All entries for November 2023

Author and Style Guidelines Updated

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/guidance

Updated guidelines means easier submission experience for authors

A task I’ve been meaning to get around for some months [1] has been to go through our Author and Style guidance pages and refresh the content. Finding the right moment has been trickier than I thought, but in the wake of our recent 10^th birthday issue, it seemed the ideal time to revisit this vital guidance to our authors, and make some judicious changes. Going through I could spot areas where the advice has been lightly tweaked over the years, and as a result some elements of it were mildly contradictory. Indeed, I strongly suspect it hasn’t come in for anything like a systematic review since I first came aboard the journal, and I don’t believe I’ve really had a look at the style guide quite as closely as I have in recent weeks.

The good news is that the changes are all now live, and both guides are – hopefully – a lot clearer.

• Author Guidance
• Style Guidance

Now, if you’re an author whose article is already underway – don’t panic! We’ve not made any major changes! We’re the same journal with fairly broad and welcoming requirements which make it as easy as possible for authors to contribute. This exercise was rather about bringing this online guidance more closely into line with what we advise authors in our 1-2-1 consultations.

Naturally though, we can’t claim to be perfect – so if there’s any aspect you’d like to see more about on these pages, let us know. We’re only too happy to keep refining and improving this guidance to ensure it continues to be fit for purposes for the next decade of Exchanges.

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Endnotes

[1] Maybe even years.

Gareth Johnson : 29 Nov 2023 14:16 |  Tags: Advise Author Guidance Manuscripts Style Submissions |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Exchanges – Now Available on Bluesky

Writing about web page https://bsky.app/profile/exchangesjournal.bsky.social

For some years now, well actually since I took over running the journal in early 2018, we've had a fairly active Twitter/X account. We use this quite heavily to promote calls for papers and other news from the journal, and I'm pleased to say we have built up a good following. It’s unlikely you missed in recent news coverage how much Twitter/X's new owner has rather...reduced the site in many people's eyes, and there's an increased possibility these days that everything will eventually disappear behind a paywall.

Now, given the open access principles that Exchanges was founded and runs on, this really wouldn't be something we'd be too keen to remain associated. Which is why I've been hoping for some months to start running a new microblogging account on the 'Founded by Former Twitter Chiefs' Bluesky platform. This is still in its early days, and has a slowly growing community. Unlike Mastodon, which seems to have strongly attracted the more tech-savvy user community, Bluesky seems to be a place where more and more academics are hanging out. Hence, getting an account here as an alternative to Twitter/X seemed a no-brainer.

Problem being, you only can get an account currently with an invite code via a lengthy waiting list, or alternatively via a friend/colleague already on the platform providing an invite code. Luckily, I got a personal account on there a month ago, and with my first provided invite code this week, I welcomed @ExchangesJournal.bsky.social into the digital world.[1]

For the time being I'll be running the Twitter/X and Bluesky accounts in parallel, but I suspect as Bluesky grows and Twitter/X (probably) tailspins, I'll be favouring the latter option all the more.

So, if you're on Bluesky - come and follow us for all your regular updates on the journal and social chat about publishing. Of course, if you're not on there, you can still, for now, follow us over on Twitter/X!

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Endnotes

[1] or just plain old @ExchangesJournal, to give the short version of our new handle.

Gareth Johnson : 16 Nov 2023 09:27 |  Tags: Bluesky Media Microblogging Social Twitter X |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Submission Guidance Video Leads to Smoother Submission Experience

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/about/submissions

A new video offers to smooth the route to paper submission.

As part of the preparations for our various special issues, I’ve been working on some new advice for submitting authors on the practical steps they need to take. I strongly believe in diminishing as many of the mechanical barriers to submission as possible, and offering a stepwise guide is one way to address this. While I might not be able to tweak the underlying OJS code on which we run Exchanges[1], there are still at least some ways I can try and make the submission experience easier.

Case in point: While writing the two page ‘here’s what you do next’ guide for the authors, I found myself thinking ‘I wish we had a handy video talking people through the steps involved in manuscript submission’. Such a compulsion might be a holdover from my long-ago days as an academic librarian – I wrote so many printed and media guides back then – but as I said, any barrier is a barrier too many in my book (journal). I thought this would be an easy task, maybe taking a couple of hours or so at most to script, record edit and share.

I was wrong. But you can click on the screenshot below to watch the final video all the same:

You see, as part of the process of writing and creating the guide I had to go through the actual submission process myself with a dummy paper. I have to do a submission when I add the editorial each issue, but I generally don’t pay a lot of attention to what I’m doing – just need to get the paper into our workflows! However, this time going through the process more carefully, and observing each aspect was really helpful because it caused me to notice a couple of elements of our ‘submission wizard’ [2] which I wasn’t happy about.

One of them was the wording on our clickthrough publishing licence’. The phrasing here seemed less than clear in places, and I confess I suspect no one has looked at this since the journal first launched. As a result, after a little fiddling around on OJS I found where I could edit and revise them. Hopefully, now the phrasing is better than it was – let me know your thoughts on this if you have them.

I also discovered a strange glitch which was restricting the article submission types which were visible to non-editors. This isn’t too much of an issue in the editorial process, as we can shift the type easily – but at submission, I suspect this might be off-putting to an author. As I normally look at the site in ‘uber’ editor mode, this is the sort of detail which is easily missed too. In preparing for my video though, I switched to my alt-author account which as a result highlighted the issue! It appeared from what I could see that the article type categories available to authors clearly weren’t as they should be – with some options not displaying – and others erroneously still showing.[3] Certainly, they were far from clear and as far as I was concerned – a barrier to submission!

My apologies to our authors if you’ve experienced this glitch! I’ve no idea when it arose – I’m hoping it’s not been too long, but I have my suspicions. Nevertheless, I can assure you it’s been cleaned up. Now, the options to submit are in our five major formats: peer-reviewed article or review, and editorially revied conversation, critical reflection or book review.

Phew.

With this sorted (and despite a computer that insisted in BSODing me once) the new guidance video still went live last week. And while this might have all taken me much longer than I anticipated to resolve, hey, at least it also means I had an opportunity to hopefully streamline the submission process slightly.

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Endnotes

[1] More is the pity here.

[2] It doesn’t wear a pointy hat, nor an eight-pointed star.

[3] I was fairly sure we weren’t interested in submissions to the special section of the journal published in 2014.

Gareth Johnson : 07 Nov 2023 11:22 |  Tags: Article Guidance Submissions Support Video |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New Call for Papers: Becoming a Productive Publishing Scholar

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/announcement/view/53

A new call for papers for the October 2024 issue of Exchanges considers productive authorship.

As you’ve hopefully read in Exchanges’ recent editorial, we have rolled out a new themed call for papers for the regular journal. While we’ve a number of ongoing calls for special issues currently, the Board and me thought it was overdue time to explore a themed section in the journal itself. And what better area to explore than one which we’ve been discussing for the past couple of years in researcher workshops here at Warwick.

• You can read the full text of the call here: Becoming a productive publishing scholar.

However, the short version is: we’re interested in papers exploring the paradigms, praxis or process which academics, at any career stage, encounter when balancing published output against the other demands on their time. Hence, papers on everything from overcoming challenges, through to effective strategic approaches or even ones arguing against the pressure to publish as a measure of academic esteem would be welcome. Critical reflections which examine personal experiences and coping mechanisms would be especially welcome, as these would be very well received by our readership I suspect.

Plus, as an interdisciplinary journal we’re aware that ‘productive publication’ has different meaning and imperatives across the disciplines. That has certainly been a theme we’ve heard about in our workshop discussions from participants. So, as a result, we would be especially interested in papers which either explore publication nuances from within particular disciplines, or those which alternatively offer comparative studies across a range of fields. Likewise, perspectives from early, mid or established career scholars would be equally valid and interesting, as I have no doubt in mind at all that there will be variations and subtleties worthy of exploration.

There’s plenty of time to get involved, or indeed have a chat with myself about potential papers, as the submission deadlines [1] run through to 2024. As always, myself and my editors look forward t reading your submissions! Happy writing.

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Endnotes

[1] There’s a longer deadline for editorially reviewed material like critical reflections, over peer-reviewed pieces.

Gareth Johnson : 01 Nov 2023 08:21 |  Tags: Call Career Esteem Life Output Papers Productive Publishing Work |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem