The document summarizes a workshop on writing for publication. It discusses reasons for publishing, defining different types of publication, and factors to consider when choosing publication formats and venues. It also touches on issues in higher education around metrics, productivity pressures, and navigating conventional vs. unconventional publishing options. The workshop aims to help participants navigate common questions and challenges around getting started with the publication process.

1. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/children-splash-asia-sunset-1822688/
Writing for publication… Some
tentative ideas
Paul Prinsloo
University of South Africa (Unisa)
@14prinsp
Workshop notes, College of Education,
University of South Africa,
20 September 2018

2. Acknowledgement
I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this
presentation. I therefore acknowledge the original copyright
and licensing regime of every image used.
This presentation (excluding the images) is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.

3. Broad overview of the workshop
1. What were your reasons and expectations when you
registered for this workshop?
2. Why, oh why, do you want to publish? Mapping reasons for
publishing
3. Defining ‘publish’
4. Writing for ‘publication’ – it depends
5. Where do I start?
6. Ugh – let us talk about article titles, introductions, literature
reviews, methodologies, analyses, findings and discussions,
limitations and issues for further research, conclusions,
references and of course, the dreaded abstract…
7. Wrap-up

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Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/chairs-spectators-red-443280/
Introductions

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Introductions
• Your name and department
• Why you decided to come
• Have you published before?
• Two specific things that you hope to know
before the end of the workshop

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Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/puzzle-match-missing-hole-blank-693865/
Why, oh why, do you want to publish?

7. • Why do we do/want to do research/publish?
• What changes/will change as a result of our
research/publishing?
• Who do we answer to when we do our
research/publish? Who will hold us to account for
our questions, our processes and our findings?
• What will happen if we don’t do research/publish?
Let us consider the following:

8. Writing for publication – what do
you mean?
• Why is this a question?
• What is meant by ‘publication’?
• What forms of ‘publication’ are valued/
encouraged/supported/shunned?
• What are the costs & benefits to the different forms
of publication – financial, reputation, and risk?
• How do I choose? How do I find my voice?
Do you have a voice?

9. How do we think of ‘writing for
publication’ in the context of…?
• The very nature of being a scholar, making public what you
know
• The institutional pressures to publish – rankings/ratings
• The many opportunities to ‘publish’ – to make known, to
share, to get input
• The beauty (and danger) of the immediacy of living “onlife”
versus the long traditional publication processes
• Alternative forms of publishing may support the more
conventional forms of sharing/peer review
• The nature of scholarship and the sharing of
research/thinking/praxis has changed

10. “Hypatia[a] (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a
Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and
mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then
part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a
prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in
Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and
astronomy. She is the first female mathematician
whose life is reasonably well recorded”
Source credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
Central to the question of academic
publishing, is the issue of scholarship…
When is someone a scholar?
How do we know?

11. On being a scholar
• Having academic expertise in a particular field or
fields/disciplines
• Recognition of the expertise by institutions (e.g.
awarding of degrees/appointment)
• Acknowledgement by the gatekeepers in the
discipline/field of inquiry
• Recognition by peers
• Maintaining and expanding expertise
• Dissemination of thinking/research/praxis
• Being a gatekeeper/peer
• Developing and recognising expertise of others

12. Source credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
WARNING: The field is rigged –
gender/race/power
Image credit:
http://thesociologicalcinema.tumblr.com/post/142531355075/youre
-playing-monopoly-one-player-is-given-all

13. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/tree-natur-nightsky-cloud-stars-736887/
Higher education as ‘field’

14. Source credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/science/predatory-journals-academics.html
30 October 2017

15. Source credit: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/elsevier-academic-publishing-
petition/427059/

16. Source credit: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/elsevier-declines-to-cut-off-german-universities-that-
cancelled-journal-subs/3008505.article

17. Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867

18. Academic disciplines in our time have
been subjected to the principle that more
productivity is better, and a lot more is
better than better, giving rise to a kind of
productivity syndrome.
Quantity is so much easier to evaluate.
Professor X has 18 articles, 12 book
reviews, 21 conference presentations, two
monographs, and an edited volume. The
university’s T&P committee is going to be
impressed. End of story.
Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867

19. “Academic culture — like American culture
more broadly — has become
monomaniacally infatuated with
productivity as the marker of a successful
life, and quantitative measures have
become central to determining what
counts as success. Although academics can
be found resisting (mildly) the metrics of
productivity foisted on them by
administrators, they also enthusiastically
measure themselves.”
Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867

20. Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Feeling-Anxious-You-re-Not/243117

21. “Academic labor and performance anxiety”: where the “shame
[of not performing] becomes a central tenet of everyday
academic life” (Richard Hall, 2014a, par. 2)
Academics “overwork because the current culture in
universities is brutally and deliberately invested in shaming
those who don’t compete effectively…” in stark contrast with
the heroic few who do, somehow, meet the shifting goalposts
(Kate Bowles, 2014, par. 7-8)
Image credits: http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Superman_S_symbol.svg
You are
either /or

22. Source credit: https://www.amazon.com/Metric-Power-David-Beer-
ebook/dp/B01JE3SI20/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526806112&sr=8-1&keywords=metric+power+beer
“…we are created and recreated by
metrics; we live through them, with
them, and within them. Metrics
facilitate the making and remaking
of judgements about us, the
judgements we make of ourselves
and the consequences of those
judgements as they are felt and
experienced in our lives. We play
with metrics and we are more often
played by them”
(Beer, 2016, p. 3).

23. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/bridge-concrete-pillar-architecture-1819153/
“Those things that cannot be counted are
rendered invisible, and those that can be
counted achieve visibility”
(Beer, 2016, p. 59).

24. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/urban-urbex-lostplace-abandoned-628269/
When numbers are used alone, “when the world is
reduced to numbers, a measure, to what is calculable
and laid before us; when humans are summed,
aggregated and accounted for; then much remains
forgotten, unsaid, concealed”
(Elden, 2006, in Beer, 2016, pp. 59-60).

25. On being a scholar and the rationale
for publishing
• Having academic expertise in a particular field or
fields/disciplines
• Recognition of the expertise by institutions (awarding of
degrees)
• Recognition by the gatekeepers in the discipline/field of
inquiry
• Recognition by peers
• Maintaining and expanding expertise
• Dissemination of thinking/praxis
• Being a gatekeeper/peer
• Developing and recognising expertise

26. Conventional publishing (Un)conventional publishing

27. “Conventional”
publishing in higher
education
• Monographs
• Edited volumes
• Peer-reviewed articles in
journals on IBSS, ISI,
Norwegian, Scopus
“Unconventional”
publishing in higher
education
• Blogs
• Tweets
• Opinion pieces
• Letters to the editor
• Articles in magazines

28. Soccer Rugby
Baseball Hockey
What are the rules?
Image credit – https://pixabay.com/en/soccer-field-
diagram-green-307046/
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rugby_field.png
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baseball_diamond.
svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Field_hockey
_offside_1987_rule.png

29. ‘What’ needs to be shared?
How urgent is the findings/message?
‘What’ are the
reputational
benefits and
risks?
How accessible will/should it
be?
Who will be the peer
reviewers and how will peer
review happen/impact?
Who are the gatekeepers?
Who is the intended audience
and why?
‘Where’/’how’
does it fit into
my career –
short-term/
longer term?
What are the rules?
Going conventional,
alternative or somewhere
in-between?

30. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/rugby-watching-winter-596762/
So you want to play?
Why?
Where?
Do you know the rules?

31. Soccer Rugby
Baseball Hockey
Let’s play ball…
Image credit – https://pixabay.com/en/soccer-field-
diagram-green-307046/
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rugby_field.png
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baseball_diamond.
svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Field_hockey
_offside_1987_rule.png

32. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/piano-music-keys-instrument-3447281/
Where do I start?

33. 1. I don’t have a question
2. I have a faint idea of a question, then what?
3. I have a question, but I don’t know how?
4. I have a question and I know how, but where do I
publish?
5. I have a question, I know how to do the research, I
know where I would like to publish, what is next?
Issues of open publishing, the fifty shades of
publication, predatory journals, journal impact
factor, and the ‘lists’
Where do I start?

34. 1. I don’t have a question
• What do you read?
• What are the issues in your discipline?
• What are the issues in the teaching of your discipline?
• What are the issues in society and in your
communities that your discipline may help to
understand/solve?
• What are the issues in other disciplines that your
disciplinary background may help to
understand/solve?

35. 2. I have a faint idea of a question, then
what?
• Make time to search/read
• Open yourself to the power and serendipity of
networks
• Get a mentor/circle of scholars
• Expose yourself to the thinking of others

36. 3. I have a question, but I don’t know
how?
• Make time to search/read
• Open yourself to the power and serendipity of
networks
• Get a mentor/circle of scholars
• Expose yourself to the thinking of others
How do/did others approached a similar
question?

37. 4. I have a question and I know how, but
where do I publish?
’Formal’ publication – it depends
• Where are you in your career as scholar?
• Can you ‘afford’ and what are the benefits an
alternative, or new journal?
• Can you ‘afford’ and what are the benefits a low
impact journal but that has a wide readership?
• Can you ‘afford’ and what are the benefits of
publishing in closed/open licensing journals?

38. ‘What’ needs to be shared?
How urgent is the findings/message?
‘What’ are the
reputational
benefits and
risks?
How accessible will/should it
be?
Who will be the peer
reviewers and how will peer
review happen/impact?
Who are the gatekeepers?
Who is the intended audience
and why?
‘Where’/’how’
does it fit into
my career –
short-term/
longer term?
What are the rules?
Going conventional,
alternative or somewhere
in-between?

39. 5. I have a question, I know how to do the research, I
know where I would like to publish, what is next?
Issues of open publishing, the fifty shades of
publication, predatory journals, journal impact factor,
and the ‘lists’
• DHET
• IBSS 2018
• ISI 2018
• Norwegian 2018
• ScieLO SA 2018
• Scopus 2018

40. Also consider:
• Editorial Board
• List of reviewers
• Number of issues per year
• Turnaround time
• Issues of Copyright

41. Source credit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

42. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/creative-commons-licenses-icons-by-783531/

43. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/sign-forbidden-rules-metal-warning-1438603/
Predatory journals

44. Source credit: https://clinicallibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers/

45. A personal
journey in
‘alternative’
scholarship
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/boards-height-balance-2040575/

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Goodier, S., & Czerniewicz, L. (2015). Academics' online
presence: a four-step guide to taking control of your
visibility. [Third edition]
Retrieved from http://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/2652/GoodierOnlinePresenceV3.pdf?sequence=11

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48. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Some scholars say that Twitter ‘does not
work’ for them…
This reminds me of walking into a library and
expecting books to find you
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/books-door-entrance-italy-colors-1655783/

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Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/books-door-entrance-italy-colors-1655783/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/ant-shadow-big-small-metaphor-1541524/
Using Twitter as scholar requires effort, dedication,
a careful selection of who to follow, a willingness
to be surprised, and dealing with an
abundance of stimulation

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51. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/nacelle-workers-wall-city-work-1888587/
The increasing disappearance of
public/private/professional/personal
Using Facebook as scholar…

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56. Case in point: Slides prepared for a group of 30 bored
academics in a small stuffy venue. One year later,
10,773 views

58. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

59. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

60. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/action-basketball-ball-athlete-cap-1869428/
Let us take aim…

61. • Choosing a title
• Introduction
• Literature review
• Methodology
• Analysis of findings/discussion
• Limitations
• Issues for further research
• Reference list
• …. the Abstract

62. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Our digital shadows….
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/igromania-game-addiction-handcuffs-1894847/
So, what will prevent you from ‘writing
for publication’?

63. • Why do we do/want to do research/publish?
• What changes/will change as a result of our
research/publishing?
• Who do we answer to when we do our
research/publish? Who will hold us to account for
our questions, our processes and our findings?
• What will happen if we don’t do research/publish?
Let us re-consider the following:

64. “I beg you, to have patience with
everything unresolved in your heart and to
try to love the questions themselves as if
they were locked rooms or books written
in a very foreign language. Don’t search
for the answers, which could not be given
to you now, because you would not be
able to live them. And the point is to live
everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing
it, live your way into the answer.”
Image credit: https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Rainer-Maria-Rilke/dp/0393310396

65. “In the deepest hour of the night,
confess to yourself that you would
die if you were forbidden to write.
And look deep into your heart
where it spreads its roots, the
answer, and ask yourself, must I
write?”
Image credit: https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Rainer-Maria-Rilke/dp/0393310396

66. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

67. THANK YOU
Paul Prinsloo (Prof)
Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)
College of Economic and Management Sciences,
Samuel Pauw Building, Office 5-21, P.O. Box 392
Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)
prinsp@unisa.ac.za
Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog:
http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp