A reply from a ‘pracademic’: It is not all mischief, and there is scope to educate budding authors
- Authors: Bussin, Mark H.R.
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Open-science , Article writing , Academic publishing
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/404965 , uj:33985 , Citation: Bussin, M.H.R. 2019: A reply from a ‘pracademic’: It is not all mischief, and there is scope to educate budding authors. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology/SA Tydskrif vir Bedryfsielkunde, 45(0), a1726. DOI : https://doi. org/10.4102/sajip.v45i0.1726
- Description: Abstract : Problemification: Some academics joined the profession from private sector late in their career. They are sometimes referred to fondly as practical academics or ‘pracademics’ because they still work in private sector and also act as a visiting professor in academia. I sit on eight boards and chair nearly half of them, and serve on audit committees and HR Remuneration committees. I am an example of a ‘pracademic’, and my induction into academia was one sentence – publish or perish. In the private sector, induction can take up to a week. I had one minute. Implications: The implication is that I had to find out what a peer-reviewed journal was and trip into the fact that some peer-reviewed journals are scams and others A rated. Telling the difference in my initial years took its toll. I continually had to ask colleagues – is this journal real? Eventually I realised the DHET list was a good starting point and I started submitting articles. I got more rejections than acceptances at first, with very little explanation. So I learnt nothing and did not know what to do to improve. I had to waste another thousand reviewer hours of time to learn what the requirement was. Research writing is guided by a personal philosophy, and it is about what types of research issues one is inclined towards. For instance, some people are naturally inclined towards basic research and others towards applied research. Others are more oriented towards theory building and testing types for the purpose of creating knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Some others are pragmatic types or realist types and believe real-world problems do not come neatly packaged and are somewhat untidily in presentation calling for discretion or judgement on what to prioritise for research and how to carry out the research. Some are scientist practitioners (evidence informed researchers) and others are practitioner-scientist (practice-led science). Perhaps this kind of orientation to research is what early career researchers need initially; then, they can worry about reproducibility of research findings down the line after grounding themselves into the research space they perceive to belong to and where they feel invested. Purpose: The purpose of this opinion article is to share my journey and sow some doubt in reply to the opinion piece circulated by Efendic and Van Zyl. Whilst I do agree with everything that is said in their article, I believe that there is additional information that needs to be considered. Context is important. Not all academics that submit articles have been in academia for many years. We need to do more to support budding authors. Recommendations: We need to be much more helpful to budding authors than just publishing a page or two called author submission guidelines. These are mostly cosmetic style guides. If we want a higher quality submission and plenty of them – then I believe we need to educate our budding authors of the requirements. Perhaps we need a detailed guide, similar in content and depth as the article of Efendic and Van Zyl (2019). We could consider a podcast setting out the technical guidelines and statistical requirements. Running courses on article publishing by the reviewers is important because that is from the horse’s mouth. Trust me; it is not just a case of sticking to the style guide. You need to really understand some of the under currents of article publishing, for example, quoting as many authors from that particular journal’s list of articles as possible.
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Enabling higher education development through challenging commercial academic publishing
- Authors: Habib, Adam
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: Open access , Academic publishing , Commercial publishing , Academic journal subscriptions , Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
- Type: Video
- Identifier: uj:1627 , http://hml.uj.ac.za/Play.aspx?VideoId=113 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/8250
- Description: The history of the Berlin Declaration In 2003, a landmark meeting organised by the Max Planck Society and the European Cultural Heritage Online project brought together international experts with the aim of developing a new web-based research environment using the Open Access paradigm as a mechanism for having scientific knowledge and cultural heritage accessible worldwide. As a result of the meeting, leading international research, scientific, and cultural institutions issued and signed: The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, a document that outlines concrete steps to promote the Internet as a medium for disseminating global knowledge. The Berlin Declaration builds on the widely accepted Budapest Open Access Initiative, which calls for the results of research produced by authors without expectation of payment to be made widely available on the Internet, and to carry permissions necessary for users to use and re-use results in a way that accelerates the pace of scholarship and research.
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Scenarios for the role of libraries in the publishing process
- Authors: Gibbons, Susan
- Date: 2010-05-17
- Subjects: Scholarly communication , Academic libraries , Academic publishing , Digital publishing
- Type: Presentation
- Identifier: uj:1579 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/3312
- Description: There are few people who would claim that the current scholarly communication landscape is sustainable, but the pathway forward to a new scholarly communication paradigm appears so mired in tradition, the status quo and vested interests that it seems impossible to imagine what the future norms will be. Using future scenarios as a tool, perhaps it is possible to jump forward to potential future outcomes and work backwards to construct what those pathways may have been. My talk will present three future scenarios for scholarly communication and discuss the potential impacts of each for academic libraries and publishing. The first future scenario is one which leverages print-on-demand to create just-in-time library collection development. Digital printing offers publishers alternative economic models which can decrease risk while increasing profitability. But while some of the costs of publication can be removed entirely from the production chain, others are shifted to libraries and their users. The second scenario assumes that the legal barriers to the Google Book project are resolved. Google and other major content vendors utilize micro-payments and disaggregate scholarly publications such that libraries are displaced from their role as cooperative purchasing agents on behalf of their academic communities. In contrast, the third scenario significantly increases the role of academic libraries in scholarly communication. Scholarship has pushed beyond the confines of textual presentation such that books and articles can no longer serve as adequate vehicles of scholarship. Scholarly societies take on the peer-review, quality control role, but it falls to libraries, not publishers, to provide access and active, long-term preservation of these new objects. The focus of university presses are reposition into their host institutions such that many return to their original missions of acting for the express purpose of disseminating the research conducted by their local faculty. It is clear that publishing and academic libraries are on the precipice of a dramatic paradigm shift. In 10 or 15 years time, we will likely find that all three of these scenarios are off the mark, but in many ways the exercise of imagining potential futures is more important than the accuracy of the end product.
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The future is now : new roles and relationships for academic libraries
- Authors: University of Johannesburg Library and Information Centre
- Date: 2010-05-17
- Subjects: Academic libraries , Information technology , Academic publishing , Internet access , e-Learning , Conference proceedings
- Type: Other
- Identifier: uj:1585 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/3318
- Description: Welcome to this very exciting conference focusing on the changing roles and relationships of academic libraries which goes hand in hand with the rapid development of information technology. Last year, when we started planning for the conference we came to the conclusion that the title ‘The Future is Now’ expresses our experience of being overtaken by technology, in a unique and innovative way. However, when we did a Google search on the phrase we found that it was a widely used phrase which gives expression to the global village’s experience that developments which we thought lie in the future are overtaking us as a result of the rapid development of Internet and mobile technologies. Despite its lack of originality, we decided to stick to the title, because there was no better way of saying what we wanted to say. I repeated the Google search about a year later, when I was busy writing this welcome note to you, and this time carefully noted the number of hits: 128 000 000. Most significantly I found two websites relating to the impact of information technology on the world of libraries within the first 20 hits. One was the website of an eponymous ALA conference on libraries and museums in the virtual word held on 5 and 6 March 2010 (http://www.opal-online.org/finindex.htm). The conference dealt with the use of Second Life in libraries and museums. The other was an article on the launch of Elsevier’s ‘Article of the Future‘ project (http://www.cell.com) on 7 January 2010. Both these hits underlined the impact of technology on our world and the need to consider the way forward as a result of it. George Will said that ‘the future has a way of arriving unannounced’. It is the sincere hope of the Conference Organising Committee that this conference will help prevent the future of taking us unawares. We believe that your presence here will inspire and motivate you to explore the new technologies and harness it to sustain and improve on academic libraries’ proud tradition and history of moving with the times. - Dr Anette van Vuren, Conference Chair.
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