Posts tagged Publishing
How I published a book, thanks to The Open Laboratory
Sep 1st
Available at Scribd & Lulu
I’ve been busy in August, and one of the things I’ve been working on has been out for a couple of weeks and I forgot to blog it. I’ve published a book.
I haven’t written a book, or edited it or anything requiring any academic input. I just worked on the publishing. The book is the first volume of the Proceedings from the GIREP-EPEC and PHEC 2009 conference. In English, it was a Physics Education conference. I had nothing to do with the conference, but my Head of Department mentioned to a colleague at McMaster University that he was going to publish a proceedings volume and she remembered I’d worked on the cover for the first Open Laboratory book, and so must be an expert in publishing.
I’m not, but as Shawn Graham has shown, the actual process of publishing a book via Lulu is easy and pain-free if you’re willing to make some compromises. The drawbacks are things like a lack of professional typesetting, but these days publishers often insist on camera-ready copy anyway. There’s also no marketing. For some conference volumes this will be a line in a catalogue and an email and, possibly a display at More >
Debunking Academics
Mar 24th
Duty Calls by xkcd
I have some sympathy with alternative archaeologists when it comes to debunking. It’s common to see bloggers debunking their work, but not so much other academics. One reason for that could be that academics, doing their work as a professional job in specialist domains aren’t likely to make as many mistakes as an amateur with a theory that covers a couple of thousand years and the entire globe. But that can only be half the story. Some bloggers don’t criticise other academics at all. Wouldn’t it be a bit odd that academics never make any mistakes? What should you do when they do?
A couple of months ago, I read an odd paper, we’ll call it Paper A, for reasons that might become clear below. Author A made a very simple and basic mathematical error. Something a bit like mixing up a plus and a minus sign and concluding that the Great Pyramid was a hole around 150 metres deep. It wasn’t that bad, but the author thought the conclusions flew in the face of everything known about a site. Still, the mathematics were conclusive, so he had to go with it. There were more errors, but basically the More >
Why PLoS?
Nov 19th
I’ve published a paper with PLoS One which should be out today. The most common question I’ve been asked so far is: Why there? I’m applying for jobs in Archaeology and Ancient History, so why would I want to publish in an online journal that hardly anyone in those fields has heard of? Surely publishing in one of the big journals would be better? Here’s a few reasons.
- It’s fast. The paper was submitted on the 8th of September and I got the acceptance, subject to revisions on the 30th of September. I wouldn’t be quite so happy if it had been rejected, but you have to be prepared for that. The faster there’s a decision the quicker you can work on the revisions or else re-write for another journal. The rapid response means that I can cite the data in this paper in other papers immediately rather than delaying writing about further work.
- It’s accessible. Research might be interdisciplinary, but not so many journals are. For this paper the alternatives would be publication in specialist archaeoastronomy, classics, archaeology or astronomy journals. I can do that and will do that in the future, but writing for those journals means writing for those specific audiences. If More >
Bookmarks for 16th of November through to 18th of November
Nov 18th
These are my links for 16th of November through 18th of November:
- The Academic Journal Racket « In the DarkTelescoper explains how academic publishing works. The only thing that would improbe the post would be the theme from 'The Naked Gun' in the background.
- A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’ – NYTimes.comYou can make arguments in favour of repatriation of antiquities. You can make arguements against. Being on either side doesn't make you inherently foolish. But when you write that the British Army took the Rosetta Stone from the French and "returned it to the British Museum" then something has gone wrong. It's probably a case of momentary brainfade rather than idiocy, but it matters because the whole question of ownership of the Rosetta Stone is about where it rightfully belongs. Using the word 'returned' builds in the assumption that all antiquities are inherently British.
- Notes & Queries; Sledges – Theoretical Structural ArchaeologyGeoff Carter concluded he didn't have evidence for a staggeringly early cart shed in Poland. Could it have been a used to house a sledge? I've just realised I know absolutely nothing at all about the history of sleds and sledges. Not only that, but I can't recall much attention More >
Time and Mind launches – first issue free
Mar 5th
I liked 3rd Stone, which was a magazine about all things megalithic in a middle ground between academics and the fringe. Unfortunately it had to close. The people behind it are back with the help of Berg and a new journal Time and Mind. I was going to say it’s a lot more expensive, but I’m not sure it is – £45 for six issues over two years in print, or £25 for a year. If you want the online version then you should be prepared to sacrifice an internal organ (it’s £125 for a year) but the print fees seem more reasonable than a few other journals I could think of.
I haven’t had time to read it, so I can’t tell you if the magic has been lost or not. I am looking forward to reading Jeremy Harte’s The Devil on Dartmoor, which argues that the myths of the moors are the products of the Victorian tourist industry.
I suspect the paper which will grab the attention of most people will be Benny Shanon’s on biblical drug use. A quick skim raises some pretty basic questions about how you tackle how historical record was created. If the text was written More >
Scholarly Journals between the Past and the Future by Martin Rundkvist.
Feb 16th
Rundkvist, M. 2007. Scholarly Journals between the Past and the Future: The Fornvännen Centenary Round-Table Seminar, Stockholmm 21 April 2006. Konferenser 65. Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien.
It’s a measure of the quality of this book that I have delayed putting up a review until I have thought it could get the audience it deserves. The volume brings together papers by nine editors of journals across Europe, each with their own perspective on what the future holds for publishing. Their opinions are diverse and provocative, but even where some assertions are demonstrably wrong they highlight misconceptions about publishing which need to be tackled.
The first paper is ‘Scholarly Open Access Journals and Libraries’ by Jan Hagerlid. This can be an overlooked aspect of the Open Access debate, with academics concentrating on the content rather than the medium. Hagerlid raises some interesting points highlighting that the aims even of of traditional and conservative scholars do not necessarily align with those of publishers. For example he notes that the transition to electronic subscription would have mean the end of the inter-library loan, had the publishers been granted what they demanded. He also argues that it would be wrong to treat publishers as a More >
Blog cited in a peer-reviewed journal
Feb 13th
Bill Caraher mentioned recently that Law and Literature are fields which are accepting citations of blog posts in articles. We can add another to the list, Archaeology.
Giulio Magli has a paper on the Orientation of Roman towns in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology this month. I’m not going to comment much on his conclusions because it would mean writing up extensive amounts of work in progress for a blog. What I will draw attention to is the bibliography.
I’ve been working on a statistical model for analysing Greek temple alignments. If it’s sound then it would work not only for sets of astronomical alignments, but also possibly questions about coin distributions or plant populations or things further afield than archaeology. That’s if. It’s work-in-progress. (more…)
Name that Blog Carnival / Journal
Feb 10th
I put up a proposal for a blog carnival / journal hybrid at the Ancient World Bloggers Group. We’ve got the management committee and the 1st issue editors. What we need is a name.
I suggested The Past Discussed Quarterly, but David Meadows makes the very good point that Q could be a real bind in the future if we want to change schedules, so I’m thinking PD would be better. But are David and I in a minority? A lot of people like PDQ. You can visit the AWBG and have your say or suggest something else.
We’ll start calling for entries shortly.
Research Blogging / BPR3 is in open Beta
Jan 22nd
This could be something major for blogging. BPR3 has opened up its aggregator on a trial basis to bloggers at ResearchBlogging.org. It’s a site with a handy icon to identify when someone is blogging about peer-reviewed research. It’s also an aggregator for these posts. This gets interesting because you can browse by category, like Anthropology. Historians have to make do with the Other category for now, but if it takes off amongst historians and classicists then it seems a new category would be feasible.
What I particularly like about is is the citation generator. This puts all citations in the same format and when you visit the homepage you can see the opening of the blog post, and the paper it cites. I suspect the generator works easily with a DOI, but that’s rare in archaeology and ancient history at the moment. Thankfully the manual entry isn’t painful.
To work with it, I’ve created a new category here Research Blogging. The first entry will be comments Peter Heslin’s new paper in JRS on the Horologium Augusti which goes live 23rd of January. I’m already getting searches for that. Hopefully there’ll be a weekly or fortnightly addition of other papers. I may also More >
Archaeology 2.0
Jan 11th
Immersive Archaeology. Photo (cc) John Lester
Second Life is one of those things I’m wary of, like Facebook. There’s plenty of people getting excited about them both, but it seems like a very insidous way of building into a gated community and a proprietary format. Electric Archaeology has persuaded me that Second Life could be worth a second look.
Shawn Graham has put up two posts. Archaeology in Second Life…. Where to begin? and Planning archaeology in Second Life (2). Eric Kansa has been throwing around some brilliant ideas as well at Digging Digitally looking at 2nd Life and Archaeological Databases. In my head till now Second Life has been next door to Doom, Quake and Half-Life, but not as compelling due to the lack of gore. The archaeological models I’ve seen have been painstakingly created, but they’ve always seemed unrealistic. Partly because of the limitations of technology, but also because they tend to be re-creations of monuments and artefacts in pristine condition. Between them Shawn and Eric have shown Second Life could be much more interesting if you take another approach and try and build a virtual excavation. (more…)
