Reading – Writing – Publishing

A conversation with Dasapta Erwin Irawan

A conversation with Donny Winston

A conversation with Mark Hahnel.

A conversation with Nicholas Outa.

This collective preprint is an active document intended to encourage reflection on academic writing. It is meant to evolve as a result of continuous input from interested contributors. Everyone is welcome who wants to contribute.

Talking about preprints and AfricArXiv in particular, we are honored to be featured in University World News along with colleagues and institutional partners Joy Owango (TCC Africa-Training Centre in Communication ), Stephanie Dawson (ScienceOpen), Mark Hahnel (figshare), Catherine Ahearn (Knowledge Futures Group).

Maureen Archer is President of the training and consulting firm Professional English Inc. and helps professionals (incl. researchers) improve their English skills and confidence for career advancement. With Jo, she talks about the career path that led her to her current profession, common challenges and obstacles with the English language as perceived by non-native English speakers, as well as some of the key skills researchers should have in communicating their ideas, thoughts, and results.

Rethink your publishing strategy. Instead of making it all about numbers and prestige (High Impact factor and Journal, find answers to the questions of Why, What, When, and How to make your research results available and based on that decide Where to publish.

Owango, Joy, Munene, Aurelia, Ngugi, Wangari Joyce, Obanda, Johanssen, Havemann, Johanna, Saderi, Daniela, & Korzec, Kornelia. (2021, December 9). Open Reviewers Africa – A workshop to empower the next generation of African Peer Reviewers. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5770712

Munene, Aurelia, Ngugi, Wangari Joyce, Owango, Joy, Obanda, Johanssen, Havemann, Johanna, Saderi, Daniela, & Korzec, Kornelia. (2021). Open Reviewers Africa. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5762096

Heads of states and various stakeholders have convened at COP26 to formulate solutions to the impacts of climate change. Addressing these enormous challenges requires access to scientific research, including that conducted by environmental non-government organizations (eNGOs).

Here are a few quick search results in counter-chronological order for “illegal pharmaceuticals" (example search). Be aware that each platform works with a specific search approach and algorithm which is why we recommend for you to always compare and screen search results on more than one or two platforms:

The International African Institute (IAI, https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org) in collaboration with AfricarXiv (https://info.africarxiv.org) present an interactive map of African digital research literature repositories. This drew from IAI’s earlier work from 2016 onwards to identify and list Africa-based institutional repositories that focused  on identifying repositories based in African university libraries. Our earlier resources are available at https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/repositories.

A couple of days ago on May 15th in Leipzig, Germany at the Mx Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), Corina Logan had invited Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud from Peer Community In to give a seminar on their non-profit service to science: A researcher-run solution to improving science and […]

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. […]

An article by Nick Wehner, Director of Open Initiatives at OCTO | Open Communications for The Ocean – originally published at marxivinfo.org. Numerous studies have found that Open Access papers are cited significantly more than the global average. Across all scientific disciplines, the average citation increase is 30%. If that’s not a compelling enough […]

Introducing our new course on Policy Writing and Communication for Scientists, Alexandra Athansopoulous-Köpping shares her views on the importance of the topic and its relevance to research.   In the last season of Game of Thrones when the danger of the white walkers was more imminent than ever, esp. in […]

This post was originally published in Swedish at the Vetenskap & Allmänhet website. “VA is an independent Swedish non-profit membership organization that works to promote dialogue and openness between researchers and the public.” This English version was originally published by Olle Bergman on LInkedIn. I harp on about it all the time, […]

On his blog Green Tea and Velociraptors our team colleague Jon Tennant questions the ethics of the widely practiced copyright transfer from authors of peer reviewed articles that are based mostly on public funding to commercial publishers.  The following is an excerpt from Jon’s original blog post. […] Typically, the process of […]

This podcast was originally published at PhD Career Stories. Professor Alfred Orina Isaac is a Pharmaceutical Scientist at Kenya Technical University with a specific interest in Neuroscience. His research is focused on neurotoxicology and neuroprotection mechanisms in the brain. Currently, he is studying the neurotoxicity of Khat in a mouse model and […]