Pay to play: Are submission fees common for publication in journals?

There seem to be many recent email messages, advertisements, and calls for journal submissions that have touted competitive or lower than average submission fees. From a traditional perspective of submitting work to academic journals, you may 1) never paid for submission of articles, and 2) been wary of those journals who required payment for submission, thinking them to be less credible “pay to play” sources of publication.

With evidence of a more common practice of submission fee requirements, we solicited the opinions of TAA members Jörg Waltje, executive director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at Texas Woman’s University, and Patricia Goodson, presidential professor for Teaching Excellence and director of POWER Services for Texas A&M University, who provided different perspectives.

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Tech Tip: Managing academic reference sources in Microsoft Word

Although a number of software tools are now available for managing citations and references for research papers and journal articles, I have found that using the tools built into the latest versions of Microsoft Word provide a single tool for document creation and reference source management. The reference features of Word support a variety of manuscript styles, allow for quick and accurate citations, automate the development of bibliography or works cited pages, and support the reuse of sources across multiple documents with ease.

In this article, I will discuss the basic steps for implementing the tools to manage your academic reference sources in Microsoft Word.

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TweetChat Recap: #AcWriChat 11/3 – Get Organized

On November 3rd, TAA co-hosted its first TweetChat event with SAGE Methodspace as part of Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). The focus on this event was getting organized with your academic writing projects.

Six questions were presented during the hour-long event on type of project, inspiration, organization steps, audience influence, desired impact, and next steps. The full conversation is available in the Storify record below.

Mark your calendar and join the discussion this Friday, November 17th at 11am ET as we discuss writing productivity. Simply log in to your Twitter account and search for #AcWriChat. As questions are posted, tag your responses with the #AcWriChat hashtag. See you there!

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6 strategies to help you secure ‘impactful publications’

In part 2 of his two-part TAA webinar, “A 30-Step Guide to Publishing in Scholarly Journals“, Dr. Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Sam Houston State University, and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, shared several strategies for helping authors secure “impactful publications”—those that advance the field.

The following are six of those strategies. 

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6 of Dr. Onwuegbuzie’s 30 steps to publishing in scholarly journals

In part 1 of his two-part webinar, “A 30-Step Guide to Publishing in Scholarly Journals”, Dr. Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Sam Houston State University, and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, shared insight into his 30-step process, which he calls a meta-framework for publishing with steps that are “continuous, iterative, interactive, holistic, dynamic, and synergistic”.

The following steps are six of the 30 he shared: selecting a topic of interest, determining the outlet and audience, deciding on whether collaboration is needed/feasible, choosing the outlets for publication, and writing the work.

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