reading about research; and for the final third, you're writing about your research. So you should split this up equally, and I say the same...

Exploring what academic podcasting is and what it could be, Ian Cook's Scholarly Podcasting (Routledge, 2023) is the first to consider the why, what, and how academics engage with this insurgent, curious craft.

Featuring interviews with 101 podcasting academics, including scholars and teachers of podcasting, this book explores the motivations of scholarly podcasters, interrogates what podcasting does to academic knowledge, and leads potential podcasters through the creation process from beginning to end. With scholarship often trapped inside expensive journals, wrapped in opaque language, and laced with a standoffish tone, this book analyses the implications of moving towards a more ope...

Anthony Wilks discusses his career heading up audio-visual projects for the London Review of Books. He tells the story of his winding career, in addition to some great musings about the future of the greater book world.

Anthony Wilks is head of audio and video at the London Review of Books.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Listen to this interview of Nick Enfield, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney for Language Research and the Sydney Initiative for Truth. We talk about communication as you think it is and also, about communication as it really is. Enfield is the author of Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022).

Nick Enfield : "Every scientist does need to be mindful of the power of language to influence — because we always are influencing people when we use language — that is just foundationally what all communication is: influencing other people. B...

Mushtaq Bilal is an academic, content creator, thought leader, and public intellectual. Mushtaq discusses how he built an audience of more than 185,000 followers on Twitter and more than 30,000 on LinkedIn over the last year by helping to simplify the writing process for early career academics. A must-listen for anyone who is thinking about building a community and an author platform online around their research.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Listen to this interview of James Gee, Regents' Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. We talk about too much communication, about too much specialization, and about too much narrativization. We also talk about his books Introducing Discourse Analysis: From Grammar to Society (Routledge, 2018) and What Is a Human?: Language, Mind, and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

James Gee : "It is absolutely crucial that the early-career researcher, that is, the person who is new to a field and also new to the community of that field — it is absolutely crucial that this resear...

This episode features discussions with Thomas Weaver (Senior Acquisitions Editor for Art and Architecture) and Victoria Hindley (Acquisitions Editor in Visual Culture and Design) about publishing in the fields of art, architecture, and visual culture, as part of our virtual attendance of the 2021 College Art Association Conference. 

Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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Myra Tawfik's book For the Encouragement of Learning: The Origins of Canadian Copyright Law (U Toronto Press, 2023) addresses the contested history of copyright law in Canada, where the economic and reputational interests of authors and the commercial interests of publishers often conflict with the public interest in access to knowledge. It chronicles Canada’s earliest copyright law to explain how pre-Confederation policy-makers understood copyright’s normative purpose.

Using government and private archives and copyright registration records, Myra Tawfik demonstrates that the nineteenth-century originators of copyright law intended to promote the advancement of learning in schools by encouraging the ma...

Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford UP, 2022), Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has been propelled by a succession of technologies—from paper manufacture to printing to computers. Together, they have made literary history itself a cultural technology indebted to colonial capitalism.

B...

As social media is increasingly becoming a standard feature of sociological practice, this timely book The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media (Bristol UP, 2021) rethinks the role of these mediums in public sociology and what they can contribute to the discipline in the post-COVID world. It reconsiders the history and current conceptualizations of what sociology is, and analyses what kinds of social life emerge in and through the interactions between ‘intellectuals’, ‘publics’ and ‘platforms’ of communication. Cutting across multiple disciplines, this pioneering work envisions a new kind of public sociology that brings together the digital an...

Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 brings together urgency and scientific rigor so the world’s researchers can quickly disseminate new discoveries that the public can trust. Amy Brand (Director, The MIT Press) and Vilas Dhar (Trustee, The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation) discuss this new overlay journal, its innovative goals, and its role as a proof-of-concept for new models of peer-review and rapid publishing.

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Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, professor emerita in the School of Humanities and the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland, founder of WriteSPACE, an international virtual writing community, and author of Writing with Pleasure (Princeton UP, 2023). We talk about how pleasure is difficult-but-good.

Helen Sword : "If you have a text that has not been written with pleasure — it's been like pulling teeth for the author — it's going to feel the same way for the reader. So I think an issue with a lot of academic writing is that we have to read...

Listen to this interview of Jan Recker, Professor for Information Systems and Digital Innovation at the University of Hamburg, Germany and author of Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide (Springer, 2021). We talk about how your research is what you write.

Jan Recker : "Very few of us scientists are gifted readers, and very few of us are gifted writers, but those who are, I do think that they have an advantage in science. It's not that they're the better scientists, but they just understand the literature better, or they can help a reader understand their own re...

State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk of conceding to mobs and cuddled “snowflake” students and sacrifice the hallowed values of free speech and academic inquiry? Bradford Vivian examines the heated debates over campus misinformation as a language unto itself that confirms existing notions and often provides simple explanations for complex shared problems. In his book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free S...

Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence (Fordham UP, 2023) investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma play in reconstructing stories of three historically marginalized groups in Moroccan history: Berbers/Imazighen, Jews, and political prisoners.

This book demonstrates how Moroccan cultural production has become an other-ar...

Writing and publishing are at the heart of most academic and research pursuits. Many potential authors, however, feel lost in the seemingly Everest climbing-like process. There is little formal education that authors receive during their education. In this regard, John Bond’s new book's The Little Guide to Getting Your Journal Article Published: Simple Steps to Success (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) seeks to pull back the curtain on the process and provide essential information to lead authors to their goals.

The Little Guide answers all of a novice author's questions in a direct and useful fashion. The book can be rea...

Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) is a newly launched open access journal that was born out of a collaboration between the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) and the MIT Press. In this episode, Editor-in-Chief Ludo Waltman discusses the origins of QSS, its growing inaugural issue, and its future as a publishing outlet run for and by the scientometric community.

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“Archivists feel that what their mission is, is to document society. And the question is: how can you document society if you only look at or value or preserve­—maybe value is the right word—a particular segment of the expressions of society?”

In Archiving Cultures: Heritage, Community and the Making of Records and Memory (Routledge, 2023), Jeannette Bastian defines and models the concept of cultural archives, focusing on how diverse communities express and record their heritage and collective memory and why and how these often-intangible expressions are archival records. Analysis of oral traditions, memory texts and performance arts demonstr...

What is an advance contract? Do you need an agent? How do you know which editor to approach with your manuscript? Successfully following the path to academic publishing can be daunting for first-time authors. But it doesn’t have to be. Acquisitions editor Laura Devulis joins us to explain the hidden curriculum, including:

In this episode, Gita Manaktala, Editorial Director at the MIT Press, and Ellen Finnie, Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections at MIT Libraries, discuss the Ideas series: a hybrid print and open access book series for general readers, that provides fresh, strongly argued, and provocative views of the effects of digital technology on culture, business, government, education, and our lives.

Learn more about the full series here.

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The authors of Data Feminism (2020), Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, along with Catherine Ahearn, Content Lead at PubPub, discuss the value and process of open peer review, share experiences and best practices, and explore issues surrounding peer review transparency.

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Cinegogía is an open-access website devoted to the teaching and study of Latin American cinemas. Bridget Franco, an associate professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross, founded and coordinates the website. Cinegogía contains a database of Latin American film as well as resources for teaching and researching film. Teaching resources include syllabi, teaching activities and assignments, and film guides. Cinegogía has a considerable selection of films by and about Black and Indigenous communities in Latin America. Bridget Franco and I discuss how she founded the site, teaching with Latin American film, and digital humanities proj...

Jess Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, and Sam Klein of the MIT Press/MIT Media Lab’s Knowledge Futures Group (KFG) and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society survey and explain open science initiatives and tools.

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In the first of four episodes in the MITP Open Access series, Travis Rich, PubPub co-founder and project lead, speaks with Edward Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. They discuss Frankenbook—an open access digital version of the print edition of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein published by the MIT Press in 2017.

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Vivian Berghahn joins to discuss what is broken with the peer review system in general, how it impacts book publishing, and some creative solutions for how it can be rectified. Also, hear the surprising reason why small, independent publishers tend to have more robust quality review processes than big corporate publishers.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Dr. Joyce Kinkead, Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University discusses her recent book, A Writing Studies Primer (Broadview Press. 2022). A Carnegie Foundation/CASE US Professor of the Year, Professor Kinkead’s primary scholarly areas are in Writing Studies and Undergraduate Research. She has brought a tremendous amount of her expertise in undergraduate research, writing, and composition to the forefront of A Writing Studies Primer.

Writing is omnipresent in our lives, yet we rarely stop and consider its history and material culture. This volume introduces student readers to the development of writing across time and societies. The bo...

Alessandra Anzani, Editorial Director, Academic Studies Press, talks about the steps that authors need to take to bring their manuscripts to publication. The conversation includes a deep dive into the different kinds of editing a book goes through, including what authors need to do themselves or with external support vs. the editing (some) publishers will do for authors. We also discuss some of the advantages of small publishers and how to best promote your book after it is published.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

Learn more about your...

Listen to this interview of Cormac Herley, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. We talk about the science of security and as well, about the communication of security science.

Cormac Herley : "For very many projects, all through, I sort of have this kind of imaginary dialogue going on with my imagined audience or with representatives of my imagined audience, where what I'm doing on my side of the talk is to convince them. And for me personally, the point of the dialogue is kind of, What am I trying to convince them of? Because, I mean, if I can...

Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices (Beacon Press, 2022) provides a field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future.

Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tir...

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.

Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the mode...

Is writing a nonfiction book harder than you thought it would be? This episode explores:

Our guest is: Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer who earned a PhD in Communi...

Sally Wilson, VP of Publishing at Emerald opens up about the challenges publishers are facing in contending with the onset of the mass adoption of AI tools including ChatGPT, and its ramifications for scholarly publishing. She also talks about the potential positive use cases for ChatGPT for reducing inequality in publishing. In addition, Sally discusses the nature of mission-based publishing and leading the charge in tackling United Nations SDG goals in publishing.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation (Cornell UP, 2023) rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting which that reimagines the relationship betwe...

Why is giving a presentation so stressful? Is your heart supposed to race? And how do you gain more confidence? This episode explores:

Our guest is: Dr. James M. Lang, who is the author of six books...

For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), he tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. Cortada argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it...

The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. 

The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom (U California Press, 2023) argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses th...

"It is not only for science to give to publishing, but the time has come for publishing to start giving back to science." Tiffany Gasbarrini clarifies the difference between commercial and mission-driven publishers and how publishers who aren't bound by commercial interests alone can make brave ideological publishing decisions. She also makes a passionate case for why telling stories in science can make all the difference in the way we perceive and trust science as a community and society.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Today’s book is: Engage in Public Scholarship: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, by Dr. Alex D. Ketchum. Public scholarship—sharing research with audiences outside of academic settings—has become increasingly necessary to counter the rise of misinformation, fill gaps from cuts to traditional media, and increase the reach of important scholarship. Engaging in these efforts often comes with the risk of harassment and threats—especially for women, people of color, queer communities, and precariously employed workers. Engage in Public Scholarship provides guidance on translating research into inclusive public outreach while ensuring that such efforts are safer and more ac...

Listen to this interview of Elissa Redmiles, Faculty Member and Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems; Founder and Managing Researcher of Human Computing Associates; and Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. We talk about reaching people with your research.

Elissa Redmiles : "And so, when I think about communicating to my own specific research community, I think about what is my call to action that I would like my fellow researchers to do. And maybe they won't do that, and they'll do something completely different. But sti...

Today I talked to Michelle Chihara, Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Annie Berke, the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. We talked about book reviewing in the age of the Internet and LA literary culture.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Irene Van Rossum and Avi do a deep dive into how Open Access works (or doesn't work) in the context for book manuscripts in the Humanities. Listeners will get a better understanding of transformative agreements and why different countries have entirely different perspectives on the importance and primacy of Open Access.

Irene also discusses important and creative OA initiatives such as 'Path to Open' which encourages libraries and publishers to work together to ensure that everyone can access research.

Finally, we will discuss why metadata has become so critical and how authors can work with p...

Writing the Classroom: Pedagogical Documents As Rhetorical Genres (UP of Colorado, 2022) explores how faculty compose and use pedagogical documents to establish classroom expectations and teaching practices, as well as to articulate the professional identities they perform both inside and outside the classroom.

The contributors to this unique collection employ a wide range of methodological frameworks to demonstrate how pedagogical genres—even ones as seemingly straightforward as the class syllabus—have lives extending well beyond the classroom as they become part of how college teachers represent their own academic identities, advocate for pedagogical values, and negotiate the many exter...

Jeffrey joins the podcast to discuss the prevalence of English in the academic ecosystem and in research publishing. Jeffrey critiques the lackadaisical approach US institutions take towards Spanish language content and research and makes a strong argument to follow the Puerto-Rican model which sees greater opportunity, equality, and sophistication in multilingual academic research. About his book:

Despite a pronounced shift away from Eurocentrism in Spanish and Hispanic studies departments in US universities, many implicit and explicit vestiges of coloniality remain firmly in place. While certain national and linguistic expressions are privileged, others are silenced with predictable racial...

Alan Harvey, Director of Stanford University Press, sits with Avi to discuss why it is so challenging for scholars to write and publish books and to dispel myths around the profitability of all university publishers. Tune in to hear how Alan's sixth-month commitment turned into a lifetime pursuit of enabling authors to convey their research in a compelling manner.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Ben Denne (Director of Publishing, Academic Books, Cambridge UP) joins Avi to discuss how Open Access quickly became a predominant form of academic publishing in the last decade, what issues OA raises for the publishing industry, how OA impacts book publishing and some of the creative solutions for alternative models, including CUP's novel "Flip it Open" program.

We also discuss Ben's journey from writing children's books to presiding over one of the most important academic publishers in the world and the responsibility behind the position. Finally, stay tuned until the end for some interesting ideas regarding alternative pub...

Eric Schwartz joins Avi for a fascinating discussion about the relationship between Columbia University and the Press and how they bounced back after losing their biggest source of income. Eric also talks about the joint publishing program with Howard University and the work publishing still has to do to ensure that all scholars have the opportunity to publish with a leading university publisher.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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How can cultural heritage give us the methodological tools and source material to confront climate change? How can the cultural heritage sector lead the way into a future that proactively faces the climate crisis? Who can be involved in this work—who gets to identify as a “cultural heritage expert”—and what is the work to be done?

Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2022) examines the challenges that environmental change, both sudden and long-term, poses to the preservation of cultural material. But more than this, Robyn Sloggett and Marcelle Scott point out how our confrontation of the cl...

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Duke UP, 2023), Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s.

Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the pa...

Jennifer Crewe talks about how translation became a key component of the Columbia University Press publishing program and how the press decides which books they want to translate. In addition, we go behind the scenes to understand the mechanics of a translation rights deal and how negotiations are conducted between academic publishers around the world. Finally, we cover the ever-changing business of academic book sales that can literally turn on its head overnight.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Museums everywhere have the potential to serve as agents of change—bringing people together, contributing to local communities, and changing people’s lives. So how can we, as individuals, radically expand the work of museums to live up to this potential? How can we more fiercely recognize the meaningful work that museums are doing to enact change around the relevant issues in our communities? How can we work together to build a stronger culture of equity and care within museums? Questions like these are increasingly vital for all museum professionals to consider, no matter what your role is within your...

As we interact online we are creating new kinds of knowledge and community. How are these communities formed? How do we know whether to trust them as sources of information? In other words, should we believe Wikipedia? 

Should You Believe Wikipedia?: Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores what community is, what knowledge is, how the internet facilitates new kinds of community, and how knowledge is shaped through online collaboration and conversation. Along the way the author tackles issues such as how we represent ourselves online and how this shapes how we interact, why th...

Monumental Names: Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow (Routledge, 2022) asks us to consider: what stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic examines a version of archival activism that is centred on various practices of documentation and commemoration of many dead victims of historical violence in Russia to understand what kind of historicity is produced when a si...

Why is writing a grant proposal so stressful? Are you supposed to just know how to do it? This episode explores:

...

We have usually relied on public intellectuals to provide facts, ideas, and cultural leadership--though not all have lived up to the ideal of “speaking truth to power.” Today, however, online networks and social media mean we are all public intellectuals, and we have new responsibilities that come with this role.

Guests:

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Avi and Gita Manaktala discuss how researchers should approach the book publishing process, including determining whether research should be published as an article or book, how to make an impact on the acquisitions editors, the significance of the editorial process, and the importance and function of an 'author platform' to spread your book.

Gita also shares how the move to Open Access is impacting the book publishing space and MIT's program to offer OA for new scholarly books. Finally, we discuss what can be done to increase diversity among authors and readers of academic works.

Avi...

Harm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences (U California Press, 2022) is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or excluded. Drawing on a variety of real-world examples, narrative criminologist Lois Presser outlines how to determine what or who is excluded from textual materials. With strategies that can be added to the tool kits of social researchers and activists alike, Unsaid provides a richly layered approach to analyzing and dismantling the power structures that both create and arise from what goes w...

Hell on Earth: The 30 Years War and the Violent Birth of Capitalism is a new 10-part series from the creators of Hell of Presidents — one of Entertainment Weekly’s best podcasts of 2021 — and Chapo Trap House, the political podcast that they claim has made more people angrier than any other podcast. Hell on Earth tells the story of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. Including the long crisis of the 17th century, the birth of Protestantism and the collapse of Catholic Christendom, and ultimately, “the gleaming T-800 Terminator skeleton of capitalism emerging from the rotting corpse of feudalism”. In addition to tales of lurid viol...

Listen to this interview of Laura Lindenfeld, Executive Director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. We talk about how improvisation helps people communicate for real.

Laura Lindenfeld : "I feel that communication as a field has often been thought of as communications, you know, more technical, less relational. But we at the Alan Alda Center see ourselves as studying something and also helping with something that is very relational, and relating, of course, is done in real-world settings. And it's my strong feeling that communication, in this relational sense, is poised to thrive in the twenty-first c...

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Stanford UP, 2022) demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet.

Exa...

This episode is a recording of a short paper presented by Kim and Saronik in the panel “Literary Criticism: New Platforms” organized by Anna Kornbluh at the 2023 Convention of the Modern Language Association. In the paper, they reflect on the nature of the voice in the humanities and the role of the humanities podcast inside and outside institutions.

Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu

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Listen to this interview of Gang Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We talk about using writing to research better.

Gang Wang : "I personally view writing as a very useful process to polish my own thinking. For example, when my group are on a project, until we actually put things in writing, we won't find little flaws in the design, or jumped steps in the argumentation, or missing experiments in the study. But when we put things in writing, this shows us very quickly what we've left out."

The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton UP, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries. 

Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides readers step-by-step through all phases of historical research, from narrowing a topic and locating sources to taking notes, crafting a narrative, and connecting one's work to existing scholarship. He sho...

Professor Sarah Willen talks about her part in creating the Pandemic Journaling Project and how that has morphed into a series of visual exhibitions that emphasis how we all can work to create new histories, shape archives, and reclaim our own creativity and power.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

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"The Partially Examined Life" is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it." In this interview, I chat with PEL host, Wes Alwan, about creating one of the longest-running philosophy podcasts. Wes discusses the personal value he's gotten from participating in publically-available debates and discussions. We also talk about the relevance of philosophy today and how to deal with controversial subjects.

Wes Alwan (wes@partiallyexaminedlife.com) also co-hosts the literature and film podcast Subtext, and has a Substack newsletter at wesalwan.c...

What is the feeling of archival kismet? And how can we reimagine the format of academic conferences to better support scholars? This episode explores:

Our guest is: Dr. Courtney Thompson, who is an associate history professor...

A close reading of Wikipedia's article on the Egyptian Revolution reveals the complexity inherent in establishing the facts of events as they occur and are relayed to audiences near and far.

Wikipedia bills itself as an encyclopedia built on neutrality, authority, and crowd-sourced consensus. Platforms like Google and digital assistants like Siri distribute Wikipedia's facts widely, further burnishing its veneer of impartiality. But as Heather Ford demonstrates in Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2022), the facts that appear on Wikipedia are often the result of protracted power struggles ov...

Becoming the Writer You Already Are (Sage, 2022) helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. Author Michelle R. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: going from "stuck" to "unstuck" by drawing on skills you already have at your fingertips. She also offers an experimental approach to trying out any new writing strategy, so you can easily fill out the parts of your writing process that need developing. The book is ideal for dissertation writing seminars, graduate students st...

The Remaking of Archival Values by Victoria Hoyle (Routledge, October 2022) posits that archival theory and practice are fields in flux, and that recent critical archival discourse that addresses neoliberalism, racism, and the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy represents a disruption not only to established principles but also to the values that underpin them.

Using critical discourse analysis and comparing theory and practice from the UK and the Anglophone world, Hoyle explores the challenges faced by scholars, institutions, organizations, and practitioners in embedding new values. She demonstrates how persistent underlying discursive structures about archives have manifested from the l...

Listen to this interview of David Lindsay, emeritus professor of the University of Western Australia. We talk about his book Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words (CSIRO Publishing, 2020) and how your hypothesis can save the communication of your research.

David Lindsay : "It's quite unfortunate that we're training our undergraduates in science this way. I mean, undergraduates know that when they write something, for example, a protocol to be graded—undergraduates know that their professors are seeking to find out whether the student knows something about the subject. So, as long as there's any semblance at all in the text t...

Dealing with the colonial archive entails acknowledging the inability to know everything, accounting for the archive’s limited and incomplete condition. Dealing with the colonial archive is not merely about stories of the past but also about the history of the present, and how it is interrupted by the past. — Irene Hilden, in conversation with New Books Network.

With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive's Acoustic Legacies (Leuven University Press, 2022) presents a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of col...

Scholarship is frequently imagined as a solitary pursuit, done mostly in archives or with books. This CHI Salon will feature scholars pursuing alternatives to this model and who regularly publish scholarship that emerges out of community activism, who co-write or co-edit books, and who actively seek out and create new models of authorship and research. Amherst Presidential Scholar Karma Chávez (UT-Austin) and Amherst College Press authors Megan Jeanette Myers (Iowa State) and Edward Paulino (John Jay) discuss their past publication experiences and the opportunities and challenges of collaborative scholarship.

This panel is in honor of Open A...

The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India (MIT Press, 2022), written by Janaki Srinivasan and published by MIT Press in October 2022, examines how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications of this for development. Information, says Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. 

In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in informa...

The NBN would not exist but for the work of university presses. So every year we celebrate the efforts of our colleagues at UPs during "University Press Week," which happens to be November 14 to 18. This year I talked to Charles Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press and president of the Association of University Presses. 

We discussed what UPs do, what makes them different from other publishers, how UP books are priced, and the future of open access publishing. We also talked about how to make a career in UP publishing. The AUP has a wonderful reso...

Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History (Wits UP, 2022) is an exploration of particular sources of evidence on southern Africa’s early history. It gathers recent ideas about archives and asks the question: “How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?”

Historians use a wide range of source materials for this work. What are these materials? Where can we find them? Who made them? When? Why? What are the problems with using them? The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and other researchers engage these questions from a ra...

Saronik Bosu talks about humanities work engaging diverse communities and publics, misconceptions about what the ‘public’ in public humanities might mean as well as the recent attention paid to it by academic departments. In a longer version of the conversation, some individual instances of various digital humanities and archival projects are discussed. Here he speaks mainly from the perspective of his own work as a humanities podcaster and creator of humanities programming.

Saronik Bosu is a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, New York University. He researches literary rhetoric and economic thought in contexts of decolonization. He i...

You’re going to an academic conference—and maybe even presenting a project! Whether you are going virtually or in person, for the first time or the tenth, presenting or just attending, you want to feel prepared. Are you? This podcast episode explores:

Our guest is: Dr. Thomas J. Tobin, who is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin at M...

Listen to this interview of Barbara Sarnecka, Professor of Cognitive Sciences and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. We talk about putting your mind in print. She is the author of The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia.

Barbara Sarnecka : "The more quantitative a person's field of study is, the more likely they are to say that they just don't think that writing is a big requirement in their field. And they'll say, 'Well, writing isn't very important. I'm a biologist.' They imagine that wr...

Rebel Book Club is an online and in-person book club. Each month, over 1,000 people get together to discuss a non-fiction book, occasionally with the author as a participant. 

For new members, use code: REBELREADER

Ben Keene is an entrepreneur, author, and food journalist.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Is there a strategy to communicating your research online? This episode explores:

Our guest is: Jennifer van Alstyne (@HigherEdPR), a communications strategist for professors and researchers. At The Academic Designer LLC, Jennifer helps people share their work effectively in online spaces like websites and social media. The Social Academic blog shares advice about managing your online presence in Hi...

How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research areas since the introduction of a metrics and quantification regime during the 1980s. Highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of metrics and quantification, as well as the uneven distribution of positive and negati...

Listen to this interview of Sarah Huffman (Assistant Director of the Center for Communication Excellence) and Elena Cotos (Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English Department and Director of the Center for Communication Excellence) and Kimberly Becker, (Lecturer in English) — all three at Iowa State University. We talk about how to ruin your or anyone's reading experience of research articles by showing you just how much is going on in the text besides research!

Kimberley Becker : "Less experienced writers of research tend to think that academic writing is this objective and faceless entity, when in fact it...

The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (University of Chicago Press, 2022) tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate--one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?

This book will help you start your new research project the right way fo...

Listen to this interview of John Measey, Researcher at the Centre for Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. We talk about the needs of early-career researchers and also about our need for early-career researchers.

John Measey : "What we really need to know is what a scientific journal is for and what we want it to be for. So, we know, more or less, what it was for and where it came from, but what do we want that to be in the twenty-first century, and how will the journal meet rigor, independence, transparency, and replicability? Because we...

The Journal of Black Religious Thought advances critical scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies – with special attention to Black religious studies, which includes and intersects, but not limited to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, New Testament, Intertestamental, Quran, theology, history, ethics, practical theology, religion-science, philosophy of religion, Black hermeneutics, philosophy of religion, womanist, intersectionality, cultural studies, among others – offering African American, African, and/or African Diaspora points of view.

Dr. John Ahn is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Howard University School of Divinity. He is trained in ancient Near Eastern and Religious Studies. He specializes in the h...

In Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Adam Nocek, Assistant Professor in the Philosophy of Technology and Science and Technology Studies at Arizona State University, investigates the collusion between entertainment and scientific visualization in the case of molecular animation. “The very same tools that were invented to animate a character like Shrek or Nemo are now being applied to set in motion protein domains and cellular processes.” Opening with this quote by animator and scientist Gaël McGill, the book retraces the complex genealogy of molecular animation and analyses its pretension to scientific value. While the firs...

For this episode of How To Be Wrong, I speak with George Styles, a biochemist and author of the book Contemplation. George is also what we describe these days as an “influencer”—although as we discuss he objects to that label—on social media, with over 37 thousand followers on Twitter. His approach to Twitter is novel in that he focuses on asking probing questions designed to generate discussion, which at times become rather heated. Our conversation moves through topics related to how Twitter is used and how it can be used as a tool for generating civil intellectual discourse.

Listen to this interview with Jo Mackiewicz, professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University, and with Isabelle Thompson, emerita professor of technical and professional communication and former coordinator of the English Center at Auburn University. We talk about their book Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors (Routledge, 2018) and writing.

Jo Mackiewicz : "The more I think about writing center interactions and write books about it, the more I think that the value a tutor brings to learning is this: to show students a thinking process, to show students an analysis pro...

Listen to this interview of Nicholas Rowe, researcher and educator based in Finland. We talk his book The Realities of Completing a PhD: How to Plan for Success (Routledge, 2021) and about what needs to change.

Nicholas Rowe : "Writing for different purposes, for different audiences is a huge skill, because people are going to need this communication skill in their research proposal when they present their ideas to advisors, but also in their publications when they share their ideas with colleagues. Now, of courses, everybody's systems and processes are different, but the key communicative skills that you need are...

A special opportunity to hear from Sara Custer, editor of The Campus (Times Higher Education), about the role of journalism and reporting in higher education. Avi and Sara cover topics ranging from the role of media in increasing cross-institution collaboration and sharing during the pandemic to how universities can do a better job supporting their junior scholars. Also, don't miss out on the opportunity to learn how you can publish in Times Higher Education yourself!

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Paul A. Djupe, Anand Edward Sokhey, and Amy Erica Smith, The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences (Oxford UP, 2022) explores a more holistic understanding of knowledge production in the social sciences, moving beyond the publication process often required by those in tenure/tenure-track positions to thinking about the role of community in the construction of knowledge. Political Scientists Paul A. Djupe (Denison University), Anand Edward Sokhey (University of Colorado-Boulder), and Amy Erica Smith (Iowa State University) emphasize the idea of academics as citizens in communities and institutions, endowed with certain rights and responsibilities with regard to knowl...

Listen to this interview of Vivian Kao, Associate Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the First-Year Writing Program, and Julia Kiernan, Assistant Professor of Communication and Coordinator of Technical and Professional Communication — both at Lawrence Technological University, Michigan. It's more than just hot air — we talk about their STEAM, and their book Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities (Routledge, 2022).

Vivian Kao : "Writing is really central to the project of STEM. And I'm talking about writing very capaciously, so that is, composing in multiple modes, in multiple media — that is, learning how to communicate to many different a...

The International Association of Genocide Scholars is a global, interdisciplinary, non-partisan organization that seeks to further research and teaching about the nature, causes, and consequences of genocide, and advance policy studies on genocide prevention. The Association, founded in 1994, meets regularly to consider comparative research, important new work, case studies, the links between genocide and other human rights violations, and prevention and punishment of genocide. The Association holds biennial conferences and co-publishes the scholarly journal Genocide Studies and Prevention.

Melanie O’Brien is Associate Professor of International Law at the UWA Law School, University of Western Australia. Dr. O'Brie...

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

Our guest is: Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer, who is a scholar and academic. She wrote a book based on her dissertation and many scholarly journal articles, including “How To Email Your Professor (Without Being Ann...

The protests of summer 2020 led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors?

It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and...

80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Benjamin Todd is the president and co-founder of 80,000 Hours. He managed the organisation while it grew from a lecture, to a student society, to the organization it is today. He also helped to get effective altruism started in Oxford in 2011.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Rebecca Colesworthy talks about the university press and how its workings should be demystified, what authors should keep in mind when they pitch their books, and what university presses do for the state of academic labor.

Rebecca Colesworthy (she/her) is senior acquisitions editor at SUNY Press. Her areas of

acquisition include literary studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Latin American and Iberian studies, Latinx studies, African American studies, Indigenous studies, and education. She is the author of Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange (Oxford UP, 2018) and co-editor with Peter Nicholls...

How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports?

In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an online event convened by NIAS in 2021, two editors of Asian studies journals discuss the challenges of publishing high-quality articles in the field, in a lively and wide-ranging conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese S...

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

Our guest is: Robert Ramaswamy (he/they), who has a BA in...

Laura Portwood-Stacer talks with Kim about book proposals.

Laura is a consultant for academic authors. Her book, titled, appropriately, The Book Proposal Book (Princeton UP, 2021), is a how-to-guide for writing an outstanding book proposal.

Through her business, Manuscript Works, Laura runs courses, workshops, and provides editorial assistance, to help academics navigate the world of publishing. Enrollment for her next “Book Proposal Accelerator Course” opens on Jan. 3, at 9am PST. Here’s the link: courses.manuscriptworks.com

Image of several books from Wikimedia Commons.

Music used in promotional material: Mozart Piano Concerto K.467 2mvt...

Today’s guest is Whitney Trettien whose book Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork was published through the University of Minnesota Press in 2022. Trettien is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and researches the history of the book spanning print and digital technologies. Cut/Copy/Paste explores makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. The book is complemented with a wide array of resources on early modern publishing available on the book’s webpage hosted by the University of Minnesota Press.

John Yargo recently...

Jason Prevost, coordinating Chair of the Publication Ethics Committee, and Senior Acquisitions Editor at Brill joins Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts, to discuss how publishers handle ethical issues such as plagiarism, questions of authorship, and even fraudulent results. Hear how Jason dealt with a senior professor who refused to credit authorship to his Ph.D. student despite the fact that he wrote a considerable amount of his book. Also, learn how publishers go about retracting problematic research and tracking down the subsequent citations of the faulty research.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Acad...

Plan S: the open access initiative that changed the face of global research. 

Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells's book Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed. (Ubiquity Press, 2022) tells the story of open access publishing - why it matters now, and for the future. In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before - something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing milli...

Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University and editor of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. We talk about welds that hold and about sentences that stand.

Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, I'd definitely agree that people can be motivated in what they're learning when they appreciate the art of it. I mean, for instance in welding, you need to put in a certain number of hours in order to have your mind and your body work as one in this technique — you know, you need to become the tec...

Hear from Professor Chris Gerteis, director of the International Publishing Initiative at Tokyo University. Avi and Chris have a fascinating discussion about the role of English language publication in universities and colleges in Asia and his work to assist faculty to publish their books with respected university publishers. Chris shares some of the unexpected hurdles in helping Japanese scholars to publish their work and how reviewers can be more open and understanding to different writing styles, formats, and tones.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts

Learn more about your...

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

Our guest is: Dr. Marshall Poe, who is a historian, writer, podcaster, and editor. He is the founder and editor of the New Books Netw...

Listen to this interview of Julia Molinari, lecturer in professional academic communication at The Open University (UK) and independent researcher. We talk her book What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022) and about the things people use academic writing for.

Julia Molinari : "We need to ensure that teachers of academic writing have access to scholarship and can do the research that they need to do in order to sensitize themselves to the different ways of conceiving of writing. Because I see scholarship very much as a lever to the change that needs to happen in hig...

Should academic scholars trust machine translation for the publication of their academic articles? In this episode, Avi Staiman and Prof. Ana Guerberof Arenas discuss the evolution of machine translation and the most recent developments in machine translation technology. Ana shares her insight on the potential pitfalls of relying on machine translation for unpublished manuscripts. She also shares the results of her recent study on the advantages of human translation for creative and literary texts.

Ana Guerberof Arenas is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at University of Groningen. Her project (CREAMT) looks at the impact of M...

ADST has the world’s largest collection of U.S. diplomatic oral history. They have over 2,500 oral histories at ADST.org

Susan Rockwell Johnson is the president of ADST since November 2016. She is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service (retired) with over three decades of distinguished service in a broad range of bilateral and multilateral assignments in and out of the State Department.

Margery B. Thompson directs ADST’s book-related programs, advises diplomats and others on editing and publishing matters, and coordinates the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. Before joining ADST in 1995, she was...

Founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the American Historical Association provides leadership for the discipline and promotes the critical role of historical thinking in public life. The Association defends academic freedom, develops professional standards, supports innovative scholarship and teaching, and helps to sustain and enhance the work of historians. As the largest membership association of professional historians in the world (over 11,500 members), the AHA serves historians in a wide variety of professions and represents every historical era and geographical area. 

James Grossman is Executive Director of the American Historical Association. H...

Today I talked to Sean Guillory. Sean did something pretty remarkable (and hard): He started a successful academic podcast. It's called the SRB Podcast and deals with Russian and Eurasian affairs. In the interview, Sean explains how he did it, how he does it, and his current project, a wonderful narrative podcast called Teddy Goes to the USSR. I highly recommend you subscribe to the SRB Podcast and Teddy Goes to the USSR. You can follow Sean on Twitter here: @seansrussiablog. 

Sean Guillory is the Digital Scholarship Curator at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at...

Listen to this interview of Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. We talk about her book How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing (Routledge, 2021) writing well and knowing why.

Roslyn Petelin : "My book caters for all kinds of writers: student writers, creative writers, technical writers, journalistic writers, corporate writers, all of whom need to be able to write well, write successfully, for either personal or corporate credibility."

Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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Listen to this interview of Dave Harris, a writing coach who uses principles from design to help authors develop writing practices. We talk about his book, Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice (Routledge, 2019), and the ongoing conversation that is research.

Dave Harris : "And one of the important elements of thinking of your research as a conversation with your community of scholars is that the gaps in the literature are, to some extent, the things that others have left unsaid. So, we're in this conversation, and one person mentions an idea and they men...

Listen to this interview of Zen Faulkes, instructor at the School of Interdisciplinary Science, McMaster University, Canada. We talk about his book Better Posters: Plan, Design and Present an Academic Poster (Pelagic Publishing, 2021) and efficiency.

Zen Faulkes : "Any time that you're very early on in a project, you'll have tendency (as I call it) to democratize data. You want to have all the data be important. You think everything's important when you're just at the start of a project. But when you've been at the project longer, when you've had the time to sit with the data and...

The American Association of Geographers (AAG) is a non-profit scientific and educational society aimed at advancing the understanding, study, and importance of geography and related fields. Its headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. The organization was founded on December 29, 1904, in Philadelphia. As of 2020, the association has more than 10,000 members, from nearly 100 countries.

Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder and President of the AAG. 

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to John Tregoning, Imperial College respiratory infections researcher and author of the acclaimed book Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reach...

A Guide to Academic Podcasting is a practical guidebook introducing scholars to the multiverse of podcasting. It’s an open-source publication made by Amplify Podcast Network, written by Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor. In this conversation, we talked about embodied knowledge, gendered (and racialized) voices, and how new media publishing is transforming the relationships scholars have with the public(s). We entered into the territory of the vulnerable scholar, examined our discomfort with silence, and the spaces of possibilities academics may discover in podcasting.

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In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to bestselling author and University of Oxford law professor Charles Foster on how the coronavirus pandemic reveals how so many of us—including so many scientists—have replaced rigorous scientific skepticism with an alarming cult of "scientism."

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton ...

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned UC San Diego neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland about the importance of communicating science, the wonders of the biological world and the dangers of wishful thinking.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas R...

Listen to this interview of Zhihui Fang, the Irving and Rose Fien Endowed Professor of Education in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida. We talk his book Demystifying Academic Writing: Genres, Moves, Skills, and Strategies (Routledge, 2021) and about how functional grammar can benefit the academic writer.

Zhihui Fang : "Learning disciplinary content is primarily a linguistic process. When you learn the language that construes particular content, then you are learning just how people understand this content, and so content and language go together inseparably. That's why language should be a key component to our...

Listen to this interview of John Measey, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and author of How to Write a PhD in Biological Sciences: A Guide for the Uninitiated (CRC Press, 2021). We talk about how the communication of science is changing, and we talk about how you can keep up and produce the research you want to produce.

John Measey : "We're in an extremely interesting time, because the potential that we have to not just publish what we've written — which is where we used to be with scholarly journals, which just had the articl...

The University Network for Human Rights facilitates supervised undergraduate engagement in the practice of human rights at colleges and universities in the United States and across the globe. The University Network partners with advocacy organizations and communities affected or threatened by abusive state, corporate, or private conduct to advance human rights at home and abroad; trains undergraduate students in interdisciplinary human rights protection and advocacy; and collaborates with academics and human rights practitioners in other parts of the world to foster the creation of practical, interdisciplinary programs in human rights.

James (Jim) Cavallaro is Executive Director of...

Listen to this interview of Dashun Wang, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and also with Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University. We talk about their new book The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021) and science, squared.

Albert-László Barabási : "There is, of course, the need that you grow professionally. If you're a mathematician, you need to perfect your math. If you're a physicist, you need to do your physics. If you're a biologist, you need to...

Listen to this interview of Joseph Cheatle, Director of the Writing & Media Center at Iowa State University. We talk about how communication will change your life.

Joseph Cheatle : "One of the typical traits of writing center tutors is that they are just really great. I don't know how else to describe it other than that they are often the best of the best at an institution in terms of their leadership, their vision, their work ethic, their desire for professional development. I mean, people who are writing center tutors, when they go out for job interviews, they o...

Listen to this interview of Joe Esposito, Senior Partner of Clarke & Esposito. We talk about the space between academic research and consumer markets, and we travel in space to the metaverse!

Joe Esposito : "The thing that's at issue when a field of study begins publishing more in journals and less in books is another aspect of the audience. If you're a scientist, you write short articles because this is what gets you tenure, this is what gets you a promotion, this is what allows you to go to grants-making bodies and get money to hire postdoctoral students a...

Listen to this interview of Daniel Bolnick, Editor in Chief of The American Naturalist and Professor of evolution and ecology at the University of Connecticut. We talk about the role of research journals today and we talk about the location of research journals in the big endeavor that is called science.

Daniel Bolnick : "Ultimately, research articles are technical. Articles have to deal with the mathematics or with the details of the physiology or the neurobiology that they're dealing with. But the authors can create a wrapper around that technical core that makes it digestible. I like to th...

In In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2022), Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, aims to make the case for the value of spaces devoted to books and the value of the time spent browsing their stacks. It is a defense of serious bookstores, but more importantly, it is a paean to the spaces that support them; the experience of readers as they engage with the books, the stacks, and each other; and the particular community created by the presence of such an institution. Drawing on his lifelong experience as a bookseller and his...

Listen to this interview of Hilary Glasman-Deal, teacher of STEMM communication at the Centre for Academic English, Imperial College London, and author ofScience Research Writing For Native and Non-Native Speakers of English (World Scientific Publishing Europe, 2020). We talk about researching, reading, and writing.

Hilary Glasman-Deal : "One of the things I'm very often saying, particularly with early-career researchers, is this: 'Look, your reading is clearly effective, because you understand your field, okay, and you're an expert in your field. But your writing is operating at a different location from your reading. And what you need to be doing is...

Listen to this interview of Stephen Heard, Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick. We talk about his book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2022), we talk about writing when it's a verb, we talk about writing when it's a choice, and we talk about writing when it's the science.

Stephen Heard : "Especially for early-career scientists there's a risk of their writing entering into a positive feedback loop with the writing as it is in the literature. And really, we do thi...

Mary Norris, The New Yorker's Comma Queen and best-selling author of Between You & Me, has had a lifelong love affair with words. In Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (Norton, 2020), she delivers a delightful paean to the art of self-expression through accounts of her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways in which Greek helped form English. Greek to Me is filled with Norris's memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek...

Listen to this interview of Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at INSERM and Editor-in-Chief of eNeuro. We talk about the review process, about education in the sciences, and again a little bit more about education in the sciences.

Christophe Bernard : "Science is everything that a scientist does. But for many people, science is only the bench work — to them, that's what a scientist really does. And the publishing part — well, that's just something that others do. Even the review process, for too many people, is just not fully integrated into the work that scientists are doing. But there sho...

Listen to this interview of Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, cofounders of Retraction Watch. We talk about lots of things, retracting very few.

Ivan Oransky : "Accountability in science certainly does not come down to only retracting papers, because there are just lots of issues. And by the way, just to remind everyone, science is very much a human endeavor. It doesn't exist outside of humans doing the science. I mean, facts exist, and there is truth out there, and we'd very much appear to be getting close and closer to it — that's not what I'm talking about. I'm t...

Hear from Catherine Cocks, assistant director and editor-in-chief at Michigan State University Press talk about her attempt to replicate the success of the Scholarly Kitchen blog in the humanities with the 'Feeding the Elephant' forum, her work to make university publishers more accessible to authors through ASK UP and publishing on the Great Lakes at Michigan State!

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts

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Listen to this interview of Pascal Patrick Matzler, Associate Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile. We talk about his book Mentoring and Co-Writing for Research Publication Purposes: Interaction and Text Development in Doctoral Supervision (Routledge, 2021), mentorship in STEM — we talk about writing in STEM.

Pascal Matzler : "For me, perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the years that I spent with these three supervisors and three doctoral students was just seeing how scientific knowledge is gained, how it is reproduced, and how new scientists are born — so, just seeing how these students became scientists who are capa...

What does it take to become a digitally agile scholar? This manual explains how academics can comfortably navigate the digital world of today and tomorrow. It foregrounds three key domains of digital agility: getting involved in research, education and (community) service, mobilising (digital) skills on various levels, and acting in multiple roles, both individually and interlinked with others.

After an introduction that outlines the foundations of the three-dimensional framework, the chapters focus on different roles and skills associated with evolving as a digital scholar. There is the author, who writes highly specialised texts for expert peers; the st...

Can libraries be radical positive change agents in their communities?

R. David Lenkes offers a guide for librarians who see their profession as a chance to make a positive difference in their communities —librarians who recognize that it is no longer enough to stand behind a desk waiting to serve.

Lankes reminds libraries and librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, an...

Hear Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green talk about some of her shocking findings on language discrimination and bias on campus. Lippi-Green and Avi discuss her book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the US (Routledge, 2011) and what the academic community can do to be more inclusive of scholars with different levels of English. We also discuss Rosina's transition from researcher to popular novelist.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Listen to this interview of Nigel Caplan, Associate Professor at the English Language Institute, University of Delaware. We talk generically.

Nigel Caplan : "And this sort of brings us to an important point about knowledge and expertise in a discipline. The great genre scholar Doreen Starke-Meyerring said that academic writing tends to be transparent to experts in the discipline, and they forget how opaque it is to novices. So, if you study engineering, biology, philosophy, whatever it is, and you're immersed in that world all the time, it's very easy to believe that that is the only way...

Tune in to hear Prof. Talya Miron Shatz, author of Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health (Basic Books, 2021) discuss her surprising decision to publish her book with a non-academic publisher and how her writing and revision were driven by her desire to get her book into thousands of homes around the world.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Listen to this interview of Ayelet Baram-Tsabari. We talk about the accessibility of science using Google to scholars and students in languages beyond English and how scholars can de-jargonize their research to ensure increase their reach.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts

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Listen to this interview of Melinda Baldwin about her book Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal (U Chicago Press, 2015). Melinda is AIP Endowed Professor in History of Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland. We talk about Nature, naturally.

Melinda Baldwin : "Yes, I think it will be surprising to many scientists today that Nature has really been thoroughly shaped by the journal's contributors and readership, and certainly to the people who view Nature's editorial staff as these all-powerful gatekeepers of scientific success. But, I love the list you just gave of all the people who are invo...

In Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021), Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project -- not as linear, bound and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality.

In a series of talks and essays in 1937, H. G. Wells proselytized for what he called a World Brain, as manifested in a World Encyclopedia--a repository of scientifically established knowledge--that would spread enlightenment around the world and lead to world peace. Wells, known to readers today as the author of The War of the Worlds and other science fiction classics, was imagining something like a predigital Wikipedia. The World Encyclopedia would provide a summary of verified reality (in about forty volumes); it would be widely available, free of copyright, and utilize the latest technology.

Of course, as Br...

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children's drawings--the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library: A Rich and Fragile History (Basic Books, 2021), historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts. In doing so, th...

One pervasive stereotype about mathematics is that it is objective, unbiased, or otherwise exempt from the influence of human passions. James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes's edited collection will be a revelation even to mathematics professionals who don't take this strict view. The essays in Arguing with Numbers: The Intersections of Rhetoric and Mathematics (The Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) explore the interplays between rhetoric and mathematics that have shaped scholarly and popular culture through to the present day.

Opening the collection are both an historical sketch of scholarship at the intersection of these disciplines, from their division in ancie...

In Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (Columbia UP, 2021), Eric Hayot develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature and purpose of humanist intellectual work and lays out a serious of principles that undergird this core idea. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world.

Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University, where he is also Dire...

Listen to this interview of William Germano, Professor of English at Cooper Union, New York, We talk about his new book On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts (U Chicago Press, 2021), about writers, and about readers and about text — everyone involved in the revision process.

William Germano : "There an almost endless number of things one can say about revision because it is so crucial and yet so underdiscussed. In recent years, there have been a couple of events, or conversations, that have appeared, with other writers, and in particular writers who work on fiction, who have been addres...

Comedian Robin Ince quickly abandoned science at school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But, twenty years later, he fell in love and he now presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers.

In this erudite and witty book, Robin reveals why scientific wonder isn't just for the professionals. Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more - as well as charting Robin's own journey with science - The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures i...

Listen to this interview of Mike Palmquist, Professor of English (with a focus on rhetoric and composition) and also University Distinguished Teaching Scholar. We have a conversation.

Mike Palmquist : "We tend to think, 'Oh, writing. Just learn how to put your sentences together. Learn how to develop a nice paragraph. Learn the rules of grammar.' And somehow that's supposed to transfer magically into another discipline. But in fact, the kinds of debate and discourse and discussion and reporting and inquiry that go on in a particular discipline are highly conditioned by the knowledge they share, by...

Listen to this interview of Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus of Physiology at University of Maryland School of Medicine and author of Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data (Oxford UP, 2019). We talk about definitions of words and about explanations of the world.

Bradley Alger : "I don't care how brilliant your data are, but if you don't succeed in explaining them clearly and laying them out and making them accessible to other people, you're really going to be penalizing yourself, at least as a scientist. And the idea of the hypothesis as a story st...

At the New Books Network, we love university presses. So we're happy to tell you about University Press Week, the annual celebration of UPs and their important work. Today I talked to Lisa Bayer, the director of the University of Georgia Press and the president of the Association of University Presses. We discuss a lot of things--open access, business models, libraries, peer review, careers in UP publishing--all knit together by a theme, that being how UPs keep up with everything that is going on, scholarly-communications-wise. Enjoy. 

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Networ...

Listen to this interview of Aliyah Kovner, science writer and also host of the podcast A Day in the Half-Life. We talk about who science communication reaches: peers, other experts, non-experts, you, me, everyone.

Aliyah Kovner : "That's definitely a thing not talked about enough, that is: often the audience for science communication is the scientists themselves, who want to learn about other fields. And even brilliant people with PhDs don't know the lingo for a different field. So, any scientist really actually has to appreciate the fact that most people are going to be outsiders to their r...

Listen to this interview of Jari Saramäki, author of How to Write a Scientific Paper: An Academic Self-Help Guide for PhD Students (2018) and professor of computational science at Aalto University, Finland. We talk about how hard soft skills are.

Jari Saramäki : "Yes, I think that there is something to a kind of immersion approach to learning. Because you can learn a lot by observing, by imitating, by looking at things and asking questions. But this is something you need to decide to do. So, you can read a paper so that you just read and try t...

Listen to this interview of Avi Staiman, who is CEO, founder, and director of Academic Language Experts. We talk about how complex and how simple editing is.

Avi Staiman : "Let me give you an example of where the editing is not about the vocabulary available or the construction of the sentences. Japanese. Japanese academic writing tends to be two things. Number one, it's very repetitive, and this is done to place emphasis on key ideas, which is not something that you see in English writing as much. And secondly, in a lot of Japanese texts, the writing i...

Listen to this interview of Hilary Glasman-Deal and Andrew Northern, teachers of STEMM communication at the Centre for Academic English, Imperial College London. We talk about what's so special about scientists: their communication!

Hilary Glasman-Deal : "You know, if I left this work for just one year, it would be the devil-of-a-job to get back in because the communication norms in each field and even the language itself changes so fast that you've got to go like the wind in order to keep up to date. I mean, let's be honest, we're all a little bit lazy. We'd...

Book workshops produce great books, but too few scholars have access to the resources needed to organize and execute one, especially scholars at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. The 2021 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, launched a new initiative, The Minority-Serving Institution Virtual Book Workshop Project, to provide book workshops for scholars (tenured, untenured, VAP, term appointments) at Minority-Serving Institutions.

In the podcast, the co-directors of the Project discuss the importance of supporting MSI faculty, how to successfully apply, and w...

Listen to this interview of Josh Schimel and Karl Ritz, Editors-in-Chief of Soil Biology and Biochemistry. We talk about the people who all scientists are, and we demonstrate why all that matters to your next submission.

Karl Ritz : "It is definitely important that authors take seriously matters of text presentation and formatting. And one of the reasons, perhaps, people don't understand as to why it matters, as to why we need things in a specific format and following certain rules — the reason is that there are rules here that form the framework, and you can stick your cre...

Today I talked to Michelle Caswell about her new book Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021).

What is the place of archives in our society? In archival studies, an answer to this question often presents an idea of linear, progressive temporality. A common trope goes: We learn history to have a better future. That is why history, and archives as a site of historical evidence, is important. In her thoughtful, groundbreaking work, a feminist archival studies scholar Caswell challenges the white imaginary of linear, progressive time embedded in our conception of archives. Pointing out how community archi...

Listen to this interview of Elena Cotos, Director of the Center for Communication Excellence at the Graduate College (Iowa State University) and also Associate Professor in the English Department (Iowa State University). We talk about the needs of both students and faculty for training in scholarly communication, and we talk about one excellent way that those needs are being met, the Center for Communication Excellence.

Elena Cotos : "When I'd begun, as a student, to write academic texts, you know, initially I'd thought it was my English that was to blame, but then I discovered I just didn't kn...

How can one approach religion as both an academic researcher and a spiritual practitioner? Join us for this wide ranging talk with Dr. Albion Butters, historian of religion and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism. The first half of the conversation focuses on the Finnish Oriental Society (Suomen Itämainen Seura) and academic publishing through the digital journal

Studia Orientalia Electronica, edited by Dr. Butters. In the second half of the episode, Dr. Butters shares his experiences and insights on studying and teaching Buddhism, first in the USA and India, and now in Finland. Dr. Butters is also c...

When Google announced that it planned to digitize books to make the world's knowledge accessible to all, questions were raised about the roles and responsibilities of libraries, the rights of authors and publishers, and whether a powerful corporation should be the conveyor of such a fundamental public good. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization (Princeton University Press, 2021) traces the history of Google's book digitization project and its implications for us today.

In this conversation, we hear from Roger Schonfeld about, not just the history of book digitization, but the dynamic and intricate relationships amongst libraries, pub...

Listen to this interview of Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020). We talk about yesterday today.

Jonathan Zimmerman : "Look, I don't think anyone questions that some of the best teaching they do is in their responses to student drafts and student papers. And, I think this restates the obvious, but: That is highly individuated, right? I mean, unlike a collective exercise, this is targeted directly at the student, and at what she...

Listen to this interview of Joshua Schimel, Professor of soil ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (Oxford UP, 2011). We talk about how writing is research, and about how the Vietnam War was really just one big fat rejected manuscript.

Joshua Schimel : "One of the challenges, I think, we have in science is that all the way up through university, we're being taught scientific knowledge. But that isn't really science. That's the product of science. Science is the process of le...

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum (Routledge, 2021) provides the first interdisciplinary study of the digital documentation of artefacts and archives in contemporary museums, while also exploring the implications of polyphonic, relational thinking on collections documentation.

Drawing on case studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book provides a critical examination of the history of collections management and documentation since the introduction of computers to museums in the 1960s, demonstrating how technology has contributed to the disconnection of distributed collections knowledge. Jones also highlights how separate documentation systems have developed, managed by di...

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

In this episode you’ll hear about: how Megan became an archivist, the unusual collections she works with, why archives can be intimidating, how historians and archivists work together, and archiv...

In Beyond Conversation: Collaboration and the Production of Writing (Utah State UP, 2021), William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy, and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration. 

Our conversation focuses on the processes that remain elusive during a collaborative project (and thus are difficult to teach in a classroom or recognized by the academic ecosystem), the risky accounts that live alongside collaborations, and a few...

What is Open Access Publishing and why is it important? Listen in as Raj Balkaran interviews Dominik A. Haas on his Fair Open Access Publishing in South Asian Studies (FOASAS) initiative which maintains a list of relevant publishers, journals, book series and other publication media. The list is available here. If you know of any other FOA publishers, journals etc. with an emphasis on Indological / South Asia-related research, or have feedback about the list, feel free to contact Dominik directly at dominik@haas.asia

Dominik A. Haas, BA MA, is a DOC Fellow, Austrian Academy of Sciences and...

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

In this episode you’ll hear about: what a book proposal is and isn’t, why you have to write one, the importance of seeking the right “fit” for your manuscript...

Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles:

--use active verbs whenever possible;

--favour concrete language over vague abstractions;

--avoid long strings of prepositional phrases;

--employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence; 

--reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there.

There are exam...

Listen to this interview of Peter Kaufman, Program Manager in Strategic Initiatives and Resource Development at MIT Open Learning and author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021). We talk about us. All of us.

Peter Kaufman : "Well, I'd say this about how to bring about the change my book calls for. Take a broad look at our knowledge institutions. Define them as broadly as we can, so obviously the universities, but there are museums, there are libraries, there are archives, there are public broadcasting institutions, there are historical societies–––and just figure...

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke.

Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is...

After a turbulent political revolt against the military superpower of the early modern world, the tiny Dutch Republic managed to situate itself as the dominant printing and book trading power of the European market. The so-called Dutch Golden Age has long captured the attention of art historians, but for every one painting produced by the Dutch during the seventeenth century, at least 100 books were printed. In The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019), Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen present the untold story of how a group of family-owned businesses transfo...

Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills and research associate in the Department of Entomology in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We talk about learning, actually.

Terry McGlynn : “If you’re giving students a writing assignment, like an experimental protocol, and they’re supposed to write about what they did in the lab or in the field, and it’s a cookbook project, you know, where the students don’t design the...

We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. Written by Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian Ahnert, Nicole Coleman, and Scott Weingart, The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (Cambridge UP, 2021) contends that networks are a cat...

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge.

In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new co...

Listen to this interview of Rachel Sagner Buurma (associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (associate professor of English at the University of North Florida). We talk about there book The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and 

the great figures of English Studies--the professors and the students.

Laura Heffernan : "There is this real sense right now that the ability to read carefully, to learn how to think critically, to learn how to write well, and to conceive of those things as part of a lar...

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

In this episode you’ll hear about: Ros Pyne’s path through higher education, how she found her way to her current job, her role at Bloomsbury Publishers, what Open Access [O...

In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Faith Kearns unpacks science communication as so much more than the “sage from the stage” perspective. Dr. Kearns, through decades of experience and countless interviews, writes to further a conversation for best practices and necessary training for science communication practitioners. In this interview, we discuss the past, present, and future of science communication. We dig into Part II of the book, The Tools of Science Communication, which for those newer to the field or practice, might be shocked to hear has little to do with speaking. Instead, we talk abou...

Listen to this interview of William Tierney, University Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. We talk about his book Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education (SUNY, 2020), about what people really believe when it comes to higher education, and also about what people need to do when it comes to higher education.

William Tierney : "Oftentimes the board and the administration and the faculty are in cahoots with one another, in the sense that the marker is only how to improve in the rankings. And you can see...

Listen to this interview of Brooke Rollins, Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University. We talk about lots of Greeks and about one Frenchman and (if you write) also about you.

Brooke Rollins : "I think there is a way that practice in reading and writing–––that it lines up so nicely with physical training. You know, to run a marathon, you don't simply just run 26.2 miles every day to practise for that. There are things that gradually take you up to that, but it's persistent. It's over an extended period of time. Regularity in reading and writing is imp...

Listen to this interview of Iain McGee (PhD, Cardiff University) a PhD student in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Bristol (UK), and an EAP teacher at Cardiff University.  We talk about his book Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing (Equinox, 2018), the paragraph as a break in the text, about the paragraph as a unit of the text, and about the ¶.

Iain McGee : "Often writing instruction in classroom environments is readerless in terms of the actual text and in terms of who will engage with it. Many writers in classrooms know that the only reader w...

Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London), Cameron Neylon (Curtin University), Daniel Paul O'Donnell (University of Lethbridge), Samuel Moore (Coventry University), Robert Gadie (University of the Arts London), Victoria Odeniyi (University College London), and Shahina Parvin (University of Lethbridge) about their book Reading Peer Review: PLOS One and Institutional Change in Academia, published this year by Cambridge University Press. The book is part of Cambridge UP's "Elements" series. It's also open access. We talk about excellence in higher education and about excellence in scientific research, and we talk about all the trouble that can brin...

Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, editors of Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (published open access by MIT in 2020). We talk about a lot, and all of it, really, falls under the head "Ethics of Scholarly Communication."

interviewer : "How did you conceive of a project of this diversity on the subject of open access and publishing?"

Martin Paul Eve : "What's really interesting to me is that most academics think they know about scholarly publishing because they have all published. This is a bit like me...

Listen to this interview of Ken Hyland, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK. We talked about his book Second Language Writing (Cambridge UP, 2019), the importance of reflection to teaching, and about the importance of teaching to research, and about the importance of research to reflection.

Interviewer : "I wonder whether second language writing isn't sometimes identifying itself too closely with language learning, and not–––well, it should be writing in a second language, shouldn't it? You know, put something up front which is what this is really about."

Ken Hyland : "Yea...

Today I talked to John Thompson, Emeritus Professor, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, about his new book Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity, 2021). We discuss crowdfunding, audio books, distribution chains, social media, self-publishing, ebooks, Amazon, retail, and oh, also those things that are made of paper and glued together and have words printed in them.

Interviewer: "One of the real eye-openers for me in the book was the distance, historically speaking, between readers and publishers. Now, as I think about it, and as I compare what a company like Amazon does to what traditional publishers do...

Today I talked to Helen Sword about Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017). We talk about what not enough people talk about when the subject is writing.

interviewer : "You offer the advice of forming a writing group, because writing groups are, well, just all-around terrific for helping people write as they want to."

Helen Sword : "Exactly, and well, so I try not to be didactic about just about anything having to do with writing––I'm much more about, 'Here's a range of possibilities. Make a considered decision here,' rather than, 'I'm goi...

Listen to this interview of Gerd Bräuer, Head of the Schreibzentrum, the writing center, at Freiburg University of Education. We talk about the place of the internet in writing development, we talk about views on writing in German higher education and more widely in German society and culture, and we talk about Bert Brecht's journals.

Tnterviewer: "What part does a person's biography play in their writing? And I mean the academic writing students do, or also, the academic writing we publish, and not just literature and memoir."

Gerd Bräuer: "Well, in the writing proc...

Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the research article, about writing styles, and about the uses of rhetoric to scientists.

Interviewer: "Too many students learning to write in the sciences lack helpful feedback on their writing, and this causes them to experience, quite personally, that disconnect we were talking about, between doing science and writing science."

Christopher Thaiss: "Feedback is one of the things I return to again and again in the book. And in my teaching, I think that one of...

Listen to this interview of Joan Turner, author of On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). We talk about writers, writing, writers writing, unwritten subtexts, and written text.

Interviewer: "What do you see as the step which writing practitioners can take in the direction of their discipline-based colleagues, and what's the step that researchers can take toward writing practice?"

Joan Turner: "Well, obviously, it has to be something that has to be ongoing, and in many respects, it comes down to individuals. There are a lot of well-meaning researchers who value collaboration wi...

Listen to this interview of Robert Samuels, author of Teaching Writing, Rhetoric, and Reason at the Globalizing University (Routledge, 2021). We talk about grammar, which is what everything really fits inside of. Mostly.

Interviewer : "Clearly, the liberal globalist position will cause some pushback. What would you say to our listeners, what would you say to your readers to help them make that pushback into counterargument?"

Robert Samuels : "Well, it's difficult, because on one hand, if I'm saying we should focus on logic and reason, it seems like I'm saying that we should ignore emotion, but what I...

Today I talked Joe Essid and Brian McTague about their book Writing Centers at the Center of Change (Routledge 2020). We discuss about critical thinking through writing and we talk about what it is that's critical to writing.

Interviewer: What's the next big change you see coming?

Brian McTague: I don't know exactly what that's going to be, but I think it's going to have something to do with adapting what the previous 'normal' model was for writing centers into this new normal that definitely takes into account technology on a broader scale and how we co...

Listen to this interview of David Payne, who is Chief Careers Editor at Nature. We talk about high quality writing, about the gracious community of scientists, and about diversity, diversity, diversity.

Interviewer : "What is the one thing you hope, for sure, that every piece of Careers content will achieve?"

David Payne : "Oh, that's a question, isn't it? You know what, I think it is about emotion. And I just want it to––not tug at your heartstrings, that sounds cheesy––but I feel, we spend so much time at work, and work does define us, rightly or...

Listen to this interview of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, creators of the website newlearningonline.com and also professors at the College of Education, University of Illinois. We talk about monastic instruction in the sixth century, we talk about textbook learning in the sixteenth century, and we talk about cybersecurity education in the twenty-first century, but overall we talk about imbalances in self agency.

Interviewer: "Could you describe one pedagogical affordance of the technology on your learning platform CGScholar?"

Bill Cope: "So, what we're doing is we're using big data and learning analytics as an alt...

Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. We talk about how mutually appreciative attitudes advance Writing in the Disciplines, about how other languages matter to writing in English, and about how US Presidents have changed the ways we teach writing and learn to write.

Interviewer: "Where does language come in to the sort of writing development called Writing Studies or English for Academic Purposes or Academic Literacies?"

Shyam Sharma: "Well, there are language-focused academic curriculums around the world. B...

Listen to this interview of Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications. We talk about knowing the research you have done, but communicating the message you want said.

Interviewer: "When a submission lands on your desk, or better said, you call it up on your screen, what are you pleased to see, what makes your work easier?"

Elisa De Ranieri: "Yeah, well, I guess what makes the job easier for an editor is to receive a paper that is well-written and well-constructed and where the authors are so experienced that they know how to pitch t...

Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, author of Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success (Routledge, 2020). We talk about international students and rhetoric, international students and confidence, international students and community-based programming, and vision.

Interviewer : "Could you give an example for how teachers can foster agency among international students?"

Shyam Sharma : "Let's say you walk into a class and you ask, 'How do people greet in a formal academic setting.' If you say, 'How do people greet in a formal academic setting, in your local community' –– Just add that phrase at the...

Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012). We talk about bad writing, but a lot more about how to make it good. There's even a dog.

Interviewer : "What is it that keeps most students and then, too, many early-career academics away from making the effort to write well?"

Helen Sword : "Writing is seen as this utilitarian thing. You've got to learn it. It's got lots of rules. If you get things wrong, somebody's going to put red ink on there or red tracked changes or whatever. There's a lo...

Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, author of Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study (Routledge, 2018). We talk about talk, tutor talk, student talk, spoken written-language, and Wisconsin.

interviewer : "Now, this is pretty much something that a writing center is aiming for, isn't it? I mean, you don't want that––just as in the classroom with the teacher––you don't want that the writing tutor is doing all of the talking, do you?"

Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, yeah. One of the biggest goals of the writing center tutor is to try to get the student to...

What do university presses do? And how do they contributed to public discourse?

November 9 is the beginning of University Press Week, and today I had the honor of talking to Niko Pfund, the president of the Association of University Presses and the head of Oxford University Press. In the interview, we discuss the work of university presses and their value to the production of knowledge and a vibrant exchange of ideas. We also talked about the challenges UPs face generally and in the time of COVID.

Pfund began his career at Oxford University Press (OUP) in N...

Listen to this interview of Kit Nicholls, Director of Cooper Union Center for Writing. We talk about writing, thinking, the university, and what everyone cares about.

Interviewer : "That's the key, and the sense that I get from many students, and even also from faculty, when it comes to the point that they're writing up their results––well, it's basically, this is just a necessity, a thing that's just sort of got to be got around, got through. But if you can actually provide them with the view that the writing is the research, that you're doing your rese...

Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers.

Rosanne C...

When I put down Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2016), I looked up and began to wonder. I wondered about the book on gnomic poetry in Medieval Greek I had read over the weekend. I wondered about the PDF conference volume on my desktop between other PDFs downloaded at my university library. Casting an eye to the bookshelves along my wall, I looked at the spines of all the books there, upright and peaceful in their rows, and I wondered just who did the publishing of those bo...

Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Among PLOS's suite of journals, PLOS One is the nonprofit's largest in number of articles published and its broadest in coverage, ranging as it does over all topics in the natural sciences and medicine, to include, as well, some in the social sciences, too. PLOS One appears only online, a format the staff bring into service to foster Open Access Science, whether they do this through initiatives for Open Citations and Open Abstract...

Nature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual in journal publishing because in an issue of Nature, research stands side by side with editorials, news and feature reporting, and opinion articles. In fact, over two-thirds of the pieces Nature publishes are journalism and opinion content. This is the remit of Helen Pearson.

Helen Pearson is Chief Magazine Editor of Nature. After her PhD, Helen wanted a "broader view" of science, and so she chose sc...