Note: the blog post linked below is a joke, and I very much regret that pointing that out is necessary. Real academic publishing is so nuts and so close to this that I can almost imagine it happening.

Academic Publisher Unveils New Journal Which Prevents All Access To Its Content This entry was originally posted at http://unjapanologist.dreamwidth. ( Read more... )

HuffPo brings a pile of bizarre with 50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science. A scholar called Douglas Fields argues against open access, mainly by attempting to paint it as a dastardly government takeover of science that will mean the end of rigorous research. I was a little disappointed that he didn' ( Read more... )

Here's a lovely video about why open access for academic articles is so important. It touches upon many key problems with academic publishing, and it's animated by the guy who makes the awesome PhD Comics.

Open access explained! (8min)

( Read more... )

There's a lot of different ways in which you can screw up as an academic, from doing sloppy research full of methodological flaws and bad analysis (maybe so you can quickly monetize it as a popular book), to deliberately plagiarizing and denying other researchers credit for their work in an academic economy where people's reputations and jobs ( Read more... )

The MLA (Modern Language Association), has updated its widely-used citation guidelines for academic papers with a citation style for tweets:

( Read more... )

I recently bought the Kindle edition of this book. $89 for an e-book is beyond obscene, but I rather desperately needed it for research and there was still room in the budget. I considered getting it as a one-month rental for the equally obscene price of $40, but the rentals page explained that the number of highlights that can be made in a rental ( Read more... )

As a "happy birthday to me" present, I'd like indulge in some free speech today. Please skip the next two paragraphs in italics if you're aware of the background here.

This text is about the dismissal from my Belgian home university of another researcher, Barbara Van Dyck. Last week, she attended and defended a protest action that resulted in ( Read more... )

Quick recap: Kristina Busse's keynote "Affect and the individual fan" was given at the Textual Echoes conference and can be viewed in its entirety online. ( Read more... )

This post is abominally late, yes, and I have multiple fine excuses, but let's skip that part. Three weeks ago the conference Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities was held at Umea University, Sweden, in the gorgeous HUMlab space. It was a very inspiring experience, and I've been trying to string together a million separate thoughts about it ( Read more... )

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I spent the last couple of weeks fine-tuning a grant application. Everything hinges on this one three-page text: one wrong word or fuzzy sentence and bam, the application goes straight in the bin. That means reading and rereading and spell-checking and putting in more jargon ad ( Read more... )