As part of Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo), TAA’s Membership Marketing Manager, Eric Schmieder will be participating in a SAGE Publishing webinar on Monday, November 16 titled “What do Publishing Trends Mean for Academic Writers?” moderated by TAA Council of Fellows member, Janet Salmons.
Today’s landscape of academic publishing encompasses much more than the traditional journal article. While academic writers still write books and articles, forms and formats are changing. Electronic journals can include links to media, and increasingly open access journals make it easier to reach academics, professionals, and practitioners outside a specific discipline. Short, monograph length books hone in on a single topic, graphic books illustrate ideas, book sections are accessible as stand-alone PDFs, and textbooks are becoming interactive to be embedded in e-learning platforms. Researchers are finding other ways to share their work electronically, including podcasts and videos, blogs and social media. With more happening via the web versus academic conferences, longstanding silos are cracking as we move beyond geographic and disciplinary constraints. What do these changes mean for academics—when writers must do more than write?
Schmieder will be one of three panelists, alongside Rebecca Bayeck and Sharon Zumbrunn, to address this changing landscape and what those changes mean for academic writers. [Read more…]
In a statement issued on June 19, 2020 – Juneteenth – the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA) Council has resolved to lead its members in establishing short term and long-term goals that affect positive change toward social equality in textbook and academic authoring as we move forward. 
Dillon is counseling faculty and a professor at Grossmont College. He curated, co-authored and edited three College Success textbooks including Blueprint for Success in College and Career (Rebus Community, 2018), which won a Textbook Excellence Award from TAA and the Open Textbook award from Open Education Global. 
In our final discussion of this series on distinguishing features of academic writing, we focused on accuracy. Specifically, we considered what it means to be accurate, how understanding and vocabulary affects accuracy, how to check for accuracy in sources we use, how accuracy affects the structure, style, and grammar of a manuscript, and why accuracy is important in academic writing. Below is a summary of the discussion. 
Did you know that over 1 billion works — including scholarly articles and a growing number of academic textbooks — have been licensed with a Creative Commons (CC) license? Though widely adopted, these continually-updated, legally-enforceable tools remain a mystery to academic writers. Many authors are unaware of the permissions afforded to them through the CC licenses, and many are unaware of permissions afforded to users when a specific CC license is applied to their work by an open-access publisher.
