July 2024 PNP Roundup

Last Month in Review

Leiden, The Netherlands

Greetings, dear readers! This month, I’ve been easing back into work after my recent move and enjoying exploring my new home.

I am not sure why, but I expected to dive right into the business building as soon as I arrived. It turns out my body and soul needed something different and I’ve taken a go-with-the-flow approach to my work this month. I have days, months, and even seasons when I work at a slower pace, and I am here to remind anyone in that season that it is perfectly fine to be there! The quicker pace of work and life will return soon, so enjoy bliss while you can.

In any case, I hope you are all enjoying the final moments of July and that many of you are on vacation or otherwise relaxing.

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Here are some of my favorite media I’ve consumed over the past month on writing, productivity, and managing all the things. Some of this content is new, some of it is old, but all of it has kernels of wisdom for busy academic writers.

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1. These are the Publish Not Perish posts from July, in case you missed any:

• Editing Tools I Love

• Writing When You Don’t Want To

• Breaking Down Writing into Smaller Parts

• Managing the Mid-July Panic

• Hallo, from the Netherlands

• On Rejection, the Myth of Meritocracy, and Baseball Bats

• You will know more in the future, but that shouldn’t stop you from publishing now

• You are not the imposter problem

  

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2. Much of society is built around specific ideas of how we should live and work. For example, the traditional 9–5 workday dominates many people's schedules. Even those with flexible jobs often feel guilty for working late into the evening instead of being early risers.

We tend to validate the scholar who wakes up early to write before their children rise, rather than the night owl who writes after their bedtime. However, a recent study that the Guardian covered suggests that many people might perform better on cognitive tests if they stay up late rather than wake up early.

It turns out that staying up late could be good for our brain power as research suggests that people who identify as night owls could be sharper than those who go to bed early.

Researchers led by academics at Imperial College London studied data from the UK Biobank study on more than 26,000 people who had completed intelligence, reasoning, reaction time and memory tests.

They then examined how participants’ sleep duration, quality, and chronotype (which determines what time of day we feel most alert and productive) affected brain performance.

I’m often a bit skeptical of studies like this one because one that proves the opposite to be true could be published tomorrow. I include it here in case any of you need to feel justified for being a night owl whose brain works better into the wee hours of the morning. You do you, dear reader.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

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3.

Janet Salmons

and friends are putting on a free workshop on August 7th called “How to collaborate across paradigms: Embedding culture in mixed methods designs.” Here’s the event description:

Mixed methods researchers combine qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study. Designing and conducting studies that include more than one approach often involves more than one researcher. Sometimes data scientists, interviewers who speak the language of participants, and other specialists are needed. In this webinar you will learn how to collaborate with a cross-cultural research team. We will explore how can culture influence mixed methods designs and how authors represent culture in the requisite integration of qualitative and quantitative research.

You can register here.

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4. Speaking of free webinars,

Dr. Kate Henry

is offering a free webinar called “How to Effectively Reach Your Goals This Season” on August 4th!

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Here’s the event description:

Ready to hit the reset button for your next semester or season? Join Dr. Kate for this 60-minute workshop full of her favorite tools to pave the way toward meaningful progress on your goals. Together, we’ll break down your next big milestone to make it actionable and achievable, consider the personal resources and tasks that impact your productivity practice, and develop plans to address obstacles along the way. You’ll leave this session with a tangible plan for making this your most effective season yet.

What’s not to love about that?

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5. If you’ve been a round the academic block for a while, you’ve heard plenty of us bemoan the academic publishing industry. Dr. Arash Abizadeh's recent Guardian article aptly summarizes our grievances with the system:

The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.

Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library doesn’t subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.

Now that I’m an independent scholar, I think about how much free labor I’ve given this system as an article writer, a peer reviewer, and a journal board member. I would now have to pay out of my own pocket to access these published works. Something is profoundly unsettling about that.

Dr. Abizadeh also has some suggestions about challenging this system that you can read more about in his article.

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