Publications, Volume 3, Issue 2 (June 2015) – 6 articles , Pages 43-149

In this paper I discuss some constraints and implications in accessing fellow academics as research participants, a topic that has rarely been addressed thus far in the literature. I will point out that a lack of cooperation from fellow academics may defeat our research purposes, and will survey some studies involving U.S., European, and Chinese academics as research participants to illustrate education researchers’ efforts to work with fellow academics against the odds. By referencing my personal experience of engaging with Chinese academics, I will then discuss the role of personal contacts in research and reflect upon various constraints in accessing fellow academics as research participants. I will suggest that, when we do participate in a fellow researcher’s project, the incentive is a desire to support our peers in the spirit of “academic citizenship.” Full article

The Journal of Transport and Health is a new journal, bringing together the impacts of transport on health and inequalities and the ways changes to transport policy and/or infrastructure affect these. It aims to: promote dialogue between the two research communities it serves; improve the quality of data and its appropriate use; and encourage transfer of research into practice. The first volume of four issues was published in 2014; it is already abstracted and indexed in SafetyLit, ERIH PLUS, TRID, the TRIS and ITRD Databases. A substantial achievement is that the Social Sciences Citation Index added the journal within the first year, from the first issue onwards, which is rare. Before the end of 2014, the journal had exceeded its target by 2015 for: numbers of manuscripts submitted; editorial decisions made; articles accepted for publication; and articles downloaded. Challenges have included recruiting sufficient reviewers; setting standards for acceptance of manuscripts; and editors’ time commitments. In 2014, articles were downloaded in 77 countries, and we received submissions from 27 countries. Despite the plethora of scientific journals, Journal of Transport and Health has obviously filled a gap in interdisciplinary research “whose time has come”, in a timely and attractive manner. Full article

In this conceptual paper, we address the problem that novice scholars in social sciences sometimes have in constructing conceptual or theoretical frameworks for their dissertations and papers for publication. In the first part of the paper, we discuss why the topic is important in the high pressure environment that novice scholars face, in which finishing a doctoral degree and getting published can make a difference in career success or failure, and explain our understanding of theoretical/conceptual framing, including provisionally defining some key terms. We then elucidate ten problems that novice scholars have with theoretical/conceptual framing, using our own experiences as manuscript reviewers and writers as examples. The paper concludes with ways that novice scholars can address the task of framing their scholarly work conceptually and theoretically, on the understanding that the struggles continue over the lifetime of a scholarly career. Full article

This paper explores how two Chinese medical Master’s students’ international publication success/failure and their academic English learning outcomes were related to their agency and the social context in which they were embedded by using the notions of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) and community of practice (CoP). While both students were highly motivated and similarly limited in English proficiency, their publication and academic English literacy learning outcomes vastly differed. Analysis via the lenses of LPP and CoP reveals that their differences in scholarly achievement in terms of international publication success and academic English learning outcomes can be convincingly explained by variation in the structure of the CoPs to which they belonged. Their respective CoPs determine their amount and quality of co-participation or mutual engagement with old-timers, particularly the master, which ultimately led to markedly different publication and academic English learning outcomes. Accordingly, I argue that institutions must consider the amount of mutual engagement senior researchers can afford to their research students when allocating advising responsibilities to professors. Full article

It is widely known now that scholarly communication is in crisis, resting on an academic publishing model that is unsustainable. One response to this crisis has been the emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing, bringing scholarly literature out from behind a paywall and making it freely available to anyone online. Many research and academic libraries are facilitating the change to OA by establishing institutional repositories, supporting OA policies, and hosting OA journals. In addition, research funding bodies, such as the Australian Research Council (ARC), are mandating that all published grant research outputs be made available in OA, unless legal and contractual obligations prevent this. Despite these broader changes, not all scholars are aware of the new publishing environment. In particular, the rate of adoption of OA models in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) has historically been lower than Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) disciplines. Nevertheless, some local and international OA exemplars exist in HSS. At Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, the faculty-administered environmental humanities journal, Landscapes, was migrated to the institutional open access repository in 2013. Subsequently, researchers in the Faculty of Education and Arts were surveyed regarding their knowledge, understandings, and perceptions of OA publishing. The survey was also designed to elicit the barriers to OA publishing perceived or experienced by HSS researchers. This article will present the findings of our small faculty-based OA survey, with particular attention to HSS academics (and within this subject group, particular attention to the arts and humanities), their perceptions of OA, and the impediments they encounter. We argue that OA publishing will continue to transform scholarship within the arts and humanities, especially through the role of institutional repositories. The “library-as-publisher” role offers the potential to transform academic and university-specific publishing activities. However, the ongoing training of university researchers and personnel is required to bring into balance their understandings of OA publisher and the demands of the broader Australian and international research environment. Full article

Much scholarly attention has been given to the English writing and publishing practices of the academics in non-Anglophone countries, but studies on such practices in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) have in general been limited. The case of Mainland Chinese HSS academics is potentially interesting. On the one hand, international publications in these disciplines have been on the increase, which are also encouraged by the national research policy of “going-out”. On the other hand, unlike those in science and technology (S&T), such practices in the HSS are still much less institutionalized at the local level. In the study reported in this article, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine academics in economics, sociology and archaeology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and all nine participants had prior experience in international publishing. With a focus on participants’ experiences and perceptions, findings from this study demonstrated the relatively passive role participants played in their international publications, the importance of various resources in bringing forth these publications, and the relations between participants’ alignments with the local or international community and their voluntary investment in participating in their practices. Implications of the study were also discussed. Full article