Tagged / Academic Writing Month

Request for your paper: A historical perspective

Any publishing academic will irregularly receive emails for copies of their papers, usually for papers which researchers or students can’t access through their own institution.  Different universities have different expensive deals with publishers, and especially for universities in low-income countries this can be very limiting.  Apart from requests for papers I also receive email requests for book chapter which are part of commercial textbooks, or people asking for a PDF, i.e. a free electronic copy, of the whole textbook.  Recently I have also had a couple of requests for papers which are already freely available as Open Access publications.  I assume the latter are simply requests from lazy students, who searched a bibliographic data base found several (many?) relevant papers.  Without too much thinking they send quick automated email through ResearchGate, which is less work that searching for each actual Open Access paper online.

It did not always use to be that easy to approach an academic for a copy of their scientific paper.  When I started as a PhD student, before the widespread use of the internet, if your university library did not have a subscription to the journal you were looking for, you would write a short letter to an academic author, post the letter, and if your were lucky, receive a printed copy of the requested paper in the post a few weeks later. The more established academics would have pre-printed postcards to speed up the process of requesting an academic paper.  The photo of the 1959 (for the record this was before I was born!) shows one of such cards from a doctor based in the Netherlands.  The effort involved meant you asked only for papers you were pretty sure where central to your research, you would not do the equivalent of sending out 40 emails, hoping to get PDFs of six or seven papers relevant to your essay topic.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMWH

Will you take part in AcWriMo – Academic Writing Week?

We have received this announcement from CREST (Consortium for Research Excellence Support and Training):

Logo Consortium for Research Excellence Support and TrainingCREST is delighted to be participating in this year’s Academic Writing Month, or #AcWriMo. AcWriMo was created in 2011 by Charlotte Frost, founder of PhD2Published. It is a month long festival of writing hoping to create some good writing habits or help you get some writing done.

The CREST team has developed a set of activities to support you and encourage you with your writing. We will be holding online twitter conversations throughout November, suitable for researchers at any career stage. We will be available online between 8am  and 10am on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday each week for writing together sessions on Twitter and Slack.

How to take a part

  • Sign up to CREST AcWriMo 2018 to get updates
  • Follow @crestuk on Twitter and join in discussion. Remember to use #CRESTAcWriMo and #AcWriMo2018 in your posts
  • Join us on  Slack every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between 8 and 10 am.
  • Post to CREST AcWriMo 2018 Wall. We are asking all interested in taking part to publicly announce their intention to write. In this way you are more likely not to give up as it creates a feeling of taking a part in a ‘real and not online event’.
  • Track your Progress

What to do

  • Make a plan and research your topic in advance
  • Book some time in your diary for writing
  • Set yourself a daily goal (can be anything, we are suggesting 300-500 words or more), start writing and document your progress
  • Update your column in the CREST AcWriMo 2018 Progress sheet as often as you can (we suggest writing daily and updating daily)
  • Tweet us some photos of how is your writing going, how is your desk looking or of the view from your writing space. Don’t forget to include #acwrimo2018 #CRESTAcWriMo
  • There is a writing retreat in November 2018 but this is only open to those from CREST member institutions (BU is not a member)

Looking forward to writing with you!

Your CREST team,
Tijana, Rachel and Matthew