Scholarly Communication

Listen to this interview of Christopher Reddy, environmental chemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. We talk about his book Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide (Routledge Earthscan 2023). Christopher Reddy : "Communication definitely teaches us scientists things that we hadn't knows or appreciated, even in our own research. I mea...

Listen to this interview of Prem Devanbu, Distinguished Research Professor in Computer Science, University of California, Davis. We talk about using cross-disciplinary pollination to interrogate ideas and also oneself. Prem Devanbu : "Science is a social process. You put some idea out, and other people try to figure out if it makes sense or if you've made some mistake with it, or whether you've as...

Listen to this interview of Katherine Firth, academic at, Australia. We talk about the necessary trouble that people have when they write new knowledge. We also talk about the unnecessary trouble that people have when they imagine that this first sort doesn't exist. Firth is the co-author of How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble: A Practical Guide (Open UP, 2018). Katherine Firth : "Most people...

Listen to this interview of Christian Kästner, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about reading papers, and how to do that while balancing speed and accuracy, and we talk about writing papers, and how to do that for a reader going fast and moving with purpose. Christian Kästner: "I don't want my reader to be doing a lot of work synthesizing details...

Listen to Episode No.6 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and today as well, Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. In this episode of the F...

Listen to this interview of Natalie Aviles, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia. We talk about how organizations shape people, and how people shape science. Natalie Aviles : "I think, in general, the more self-conscious that scientists can be about what motivates them, about what makes them happy, about what drives them — the more, then, they can try to imagine a future that s...

Listen to this interview of Wouter Lueks, faculty at the CISPA Helmhotz Center for Information Security. We talk about getting into the reviewer's mindset, and also about research collaboration outside the walls of the university. Wouter Lueks : "For first ideas, you don't need writing. You can stand in front of the whiteboard, make a couple of drawings, chat with people — and it's very engaging....

Listen to Episode No.5 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and also Gang Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is w...

Academic Librarianship: Anchoring the Profession in Contribution, Scholarship, and Service (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) by Marcy Simons is needed now as a response to how much has changed in academic librarianship as a profession (from the smallest academic libraries to large research libraries). Much has been written recently about the status of the profession of librarianship, i.e. whether or no...

Can we have science without freedom of speech? Dr. Scott Atlas's professional work and personal experiences bring to light an important and often under-discussed element of speech: freedom of speech in the hard sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a host of new questions and concerns surrounding our medical system and government health agencies: as Special Advisor to the President and a memb...

Listen to Episode No.4 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is whether A.I. can mean. The short answer is yes, A.I. can mean... whatever we make it mean. For instance,...

Listen to this interview of Rebecca Roache, coach and podcaster, and also Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. We talk about the application of philosophy to the problems faced by every academic every day. Rebecca Roache : "I'd say that, for many of us, we got into our particular line of research because we were interested in and energized by the topics that we we...

Listen to this interview of Cristiano Matricardi, Senior Editor at Nature Communications. We talk about just how closely tied are the research and the communication of the research. Cristiano Matricardi : "From my perspective, that is, as a professional editor, as someone who reads above 500 new submissions a year plus all the papers for due diligence — from my perspective, I see that too many of...

Listen to this interview of Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière, co-authors of Equity for Women in Science: Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Advancement (Harvard UP, 2023). Cassidy is Professor and Tom and Marie Patton School Chair in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Vincen...

Editor Abigail Bainbridge and contributing author Sonja Schwoll join this discussion of Conservation of Books (Routledge 2023), the highly anticipated reference work on global book structures and their conservation. Offering the first modern, comprehensive overview on this subject, this volume takes an international approach. Written by over 70 specialists in conservation and conservation science...

Privacy is not dead: Students care deeply about their privacy and the rights it safeguards. They need a way to articulate their concerns and guidance on how to act within the complexity of our current information ecosystem and culture of surveillance capitalism. Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2023) edi...

Listen to Episode No.3 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and as well, Kit Nicholls, who is Director of the Cooper Union's Center for Writing and Learning. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is Learni...

Listen to this interview of John Bond, founder and publishing consultant of Riverwinds Consulting. We talk about the breadth of services and resources now on offer to publishing scientists — while the industry only grows broader and broader. John Bond : "The one thing I would say helps specifically the middle-tier author (who'll, by the way, be most reluctant to try this) is this: Feel really comf...

Listen to Episode No.2 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about TMC — Too Much Communication. In the 2000s, people complained about the demand to know more stuff. Not today. It's amazing if you sto...

Chris Hart, Director of Sales and Marketing, and Kim Walker, Director of Trade Publishing at Manchester University Press join Avi to discuss how MUP and other university publishers have changed their model over the last decade and put a major focus on trade publishing over the classic niche academic monograph. We also discuss how being the only academic publisher in Northern England forms a big pa...

How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future? In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary signif...

Listen to this interview of Yang Zhang, faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. We talk about the centrality of text to the research process. Yang Zhang : "Nowadays, especially when I talk with my students, you know, when I help them write papers, I can sorta estimate how many days or hours they'll need to finish a specific part of that paper. And if a student doesn't quite...

Listen to Episode No.1 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about what meaning actually is. Meaning is form, and meaning is function. Meaning is made, for example, when a scientist sees the image of...

In Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (MIT Press, 2016; paperback edition, 2023), Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not...

Listen to this interview of Dr. Miranda Vinay, full-time editor at Communications Engineering (a Nature Portfolio journal) and also currently Locum Associate Editor for electronics, photonics, devices, 2D materials, and applied physics at Nature. We talk about planning before writing, because it's the surest way to structure the arguments for the value of your research. interviewer : "And you know...