With membership in TAA, you are not alone. You become part of a diverse community of textbook and academic authors with similar interests and goals. We are pleased to announce the addition of 61 new TAA members who joined us in October 2019.
Most useful textbook and academic posts of the week: November 1, 2019
As we begin the month of November, for academics the month affectionately known as Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo), many of…
AcWriMo starts tomorrow – see what we have planned
Established in 2011, Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) is a month-long academic write-a-thon that happens every November. Here at TAA, we have continued to plan special opportunities for our members to engage in AcWriMo as a group to enhance their individual writing efforts. Some of our members have also created or sponsored additional AcWriMo events throughout the month.
This year, TAA has decided to focus on a theme of “Distinguishing features of academic writing”. Specifically, we have used a list of academic writing features to further focus our weekly TweetChat discussions and shared resources to include: academic precision, complexity, formality, objectivity, and accuracy. Below are several of the planned activities we have scheduled for AcWriMo 2019.
Member Spotlight: Katy Peplin
TAA member Katy Peplin is the Founder of Thrive PhD and is an academic author in the media studies writing discipline.
Her most recent publication is her second academic publication, Ford Films and Ford Viewers: Examining “Non-Theatrical” Films in the Theaters and Beyond forthcoming (Jan 1, 2020) in the collection The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s (eds. Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm).
Most useful textbook and academic posts of the week: October 25, 2019
As we come to the close of Open Access Week 2019, having been faced with the challenge of considering this year’s theme, “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge”, the words of Carl Sagan seem even more appropriate. “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
This week’s collection of articles from around the web begins with some relevant discussions on open access including an MIT-developed framework for negotiating contracts with scholarly publishers, the future of open access business models, discussion about ownership of research, and the first 100 books from Johns Hopkins University Project. We’ve also included some other hot topics for academic authors on grant writing, being an older student, and being a minority in academia.
Wherever your writing takes you this week, whether publishing open access or traditional, consider the audience you can reach and the shackles of time you can break as a result of your efforts. Happy writing!
The 5R activities of OER
During his 2019 TAA Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference presentation, “Why I Chose to Publish OER, What I Learned, and Do I Have Regrets”, with Jeanne Hoover, Dave Dillon, TAA Council member and author of the award-winning open textbook Blueprint for Success in College and Career, shared the 5R activities permitted by open access. Defining the “open” in open content and open educational resources (OER), Dillon noted, “The terms ‘open content’ and ‘open educational resources’, describe any copyrightable work that is either (1) in the public domain or (2) licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities” below.