TAA Featured in Episode of The A&P Professor Podcast

TAA was featured in an episode of The A&P Professor podcast on April 12, “Pulse of Progress, Looking Back, Moving Forward,” with host Kevin Patton, an award-winning anatomy and physiology textbook author. Kevin’s comments about the benefits of TAA membership and invitation to attend TAA’s 2024 Conference on Textbook & Academic Authoring come in at 50:22.

In the episode, Kevin says: “With a strongly supportive network of colleagues, TAA provides many resources and active, engaging opportunities for growth and network-forming. TAA meets the needs of those interested in creating textbooks, lab manuals, workbooks, and other learning resources, as well as those who focus on academic writing, such as journal articles, dissertations/theses, monographs, and scholarly or other nonfiction works.”

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More Archival Topics From TAA’s Print Newsletter with Commentary From Long-Time Member Phil Wankat

Long-time TAA Member Phil Wankat has dug back into his TAA print newsletter archive, this time into the black-and-white early issues published between 1994 and 2010, finding more gold to share with you along with his brief commentary of the value of each article.

We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” along with the other articles he shared from the TAA Report, over the next few months. The articles are organized into 12 categories, including Authors Needed, Bios, Contracts and Legal Comments, Diversity, Managing and Planning, Money, Production, Publishing first book, Recognition and Rewards, Teaching, Textbook Scholarship and Textbooks in Promotion Cases, and Writing and Writer’s Block.
The first set of articles we are sharing, in the Authors Needed category, include:

“Co-authoring a book originally written by another,” by Frank Silverman. “Look for a book that has an author who is retired, or close to retirement or, well, deceased,” says Wankat.

“Authors uneasy over Pearson deal.” “Big mergers ‘reduce the opportunities for new authors and even close the door on experienced authors,'” says Wankat.

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TAA Committee for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Town Hall on Peer Review

Peer Review is at the heart of the process scholars use for advancing knowledge, testing theories, and authenticating claims and findings of research. Identity – both of the reviewers and the reviewed – is an inescapable component of peer review, and it can add an element of subjectivity to any assessment.

 Members of TAA’s Committee for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion will conduct a Town Hall to hear from members about their experiences in peer review. Have you experienced biases in the peer review process? How did you become aware of it, and did the publisher address the issues? Are there ways you’ve seen diverse identities improve the peer review process?

Join us Tuesday, September 21 at 4 p.m. ET for a discussion guided by members of the Committee. Take this opportunity to include your voice in the discussion, and leave with strategies for reviewers and authors navigating DEI issues in the peer review process. Let’s learn from our experiences.

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Developing #TrustInPeerReview from author to audience, Part 4: Trust is appreciated by the reader

We have now explored the roles of authors, reviewers, and publishers in the peer review process and how those three sets of actors affect an established culture of trust in peer review – the theme of this year’s Peer Review Week event. In summary, authors establish trust through integrity of research and reporting, reviewers develop that trust through unbiased and constructive feedback, and publishers demonstrate trust through effective and transparent communication of the peer review processes in place.

When in concert with one another, these three aspects lead to an ultimate reader satisfaction and appreciation of the process by which they can trust the results of the peer review process culminating in the manuscript they receive.  In today’s post, we will explore some of the factors of audience appreciation as they relate to trust in peer review.

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Developing #TrustInPeerReview from author to audience, Part 3: Trust is demonstrated by the publisher

So far this week, we have explored aspects of how trust in peer review is fostered and maintained in academic publishing environments. Specifically, we have examined the responsibility of authors to establish trust through honest manuscript submission and of reviewers to further develop that trust by conducting unbiased and quality reviews.

In this post, we’re going to look at how the publisher is ultimately responsible for demonstrating that established trust to an audience of readers.

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