Scholarly Communication

Summer goal-setting for academics

I like to share interesting and useful blog posts that I find, and this morning I read one that resonated with me because I’m gearing up to set goals for both the summer and the coming year. Chances are, you are, too! In higher ed, we tend to think of summer as “project time,” whether we’re gearing up to start researching for a new article or book, or finally turning our attention to something that’s been pushed to the back burner during the academic year. But so often, it seems like the summer’s over before we know it, and the projects haven’t gotten done. Kerry Ann Rockquemore writes a blog called “Career Advice” for Inside Higher Ed; her post this morning is “Support for Summer Writers: No More Post-Summer Regret.” Rockquemore offers useful advice on planning what she calls SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attractive, Realistic and Time-Framed. So, instead of your goal being “work on book,” it might be “complete first draft of chapter 2 by August 1st.” She advises that we look carefully at our calendars for the summer, making sure that time already committed to other things (vacation, conferences, etc.) is blocked out. Only then will we know exactly how much time we can devote to our summer goals and be able to make realistic plans. I know that I definitely work more effectively, and feel more of a sense of accomplishment, when I have a “to-do” list and can cross things off as they’re completed. But I do have a tendency to make those “work on book”-type goals that are vague and have no specific timeline, and now I can see that I’m setting myself up for failure by doing so. So, the first item on my to-do list for today is: “Look at calendar and determine specific schedule for working on summer projects.”

Researchers: Share your views on open access publishing

I received this announcement today on a listserv I belong to. The Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) seeks to gain insight into researchers’ views and experiences on open access publishing through your completion of a brief survey. Although sponsored by the European Commission, SOAP is seeking respondents from all parts of the world (and at all stages of their careers). Here is the message they sent:
The SOAP Project (*), funded by the European Commission, would like to announce the release of an online survey to assess researchers’ experiences with open access publishing. This survey aims to inform the most comprehensive analysis of attitudes to open access publishing to date and is seeking views from a wide a range of interested parties. It is primarily aimed at active researchers in public and private organizations, from all fields of the research in the sciences and humanities and focuses on publication of research articles in (open access) peer-reviewed journals. If you would like to contribute to shaping the public discourse on open access, please visit: http://surveymonkey.com/soap_survey_d It should take 10-15 minutes to complete. The survey outcome will be made public and the resulting insights as well as recommendations will be openly shared with the European Commission, publishers, research funding agencies, libraries and researchers. Thanks in advance, the SOAP Project Team info@project-soap.eu (*) Note: The SOAP consortium is coordinated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It represents key stakeholders in open access, such as publishers BioMed Central, SAGE and Springer; funding agencies (the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council) and libraries (the Max Planck Digital Library of the Max Planck Society). The project runs for two years, from March 2009 to February 2011.

Mechanical Engineering students’ capstone project cited in Wired.com article

On March 9, 2010, the popular website Wired.com published an article titled “Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants,” by author Alexis Madrigal. Madrigal cited the work of six NU students, and included a link to their capstone project, which had been published in IRis, Northeastern’s digital archive of scholarship. In the past 2 months, their capstone project, “Hydroelectric Power Generator: Technical Design Report,” which the students created in the course MIME1501 in May 2002, has been viewed 350 times by readers of the Wired article. Congratulations to student authors Anthony Chesna, Tony DiBella, Tim Hutchins, Saralyn Kropf, Jeff Lesica, and Jim Mahoney! Want to increase your citation rate? Submit your work to IRis!

IRis Highlight: the Department of Sociology and Anthropology collection

The Sociology and Anthropology Department here at Northeastern University is staffed by the most amazing faculty on the planet, for example: Michael Brown Ph.D., Professor in Theory, Cultural Sociology, History of Sociology/Social Thought; and Jack Levin Ph.D., Professor in Criminology, Prejudice, Social Psychology, Aging/Social Gerontology. It is no wonder that the graduates of this program mirror the excellence of their professors; for example, Katherine Rickenbacker, Stanislav Vysotsky, Peter P. Cassino, Janese Lynette, and Marci Lee Gerulis-Darcy. Check out their disserations and master’s thesis now easily viewable and readily available on IRis. Simply browse “collections,” scroll down to Department of Sociology and Anthropology, or click here.

IRis Highlight: Talker-Specific Phonetics

In the past semester, I cannot even count how many times I have overheard my roommate reciting “HOW NOW BROWN COW” loudly, slowly and often repetitively in our apartment. Although I first attributed this new habit to her unique personality, I soon learned it was part of her “Voice and Articulation” homework to record herself speaking. We started talking about this regularly, and as a result I began paying more attention to my “regional” accent. This new interest in accents and pronunciation led me straight to Rachel Marie Theodore’s dissertation, “Some characteristics of talker-specific phonetic detail,” a paper on the IRis database  highlighting the specific sounds and details that make talkers differ. The dissertation includes an interesting experiment in which “two groups of listeners were differentially exposed to characteristic VOTs [voice-onset-time] for two talkers, one talker produced short VOTs and the other talker produced longer VOTs. Exposure was provided during training phases in which listeners heard both talkers produce one voiceless stop consonant, either /p/ or /k/, in the context of a word (e.g., pain or cane). In test phases, listeners were presented with a short-VOT and a long-VOT variant of the word presented during training as well as a novel word that began with a different voiceless stop than presented during training. In both cases, listeners were asked to select which of the two VOT variants was most representative of a given talker.” If you find this interesting, be sure to check out the paper in full!