What are you questioning today? What are you trying to learn? How are you continuing to improve your understanding of your discipline, your writing process, or current publishing opportunities? Helen Keller once said, “A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.” So, what questions are unanswered for you?

In this week’s collection of articles from around the web, we have found things to consider when starting a PhD, techniques for writing field notes, and the effect of games and simulations on higher education. We’ve also discovered methods for recognizing the value of individuals in peer review, pre-requisite knowledge before approaching a printer, a summary of traditional publishing practices, and new opportunities for publishing through F1000’s open research platform.

Continue to educate your mind so that through your work you can educate others. Take the answers you have and use them to look for new questions worth answering. And, above all, happy writing!

Starting the PhD? 25 things to consider

Are you just starting a PhD? Worried? Excited? Nervous? Fear not.:There’s lots of support and help available to you. Your institution is likely to provide an induction programme where you’ll find out about all the internal procedures and timelines you have to follow. But there’ll also be more.

How to write field notes (and how to teach the writing of fieldnotes)

Writing is hard. And writing field notes is hard, too. I don’t think that there is enough guidance on how to do it. I’ve written about the use of ethnographic fieldnotes in scholarly written output, but I don’t think I had ever written about how to write fieldnotes and how to teach or learn on your own how to write better field notes.

The Effect of Games and Simulations on Higher Education

Games and simulations play a huge role in higher learning education. Simulations provide a scenario-based environment. Students collaborate and work together to solve real-world problems and situations. This promotes collaborative learning among students in classes. Designers that build educational games consider things such as the players involved, the design, teaching modes, technical challenges, and the techniques involved. Educational games are not only fun but also act as valuable tools to improve skills and abilities.

Recognition in Peer Review

Recognition in peer review is not just about recognizing the peer reviewers for their voluntary service to scholarly publishing and the research system as a whole, but it encompasses a few other aspects as well. When authors accept and address reviewers’ suggestions and perspectives in revised manuscripts, when they thank the reviewers through their response letter, or when they appreciate reviewers publicly in the ‘acknowledgements’ sections of their articles, even without knowing their names — we see peers recognizing peers’ valuable support.

Book Printing 101: What You Need to Know Before Approaching a Printer

Today’s post is excerpted from the book Cover to Cover by Andrew Watson, a comprehensive guide to self-publishing a print book or ebook, mainly for those in Australia. However, the book printing information below is applicable to any author who wants to invest in a print run for their book.

Revisiting: How Traditional Publishing Works

With so much current talk about new business models in publishing, and a series of announcements that may make it appear that we are headed toward a fulfillment of Open Access (OA) millenarianism, whether of the Gold or Platinum variety, it seems useful to describe how traditional publishing works, if only for reasons of nostalgia.

F1000 Research is now open to all disciplines, including Humanities and Social Sciences

Open research publisher F1000, has announced that it has now extended its publishing offering on its own publishing platform, F1000Research, into all subject disciplines, with the latest addition of Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering completing the line-up.