Scholarly Communication

In this episode of Publish My Book, we explore the essential role of a well-crafted book index in academic publishing. A good index helps readers easily locate specific topics, names, or places, making your book more accessible and impactful. Avi discusses different types of indexes—such as subject, author, and sources indexes—and provides guidance on creating one. We emphasize starting the process early, choosing relevant terms, and ensuring accuracy. While some authors prefer to create their own index, outsourcing to experts is also an option.Relevant linksTo learn more about ALE’s indexing services: Indexing Process Indexing Services Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Publish My Book, we explore open-access publishing, a model designed to make publicly funded research freely available to everyone. Unlike traditional publishing, where readers or libraries pay for access, open access requires authors or their institutions to cover upfront fees—often $4,000 to $6,000—to make their books freely accessible.We discuss the benefits of open access, such as broader readership, higher citation rates, and increased impact. We also brought up the challenges, particularly the financial burden, and offer practical tips for authors, including applying for grants, adding open-access fees to funding proposals, and exploring models like Subscribe to Open, where libraries pool resources to support open-access titles.Relevant linksResources for securing OA funding Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Sakina Fatima, Research Fellow, University of Ottawa, Canada; and also, Taher Ghaleb, Assistant Professor, Trent University, Canada. We talk about the coauthored paper Flakify: A Black-Box, Language Model-based Predictor for Flaky Tests (TSE 2023).Taher Ghaleb : "With our RQs, it's not just a matter of there being a problem with flaky tests. I mean, every researcher in this area already know that flaky tests is a problem. So, when we talk about the problem in our paper — or specifically, about the motivation behind our RQs — it's not about the flaky tests, because that's just the core problem which we already know — but instead, we talk the problem with existing approaches to flaky tests." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Abubakar Mohammed, Manager, Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, Nigeria. We talk about the coauthored paper Cybersecurity Challenges in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry: An Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) Perspective (TCPS 2022).Abubakar Mohammed : "I would put the success of the paper down to us just generally understanding the audience we want. Because, we were quite clear about who our audience are — we were looking at security experts who need to secure oil-and-gas critical infrastructure — and these experts have been, like us, inundated by nonspecific research talking about loads of other industries, but not the oil and gas industry. So, we were targeting that sort of professionals, and we were targeting government officials who are in charge of making specific legislation to improve the cyber-hygiene of the oil and gas industry." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Arjun Guha, Associate Professor, Northeastern University. We talk about his coauthored paper MultiPL-E: A Scalable and Polyglot Approach to Benchmarking Neural Code Generation (TSE 2023).Arjun Guha : "My group and our collaborating colleagues really try to pick problems carefully so that we choose a problem that we can attack with the expertise that we have. So, for example, to pull off a benchmark like the one in this paper, you needed a group of students who were all interested in their own weird programming languages." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Ricardo Amaro, Senior Engineering Manager, Acquia, USA, and also a PhD Researcher, ISCTE—University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. We talk about his coauthored paper Capabilities and Practices in DevOps: A Multivocal Literature Review (TSE 2023).Ricardo Amaro : "One of the main challenges we've been experiencing in DevOps is, let's say, the cultural resistance to change — and really, it's questions like these that, sure, academia have tried to answer, but to be honest, they try from a perspective that's a little bit siloed, because they are not attempting to start a conversation to find consensus."Link to Guideline for Including Grey Literature and Conducting Multivocal Literature in Software Engineering (IST 2019)Link to QualCoder, qualitative data analysis software Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Isaac da Silva Torres, Postdoctoral Research, TU Delft, Netherlands. We talk about his coauthored paper Guidelines to Derive an e3value Business Model from a BPMN Process Model: An Experiment on Real-world Scenarios (SOSYM 2023).Isaac da Silva Torres : "I'm an industrial engineer, and I've worked in a lot of companies. Then afterwards, I worked for the government, back in Brazil. And then I came to the Netherlands to do my PhD. But, my work experience, as a business analyst, had always positioned me between business and IT somehow — and being this bridge, well, this worked really well for me. Because, being in between, you really can appreciate, for example, the interests of both sides. I mean, people in business departments, when it comes to digital transformation, for example — they're totally focused on the system — but of course, the people from IT are like, 'Okay, but can you give me the requirements. What exactly do you want?' I'm able to see those two sides, and can act." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Sumon Biswas, Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University. We talk about his coauthored paper The Art and Practice of Data Science Pipelines (ICSE 2022).Sumon Biswas : "Yeah, it's true, not many people are working in software design and software architecture — at least at ICSE — and in fact, this has been an important discussion in SE research in general: How can we increase contributions in software design and architecture? And there has been an important push, at ICSE, and at FSE as well, to make the research more representative." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Steffen Zschaler, Reader, King's College London, UK; and of Fiona Polack, Professor, University of Hull, UK. We talk about their coauthored paper Trustworthy Agent-based Simulation: The Case for Domain-specific Modelling Languages (SOSYM 2023).Fiona Polack : "The sort of collaborative environment that brings together researchers from many different backgrounds — that's an environment that's very, very creative — and what's more, it also encourages people to address not just the immediate problem, but also to think how you can solve problems more generally, because you keep meeting the same basic problem, it's just dressed up in a different guise." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publishing, in interviewing Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network, the largest academic podcasting platform in the world. The trio discuss how the New Books Network came to be; how digital technologies open up new tools for academic work; changing media landscapes, including the recent bursting of a podcasting bubble; and the future of academic communication and publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices