The blog PhD2Published recently ran a three-part series on journal article publishing: getting started; choosing a journal; and dealing with rejection. If you are thinking about publishing for the first time, it is a great idea to expose yourself to as many sources of information and opinion as you can; this blog has an extensive list of academic publishing resources. If you are working in the sciences, you may also be interested in this piece from Science on publishing in scientific journals.
This blog post from The Scholarly Kitchen discusses the new paywall at the New York Times. The author points out that the paywall allows the paper to charge organizations for access. While some individuals may get around the paywall by accessing Times’ stories through social media or blog readers, institutions will pay for subscriptions, giving the Times the financial support it both needs and deserves.
Lastly, here is something from The New Yorker Book Bench blog on the new additions to the OED. Ian Crouch has given an amusing account of the predictable outrage that attends any inclusion of novel coinage in an authoritative dictionary. In his words, the OED is a “far-reaching collection of English words, with an eye to history, which aims to be both prescriptive (these words and only these words are correct) and descriptive (these are the words that are used, as here’s how). When historians, linguists, and the generally curious want to know how people spoke in the twenty-first century, it will be useful to know about OMG and LOL, and how the phrases reflected usage that ranged from serious, to semi-serious, to full-on ironic.”
Explorations of Style 