Tag / publishing

by shannonchance

Publishing Discount for SEFI Members

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Good news shining through a rainy day in London.

I was on the bus from London South Bank University this morning, headed to University College London when good news arrived, shining through an otherwise cold and rainy day. The Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Engineering Education  (EJEE), Dr. Kristina Edström, forwarded me an email from the publishing house, Taylor and Francis, regarding costs for purchasing “Gold” level open access in the journal.

 

The change will enable SEFI members to save $500 off the cost of Gold access and the publishers will implement a change tonight–when they reboot their system. Information about the discount will then be included on the T&F web page for EJEE (although the T&F code for the journal is actually CEEE). Info about how to secure the discount will also be provided by the EJEE editors (Kristina, along with her deputy editors, Dr. Maartje van den Bogaard and Prof. Jonte Bernhard) when they send the formal acceptance email to authors.

SEFI–the European Society for Engineering Education—is the organising body behind EJEE. There are individual memberships available, but it’s more typical for an institution to join. Because I am affiliated with UCL and TU Dublin, which are both SEFI members, I am also a member of SEFI. There’s a full list of member organisation on the SEFI website.

Here’s what the publishers’ rep said:

Hi Kristina,

I hope that you are very well today.

I’m just picking up on your email to Rachel regarding the discounted APC for SEFI members and promoting this a bit more widely. I have added this information to the Instructions for Authors page under the Open Access heading, and to the Society Information page as below:

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These changes to the journal pages will go live overnight once our servers update. Do let me know if any tweaks to the wording are required. If it doesn’t appear already, it might be something worth advertising also somewhere on the SEFI website—do let me know if you would like T&F’s help with this.

For your reference, the relevant clause in the contract regarding this APC discount for SEFI members is screenshotted below:

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Please do not hesitate to get back in touch if there’s anything else I can help with.

All best wishes,
Jess

I’m glad I was able to help push this along, so SEFI members can realise savings. I stuck with this effort, first as a curious author, and second as a member of EJEE’s Editorial Board. I’m feeling today like I added a bit of value to the SEFI community.

Kristina celebrated with a Tweet letting the world know:

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img_2419As for my own article (the one I blogged about yesterday) I haven’t decided if I’ll upgrade to Gold. I’ve discovered there’s a 12-month embargo for the current access level I have (Green), and after 12 months I can post the official version of the paper. Perhaps the 50 free copies I’m allowed to give out will suffice until then, since most colleagues will have access to the article via their university libraries.

The full cost to obtain Gold access for my paper would be about €2395, according to an estimate I received from the platform a couple weeks ago. The $500 discount equates to €446, so the total cost for open access would still be head-spinning, at about €1950.

Yes, it’s true. Many people don’t know that authors typically must pay to publish their writing in top-notch journals. Fortunately, with EJEE, there’s no cost to authors if they go the Green route. However, for Gold (fully and immediately open) access to the public, there is a charge.

EJEE is pretty special in regard to offering Green access for free. The other top journals in the field of engineering education research (EER) charge. For the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), organised by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), it costs the author around $60 per page to publish (and there isn’t a free route other than requesting a special exception for extenuating circumstances). I hope I can figure out how to pay the fee when I get an article accepted there.

Today, I’m celebrating small victories.

by shannonchance

Closing a Chapter

In preparation for our chapter, Tim Cole updated me on VBCPS's sustainability strategies.

Last month, while working on our chapter, Tim Cole and I discussed VBCPS’s sustainability strategies.

I’m celebrating a moment of success here before I hit the sack for the night.

I just submitted a full draft of a chapter called “Designing School Buildings to Enhance Performance and Learning” for a book called Marketing the Green School: Form, Function, and the Future that will be part of the Advances in Educational Marketing, Administration, and Leadership (AEMAL) Book Series.  To make that project more fun, I enlisted Virginia Beach City Public School’s Director of Sustainability, J. Timothy Cole, as my supporting author.

This chapter provides a way for me to share some of the research I did for my dissertation and to extend my knowledge — I got to learn from Tim’s successes in Virginia Beach.  Tim has helped create 8 LEED-quality school facilities (5 are certified and 3 are in process to become certified). He even helped pilot LEED v1 in the 1990s.

This is the second chapter I have completed in the two months since I’ve been home.  The other chapter is called “Bringing it all Together Through Group Learning.” It is for a Wiley publication called New Directions for HIgher Education. That project was fun because I got to work with the book’s editor, the illustrious Dr. Pamela Eddy.

Since returning home on August 23, I’ve also managed to compile and submit a dossier to my University, submit a grant proposal asking for funding to help  conduct future research, spend a good amount of time with my students, implement some new teaching techniques, and — this week — get my midterm grades in on time and prep to advise students.

Oh, yes, and tonight I also had a lovely dinner with my dad and step-mom, Joyce, who are in town on business!  It was a real treat to spend a few hours with them.  Joyce is the Director of Admissions for the Vet School at Virginia Tech and she is recruiting at Hampton University in the morning.

All this is  pretty typical in the day of a professor… but I will sleep well tonight, knowing that I’m doing the best job I can possibly be doing right now, despite all the odds I’ve stacked against myself.

It is really nice to step back, take a deep breath, and be thankful for work and health and a ray of happiness every now and then.

And now, to sleep.   There’s much more to do in the morning….

A plan of the new Kellam High School, now under construction.
Tim gave me a tour of the facility, inside and out.
The highlight is the central courtyard, which the students helped design.
It includes an “edible” garden, a bio-retention infiltration garden, and an interactive gathering garden.