Worsham, Lynn. "What Editors Want."
Chronicle of Higher Education September 8, 2008:
Familiarize yourself with the types of articles that a journal publishes and only submit work appropriate for that journal. Pay close attention to the tone and style of work published in the journal and try to duplicate it in your own work. Follow, religiously, the style guide used by the journal. No hybrid styles! Only submit work that you believe to be final, publishable copy. A poorly proofread manuscript wastes your time and mine. Placing your work in the context of articles previously published in the journal is good scholarly practice and helps make your article a better "fit" for the journal. Follow the journal's submission rules — exactly. Develop a healthy attitude toward rejection. You know from the outset that competition is fierce, so maintain a positive attitude. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/09/2008090801c.htm)
Brown, Kevin. "What Professors Want from Editors and Peer Reviewers."
Inside Higher Ed October 2, 2008:
As professors we are not afraid of a healthy debate about ideas, and we seek honest feedback on our work. However, insults, whether directed at those ideas or at us personally, have no place in the critical debate. We would never allow our students to write essays using some of the responses I have seen from readers, nor would we write those comments on our students’ papers. Instead, we would tell them to focus on the ideas of the critics, as we focus on the ideas our students present in their essays. We put aside our personal feelings about the students and try to truly engage the ideas in and of themselves.
What professors truly want is constructive feedback that will make them better writers, thinkers and researchers. If, especially in our early days, we have somehow overlooked a seminal work (or a work that a reader at least believes is seminal), or have faulty logic, then, please, tell us so, but do so in an effort to make us and, therefore, the discipline, stronger. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/02/brown)
Bauerlein, Mark. "The Future of Humanities Labor."
Academe Online (September-October 2008):
“Publish or perish” has long been the formula of academic labor at research universities, but for many humanities professors that imperative has decayed into a simple rule of production. The publish-or-perish model assumed a peer-review process that maintained quality, but more and more it is the bare volume of printed words that counts. When humanities departments and committees and chairpersons examine a professor’s record, all too often they measure the output, not the excellence. And the other duties of mentoring and service slip into secondary requirements. Middling teaching does not much hurt, and great teaching does not help. Administrative work pleases colleagues, but it does not lead to promotions from within or offers from without. Research is all, or rather, research mass eclipses everything else. We have witnessed a steady slide into quantification, evaluation by lines of the vitae containing words in italics.
A friend who teaches at a large midwestern school says that salary increases correlate with book and article publication to the dollar, and he hopes that his next book comes out before year-end recommendations are due. “What if your book isn’t any good?” I ask with a half-smile. “Doesn’t matter,” he replies. When I returned to my own institution after two and a half years of government work and wondered how much credit I would get for pieces appearing during my time away, a dean skipped the quality question and replied, “Well, you have lots of titles, but how many pages do they amount to?” . . .
(Read the rest here: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2008/SO/Feat/baue.htm)
Çakmak, E. Efe and Mark C. Taylor. "Forget Journals! An Interview."
Eurozine December 30, 2008:
Books and journals as we have known them are a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the last to understand this fact are universities and academics. Having said that, the question of how to respond remains to be addressed. In the coming decades, computing will become increasingly distributed and embedded. The movement from the PC to the handheld radicalizes decentralization and changes the nature of communication. People often complain – at least, professors do – that young people do not read anymore. But that is not true. They read all the time but they do not read books or long texts. Mobile technologies scramble everything and make it necessary to recast the terms of analysis. I do not think "transnational" is a useful term here. Again, it smacks of the past and does not help us to understand the reconstitution of political space that has already occurred. Think of everything as a web with constantly shifting nodes, which might be personal, social, economic or biological. The question is where and how to plug into this network.For the most part, presses and journals as they now exist do not serve the interests of intellectual or cultural development. To the contrary, their proliferation is symptomatic of increasing hyper-specialization in which there is more and more about less and less. This is going in the opposite direction of history, in which there is increasing interconnectedness. So my advice is to forget journals – I no longer read any academic journals and I stopped publishing in them years ago. The only function presses and journals serve is to authorize those who write for them among a dwindling group of peers. If ideas are to matter – and I believe it is crucial that they do – we must completely change the way in which they are communicated. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-12-30-mctaylor-en.html)
McLemee, Scott. "Here Comes the Flood."
Inside Higher Ed January 21, 2009:
In the January issue of The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press, tries to imagine a world in which “the well-wrought, slowly gestated essay” has replaced the monograph as the gold standard for scholarship in the humanities. Some of his argument seems familiar. For one thing, Waters tried out an earlier version as a keynote address to the Council of Editors of Learned Journals when they met at MLA in 2007, where I heard it. For another thing, one idea in it came from me: the daydream of a world in which people would be penalized for publishing too much and too early in their careers. This is among the most cherished of my crackpot ideas. By now Waters has doubtless been subjected to some variation of it at lunch, probably more than once. Of course there would be occasions when some wunderkind had so many ideas that brisk and frequent publication became a matter of urgent necessity. But that would be rare. A strictly enforced set of proscriptions would add excitement to things. Picking up a book or journal, you would know that it had involved some risk. Scholars might begin to publish pseudonymously, if they felt it was absolutely urgent to get a piece of research out. The spirit of adventure would probably be good for people’s prose as well. Well, someone has to draw up the floor plans for utopia. I found the page proofs of Waters’s article while trying to clear my desktop before the start of the new administration. (Emphasis on “trying.") The title of the essay is “Slow Writing; or, Getting Off the Book Standard: What Can Journal Editors Do?” Another version ran as a Views piece here at Inside Higher Ed last year — and if you missed it, as I did at the time, I’d recommend a look. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/21/mclemee)
Waters, Lindsay. "A Call for Slow Writing."
Inside Higher Ed March 10, 2008:
What will it take to make essays the standard of achievement once again in the scholarly world? This is not where we are: Books are the gold standard for tenure in most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, so much so that journal articles almost don’t even count. As august a figure as Helen Vendler assured me recently that essays could never replace books as a basis for tenuring junior colleagues. So, in departments of English as on Wall Street, counting is all that counts. “It’s the bottom line, stupid.” Countability is the thing whereby you’ll catch the conscience of the dean, as a friend of Hamlet might advise the young Danish assistant professor or the young Shakespeare scholar. Articles don’t make a thumping sound when you drop them on a table the way a body might in Six Feet Under. I have claimed elsewhere (subscription required) that the book-for-tenure system is coming to an end, that it is unsustainable, that its growth has been an obscenity, because it was mindless, because it sought to make something automatic and machine-like play the role that should only be played by the soul. Please excuse my antiquated language: The “soul,” I remind you, is that faculty of the human body whose juices are made to flow by the exercise of judging myself whether something is of merit. In earlier publications I have charged that professors have been seeking to dodge the one activity that is most essential to their own development when they outsource tenure decisions to bureaucracies and counting replaces reading as the central job of tenure committees, because in that situation content goes by the by. Personally, for me as a publisher, the situation that has arisen is sad beyond endurance. I believe the contents of the books I publish matter. I am not selling milk, which does sustain life, but is homogenized by comparison to book. In fact, milk’s the very definition of homogenized. Each of the books I publish is different. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/10/waters)
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