Most useful textbook and academic posts of the week: July 16, 2021

“Education is a continual process, it’s like a bicycle… If you don’t pedal you don’t go forward.” ~George Weah” width=”200″ height=”200″ />When do we reach the end? When have we learned enough? While the answer to these questions may be different for each individual, if the desire to move forward remains, the real answer is “never”. As George Weah once said, “Education is a continual process, it’s like a bicycle… If you don’t pedal you don’t go forward.”

As an industry we continue to see continual process of growth, revision, and transformation. Some ways we experience this as academic and textbook authors are in the research methods we use, the peer review process, and how we handle rejection.

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How authors build structural equity and inclusion practices through open access

This year’s Open Access Week theme is “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion”. According to Nick Shockey in his #OAWeek blog post announcing this year’s theme, “Diversity, equity, and inclusion must be consistently prioritized year-round and integrated into the fabric of the open community, from how our infrastructure is built to how we organize community discussions to the governance structures we use.”

With this in mind, the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA) is exploring the author’s role in building those priorities into our work – in both open access and traditional publishing environments.

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Most useful textbook and academic posts of the week: September 18, 2020

How do you get things done? When it comes to academic writing there is no shortage of strategy advice available to authors, but there are also no shortcuts either. As Larry L. King stated, “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” In this week’s collection of articles from around the web we found some helpful resources for accomplishing all three of these fundamental practices in the pursuit of your publishing goals.

Beginning with topics of project management and daily writing practice, you must be writing and rewriting to move projects forward. That writing takes reading – and we have advice on how to stay focused while reading scholarly articles.

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Reflecting diversity, equity, and inclusion in our publications

I’ll never forget that encounter I had with Kathy a number of years ago. Kathy and I are friends now, but I’d never met her before that moment when she introduced herself at our annual anatomy and physiology (A&P) teaching conference. She asked if I had a moment to chat about how illustrations are chosen for textbooks. As you can imagine, I love talking about the process of creating textbooks, so we stepped aside for a quick chat.

It turns out that she was chatting up as many A&P textbook authors as she could, including a few other TAA members, with a question that stemmed from her interest in diversity issues. Kathy wanted to know about the illustration process because she wanted to know why women and other groups were underrepresented.

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