

Scholarly Communication
New Books Network
Discussions with those who work to disseminate research
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jun 27, 2022 • 37min
Whitney Trettien, "Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
Today’s guest is Whitney Trettien whose book Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork was published through the University of Minnesota Press in 2022. Trettien is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and researches the history of the book spanning print and digital technologies. Cut/Copy/Paste explores makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. The book is complemented with a wide array of resources on early modern publishing available on the book’s webpage hosted by the University of Minnesota Press.John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 24, 2022 • 46min
Combating Fraud and Plagiarism in the Publication of Academic Research
Jason Prevost, coordinating Chair of the Publication Ethics Committee, and Senior Acquisitions Editor at Brill joins Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts, to discuss how publishers handle ethical issues such as plagiarism, questions of authorship, and even fraudulent results. Hear how Jason dealt with a senior professor who refused to credit authorship to his Ph.D. student despite the fact that he wrote a considerable amount of his book. Also, learn how publishers go about retracting problematic research and tracking down the subsequent citations of the faulty research.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 21, 2022 • 1h
Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells, "Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed." (Ubiquity Press, 2022)
Plan S: the open access initiative that changed the face of global research. Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells's book Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed. (Ubiquity Press, 2022) tells the story of open access publishing - why it matters now, and for the future. In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before - something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientific knowledge - and public trust in science is under threat. On 4 September 2018, a bold new initiative known as 'Plan S' was unveiled, kickstarting a world-wide shift in attitudes towards open access research. For the first time, funding agencies across continents joined forces to impose new rules on the publication of research, with the aim of one day making all research free and available to all. What followed was a debate of global proportions, as stakeholders asked: Who has the right to access publicly-funded research? Will it ever be possible to enforce change on a multi-billion dollar market dominated by five major players? Here, the scheme's founder, Robert-Jan Smits, makes a compelling case for Open Access, and reveals for the first time how he set about turning his controversial plan into reality - as well as some of the challenges faced along the way. In telling his story, Smits argues that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the traditional academic publishing system as unsustainable.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 6, 2022 • 40min
English-Language Publishing in Asian Universities and Colleges
Hear from Professor Chris Gerteis, director of the International Publishing Initiative at Tokyo University. Avi and Chris have a fascinating discussion about the role of English language publication in universities and colleges in Asia and his work to assist faculty to publish their books with respected university publishers. Chris shares some of the unexpected hurdles in helping Japanese scholars to publish their work and how reviewers can be more open and understanding to different writing styles, formats, and tones.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 6, 2022 • 1h 11min
Jo Mackiewicz, "Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge" (SUNY Press, 2022)
Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University and editor of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. We talk about welds that hold and about sentences that stand.Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, I'd definitely agree that people can be motivated in what they're learning when they appreciate the art of it. I mean, for instance in welding, you need to put in a certain number of hours in order to have your mind and your body work as one in this technique — you know, you need to become the technique. And that kind of thing doesn't just happen. Your body has to do it over and over and over again for you to become an artist, or in the terms I use in the book, an expert. And those hours that you spend practising in a welding program, or in a writing program for that matter — those hours are all just building up your practice hours, building up your technique, and you keep continuing on towards true expertise."Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 2, 2022 • 59min
Amplifying Academics and Supporting Public Education
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
Why Dr. Marshall Poe left a tenured professorship to create the New Books Network
How his own experience with dyslexia inspired his book-talk podcasts,
Why he wouldn’t want to go back to being a professor now,
Common misconceptions—plus some good advice—about starting a podcast
The NBN’s role in democratizing education and in supporting academic presses.
Our guest is: Dr. Marshall Poe, who is a historian, writer, podcaster, and editor. He is the founder and editor of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of nonfiction authors which began as a single channel in 2007 and has since grown into an archived audio library containing thousands of NBN episodes. He has taught Russian, European, Eurasian, and world history at universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Poe has also authored and edited of a number of books for children and adults. He lives in Northampton, MA.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator of the Academic Life.Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:
A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, by Marshall Poe
Articles by Marshall Poe in the Atlantic
The Grinnell College History Department
The Grinnell College podcast channel on the NBN
The Russian and Eurasian Studies channel on the NBN
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

4 snips
May 31, 2022 • 1h 20min
Julia Molinari, "What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Listen to this interview of Julia Molinari, lecturer in professional academic communication at The Open University (UK) and independent researcher. We talk her book What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022) and about the things people use academic writing for.Julia Molinari : "We need to ensure that teachers of academic writing have access to scholarship and can do the research that they need to do in order to sensitize themselves to the different ways of conceiving of writing. Because I see scholarship very much as a lever to the change that needs to happen in higher education. Scholarship means, for the teacher of EAP, knowing what has been written about academic writing and knowing that there isn't just one standard form, there isn't just one template that says, 'This is academic. This is not academic.' So, enabling practitioners to do research, to do the scholarship — this is something that requires an institutional commitment: people need to have time built into their contracts, they need to be literally paid to do the scholarship, to be aware of what's at stake when it comes to academic writing."The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

May 30, 2022 • 44min
Should Scholars Trust Machine Translation of their Articles?
Should academic scholars trust machine translation for the publication of their academic articles? In this episode, Avi Staiman and Prof. Ana Guerberof Arenas discuss the evolution of machine translation and the most recent developments in machine translation technology. Ana shares her insight on the potential pitfalls of relying on machine translation for unpublished manuscripts. She also shares the results of her recent study on the advantages of human translation for creative and literary texts.Ana Guerberof Arenas is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at University of Groningen. Her project (CREAMT) looks at the impact of MT on translation creativity and the reader's experience in the context of literary texts. Ana is also a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Multimodal Technologies at University of Surrey (UK) where she is a member of the Centre for Translation Studies. She has worked more than twenty years in the translation/localization industry in roles that ranged from translator to operations manager. She has authored refereed articles and book chapters on MT post-editing productivity, quality and experience; pre-editing and post-editing; reading comprehension of MT output; translator training and creativity, and reading experience with different translation modalities.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

May 25, 2022 • 33min
The Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training: A Discussion with Susan Rockwell Johnson and Margery B. Thompson
ADST has the world’s largest collection of U.S. diplomatic oral history. They have over 2,500 oral histories at ADST.orgSusan Rockwell Johnson is the president of ADST since November 2016. She is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service (retired) with over three decades of distinguished service in a broad range of bilateral and multilateral assignments in and out of the State Department.Margery B. Thompson directs ADST’s book-related programs, advises diplomats and others on editing and publishing matters, and coordinates the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. Before joining ADST in 1995, she was director of publications and editor at the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) from 1980 to 1994.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

May 24, 2022 • 41min
How to Start a Successful Academic Podcast: A Discussion with Sean Guillory
Today I talked to Sean Guillory. Sean did something pretty remarkable (and hard): He started a successful academic podcast. It's called the SRB Podcast and deals with Russian and Eurasian affairs. In the interview, Sean explains how he did it, how he does it, and his current project, a wonderful narrative podcast called Teddy Goes to the USSR. I highly recommend you subscribe to the SRB Podcast and Teddy Goes to the USSR. You can follow Sean on Twitter here: @seansrussiablog. Sean Guillory is the Digital Scholarship Curator at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices