Alexandra K. Trenfor once said, “The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.” Life, especially in academic settings, is about seeking knowledge, exploring possibilities, and making our own unique discoveries. Textbook and academic authoring provides an outlet for us to share those discoveries with others to fuel their own journeys.

In this week’s collection of articles from around the web, we have some things worth looking at to see where they may fit your current and future needs as an author. These include developing a social media strategy, post-doctoral pursuits, saying “no”, data collection, licensing, editing, and open access opportunities.

Be on the lookout this week for teachers, whether people, places, or simply ideas that can guide where you look next and find out what you see as a result. Happy writing!

Marketing on social media: How to develop a social media strategy

Social media marketing is not about standard strategies, you need to be creative and keep in touch with modern culture. Sometimes it’s not enough to add music to a video or change the theme color. A competently planned strategy involves the following steps below.

After the viva/defence – then what?

There is no return to normal. There is no going back to what there was before. You have to find new ways of going on. I could be talking about the pandemic here. Yes indeed. But I’m not. I’m actually talking about life post thesis.

Saying no to something is saying yes to something else

It is hard to say no. It is, perhaps, one of the most important skills that academics need in order to focus on what is most important to us. Without getting into the 1000 reasons we have for not wishing to say no, there are times we know we need to.

Collecting data with interviews

Katy Wheeler and Bethany Morgan Brett have written a book about interview research, forthcoming from SAGE Publishing. We will let you know when it is available for pre-order, but in the meantime, they agreed to answer a few questions about collecting data with interviews.

It’s all about the licensing

Once upon a time, publishing was all about printing and distributing books and journals. Today, in a world of smartphones and tablets, publishing – as practiced by authors, publishers and booksellers – is all about licensing.

AJE launches free AI-based grammar check tool for scholarly authors

The new tool helps scientists ascertain the quality of their written works and improve them before submission to journal editors or other editorial decision makers. Those works can include research manuscripts, academic books, grant proposals, or theses.

New open access business models — what’s needed to make them work?

The model the community has the most experience with, the individual author paying an article-processing-charge (APC), works really well for some authors, in some subject areas, in some geographies. But it is not a universal solution to making open access work and it creates new inequities as it resolves others. In order to build a diverse ecosystem of open access publishing models that can support the diverse needs of the many different members of the research community, other models will be needed.