How Academic Organizational Systems and Culture Undermine Scholarship and Quality Research: A Response to Ron Dulek    

I now believe that the architects of a university's systems have extraordinary power and leverage to shape academic life in ways faculty often are only dimly aware of. Finally, we can help change the talk or narrative in our organizations about publications and reshape it to discussions about rewarding a blend of scholarship, research, publication, teaching, and service. Changing organizational talk is extremely difficult. Determining leverage points or openings for new language is hard to determine. Also, it's a challenge to determine ways to make that different language contagious, to make it stick. But I believe the challenge is worth pursuing, and it's work we should be good at. As Malcolm Gladwell (2000) points out in The Tipping Point, new language can be contagious, small actions can have big effects, and change can occur fast. In fact, if I were to step back into my Arcadian world of innocence where truth and beauty reigned, I might even believe that our colleagues and even our academic administrators have grown tired of the research bean-counting game and would welcome a new language, a different conversation, and a more growth-inducing set of values about the work we do.

Suchan, Jim. JBC (2008). Articles>Publishing>Research

How Offset Printing Works

Printing is a fascinating process involving huge high-speed machines, 2,000-pound rolls of paper, computers, metal plates, rubber blankets and sharp knives.

Mine, Mark. How Stuff Works (2002). Articles>Publishing>Prepress>Printing

How Scientists Retrieve Publications: An Empirical Study of How the Internet Is Overtaking Paper Media  

Bo-Christer Björk and Ziga Turk, editor and one of the co-editors of the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction, surveyed scientists and discovered that they increasingly look to e-journals for information.

Bjork, Bo-Christer and Ziga Turk. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2000). Articles>Publishing>Online

How to Create Adobe PDF eBooks

Creating eBooks that can be bought, downloaded, and viewed online has never been easier or more secure. In Adobe's How to Create Adobe PDF eBooks, you'll find the basic procedures and techniques you need to create eBooks in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Learn how to design good document templates for eBooks, convert your documents to Adobe PDF using recommended eBook job options, and optimize your Adobe PDF documents so that they display at their best in the free Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader.

Adobe (2003). Design>Publishing>Online>Adobe Acrobat

How to Get Your Blog Mentioned in the Society for Technical Communication's Intercom: Include the Word "Technical Communicator"

The keywords that set off the Intercom editor's Google Alert no doubt included technical communicator, technical writer, technical communication, and Society for Technical Communication.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2008). Articles>Publishing>Online>Blogging

How to Prepare A Winning Book Proposal

Preparing a winning book proposal is very similar to bidding on many other freelance documentation projects. This article will show you how to create a book proposal that will give you the best chance of selling your book idea to the publisher you want.

Hedtke, John. IEEE PCS (2008). Articles>Publishing>Proposals

How To Write A Book

This website was created to help your inner author navigate through the mires of book-writing, tell you how to write a book and explain the author-publisher relationship.

How To Write A Book. Resources>Publishing>Writing

How to Write and Publish Scientific Papers: Scribing Information for Pharmacists  

Scientific writing can be both professionally and financially rewarding, but many pharmacists hesitate to write for publication. A primary obstacle is not knowing how to begin. Thoughtful planning is the first and most important step. Before writing a word, the writer should identify the main message, audience, target journal, resource materials, type of manuscript, and authorship.

Hamilton, Cindy W. Hamilton House (1992). Articles>Scientific Communication>Publishing

Hypertext  

Linked presentation as we know it today -- a navigation menu, a table of contents, a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) -- suits informational material such as technical manuals, government documents, and most scientific research papers. These presentation formats do little to enhance narrative forms, however. Most discussion of online narrative -- and most experimentation -- has centered on fiction (Coover, 1993, 2000; Minganti, 1996) and literary studies (Landow, 1992; Lavagnino, 1997). Journalism narratives, especially long-form journalism, are overdue for attention.

McAdams, Mindy and Stephanie Berger. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2001). Articles>Publishing>Hypertext>FAQ

Modern Chivalry and the Case for Electronic Texts  

Finding editions of particular literary texts for the purposes of teaching or research has always been a problem for literary scholars. Given the current proliferation of electronic versions of texts available on the World Wide Web, it is tempting to assume that the problem is solved. Yet most professors are reluctant to use these sites and do not often recommend them to students. In reflecting on the reasons for this phenomenon, the most obvious causes seem to stem from questions of authority, design, and a general lack of knowledge concerning what is available and where it can be attained.

McIntire-Strasburg, Janice. TWI (2003). Articles>Publishing>Online

The Impact of Perceptions of Journal Quality on Business and Management Communication Academics    

This commentary describes and critiques criteria that, according to results from an Association for Business Communication (ABC) member survey, are having an impact on quality judgments about our journals. ABC members rank the Journal of Business Communication and Business Communication Quarterly as top research and pedagogical journals in business/management communication, a finding corroborated by a larger study of academics in business and technical communication. However, the growing importance of citation counts and journal rankings currently disadvantages our journals, presenting us with professional obligations and personal dilemmas in relation to them. The authors' purpose is to raise awareness of the various determinants of perceptions of journal quality, to explore the communal views of ABC members on this issue, and to seek ways of enhancing the value of business/management communication research in the academic marketplace.

Rogers, Priscilla S., Nittaya Campbell, Leena Louhiala-Salminen, Kathy Rent and Jim Suchan. JBC (2007). Articles>Publishing>Research>Assessment

Imparting Values to the Peer Review Process    

Writing is popularly believed to be a spontaneous exercise. Often it is, but one cannot sustain oneself as a writer of merit, as a writer whose works will live on, without quality. Quality control--who could disagree with that? Whatever we write needs to be freed from both paper and its production costs, but not from peer review, whose 'invisible hand' is what maintains its quality. Peer review is educative, informative, enlightening. Peer review invests you with the confidence that eggs you on to keep writing. Peer review offers you the credibility you seek in the writing market, from editors, publishers, agents and readers. Peer review lends respect to your writing, and with time, to your by-line.

Aiyyangar, Ramesh. International Journal for Technical Communication (2006). Articles>Publishing>Online

In Google We Trust?  

Trust, authority, and reputation are central to scholarly publishing, but the trust model of the Internet is almost antithetical to the trust model of academia. Publishers have been so preoccupied with the brute mechanics of moving content to the online world that they have virtually ignored the challenge that the Internet trust model poses to the scholarly publisher. Publishers can learn much about approaches to handling Internet trust from the actions of major online players outside the publishing industry. Publishers should also benefit from watching the trust models that are being experimented with in the nascent realm of social software applications. Publishers once led the way in establishing the apparatus of trust during the transition from manuscript to print culture in early modern Europe. Ultimately, publishers should again take the lead in helping to establish new mechanisms of trust in what could reasonably be described as 'the early modern Internet.'

Bilder, Geoffrey. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2006). Articles>Publishing>Online>Search

In-form-ation

The ultimate determinant of a good form is whether it enables you to get the information you want. To achieve this purpose, you must look at the form from the point of view of the person completing it.

Right Words. Design>Publishing>Forms

Increasing a Reader's Interest and Comprehension Through Basic Information Design

If you present information in multiple media, with complementary information, that address multiple learning styles, you increase a reader’s interest and comprehension by 65%.

Lynn, Michelle Corbin. Carolina Communique (1999). Design>Publishing>Visual>Visual Rhetoric

Independent Publishing is Growing Up

It can be said that the first year you publish an independent web zine you are in the process of learning the concept of the independent web. There is no one definition that could incapsulate what is and what isn't the indepenedent web other than the independent web is free. Free from commercialization. Free from censorship. Free from politics. Free from the boxes that we can find ourselves working our day jobs. The independent web movement is about everything we can't do elsewhere. What we can't do at our day jobs, we do on the web. What we can't do in our country, we do on the web. What we can't express elsewhere, we express on the web. We do it by ourselves for ourselves. It's our sandbox and it is our right to express ourselves not just as citizens of a country but as human beings as individuals.

Finck, Nick. Digital Web Magazine (2002). Articles>Publishing>Online

The Ineffable Mystery of Paper Grades  

It was so much easier when we just had papyrus.

Sidles, Constance J. Adobe Magazine (1999). Design>Publishing>Prepress>Paper

The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices  

This study reports on five disciplinary case studies that explore academic value systems as they influence publishing behavior and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. The case studies are based on direct interviews with relevant stakeholders -- faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors -- in five fields: chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics. The results of the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in the choices faculty make regarding their publishing behavior. The perceptions and realities of the reward system keep faculty strongly adhered to conventional, high-stature print publications (and their electronic surrogates) as the means of reporting research and having it institutionally evaluated. Perceptions of electronic-only publications are frequently negative because those venues are considered to lack strong peer review and are, consequently, believed to be of relatively lower quality. There is much more experimentation, however, with regard to means of in-progress communication, where single means of publication and communication are not fixed so deeply in values and tradition as they are for final, archival publication. We conclude that approaches that try to 'move' faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, 'final' publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term. From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas.

Harley, Diane, Sarah Earl-Novell, Jennifer Arter, Shannon Lawrence and C. Judson King. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2007). Articles>Publishing>Research>Case Studies

Institutional Repositories: Partnering with Faculty to Enhance Scholarly Communication

Institutional repositories build on a growing grassroots faculty practice of posting research online, most often on personal web sites, but also on departmental sites or in disciplinary repositories. This demonstrates a desire for expanded exposure of, and access to, their work. In addition, digital publishing technologies, ever-expanding global networking, and enabling interoperability protocols and metadata standards are coalescing to provide practical technical solutions that can be implemented now. The convergence of these interrelated strands indicates that institutional repositories merit serious and immediate consideration from academic institutions and their constituent faculty, librarians, and administrators.

Johnson, Richard K. D-Lib Magazine (2002). Articles>Publishing>Online

An Interactive Genre Within the University Textbook: The Preface    

This article examines the communicative categories and linguistic features of university textbook prefaces. The textbook preface is a highly interactive genre, with a double purpose: informative and promotional. The analysis of the genre moves and of their realization reveals that the preface is used by the author both to help the audience use the book and to convince them of the value of the book. This twofold purpose accounts for the most relevant features of prefaces: the frequent use of textual metadiscourse and the pervasive presence of evaluation. The criteria used in the preface to evaluate the textbook are related to the audience s expectations about introductory textbooks: novelty, usefulness, accessibility, comprehensiveness, importance, and interest.

Luzón, María José. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (1999). Articles>TC>Publishing>Genre

The Intercultural Component in Textbooks for Teaching A Service Technical Writing Course    

This research article investigates new developments in the representation of the intercultural component in textbooks for a service technical writing course. Through textual analysis, using quantitative and qualitative techniques, I report discourse analysis of 15 technical writing textbooks published during 1993-2006. The theoretical and practical elements of intercultural teaching have been expanded in recent years, but this progress is quite slow. This article provides some directions in which the textbooks can be revised. Such an analysis may be of interest to textbook writers and educators.

Matveeva, Natalia. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Education>Publishing>International

Introduction to Electronic Publishing on the Internet  

Publishing electronically is becoming increasingly important as global networks expand, providing a new audience. for the new medium. The volume of information available electronically is staggering, and electronic media are becoming available to thousands of more people daily. The audience for electronic publishing is vast, educated, scientifically and technologically sophisticated, and international, perhaps more so than for print publications. Electronic professional journals (e-journals) are gaining acceptability, especially when editors exercise credible peer review. Because many technical communicators are technologically oriented, they are well positioned to facilitate electronic document publishing Knowing how to use the Internet can be an important job skill.

Farrell, Susan and Leigh McElvaney. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Publishing>Online

Is Scientific Writing on the Fast Lane of the Information Highway? An Analysis of Electronic Publishing  

Because of the advances of computer technology and the accessibility of the Information Information Superhighway, electronic publishing is surpassing print literature. Electronic publishing includes libraries, on-demand publishing and journals. This paper specifically covers the purpose of electronic journals and the techniques for publishing. It also focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of electronic journals, and asks 'Is it a viable form of written communication?'

Burdan, Amy L. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Scientific Communication>Publishing>Online

Issues in Sustainability: Creating Value for Online Users  

Based on a talk given at the 2003 IMLS Web-Wise Conference, this paper addresses two issues related to the long-term sustainability of collections that museums, libraries, and other heritage institutions put online. The first is that of building collections and services that are core to the mission of the institution and that are likely to win support among its users. The second is the planning process of building those collections and services. In the latter case, Smith describes an IMLS-funded project that the Council on Library and Information Resources has undertaken to assess the business planning processes used by museums and libraries and offer models to follow.

Smith, Abby. First Monday (2003). Articles>Publishing>Online