An Alt-Ac's publishing dilemma


A couple of blog posts ago I was pondering my dilemmas about peer reviewing as an alt-ac. This week I've been pondering actual publishing as an alt-ac.  Here's how my pondering started (after a long couple of weeks at the beginning of the semester)...

Given that...

  • As an alt-ac I do not need to have published articles to be promoted in my professional work;
  • As an alc-ac I do not get professional recognition for works published (except for some internal delight when I see my citation numbers😅)
  • As an alt-ac I don't get "work release" time from my dayjob to work on this research, so any research work I do eats into my hobby/free time;
  • As a hobby, research publications don't pay (whereas other gigs do, providing an incentive to give up some of your free time in exchange for my expertise);
  • Publication of research is hitting bottlenecks, both with peer reviews and periodic journal moratoria;
  • Even without the bottlenecks, getting through peer review can be a challenge (thanks to Reviewer 2😂) and even with good publications it's been a challenge at times to get published;
  • I have at least two publications (ca. 2018 and 2021 respectively) that I completed but have yet to publish because of journal moratoria or book editors ghosting me after the work was completed - and don't feel like doing the reformatting work (or updating work) to resubmit elsewhere...
The question is: Does it make sense that I continue down this path of research and publication? 

Don't get me wrong.  I do like reading and writing, and I could very likely get a couple of 8000-word manuscripts out each year, I don't think I see the value of submitting these to peer-reviewed publications. I see a bit more value in pursuing book chapters (after all, that process is a bit more staged, and at least there's a book contract in hand!) but getting completed research into peer-reviewed research in journals feels very administratively taxing for something that is essentially a hobby. It's that last mile that feels insurmountable at this point; or at the very least yes it's possible to get over that hump, but the reward for such an effort doesn't seem worth the inputs it needs in terms of time and effort.

Any fellow alt-acs out there?  What do you think of the peer-reviewed pub lifecycle? Do you find it fundamentally worth it? If not, at what point did it lose the luster for you? 🤔

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more