Afleveringen
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In this episode of Publish My Book, we break down the key components of a strong book proposal. We discuss essential elements like a well-structured table of contents, a compelling cover letter, a carefully chosen sample chapter, and a narrative author bio that connects emotionally with acquisitions editors. We also explore the importance of a persuasive prospectus that highlights your book's novelty, market relevance, and target audience. Whether you're approaching an editor at a conference or via email, being prepared with these components will boost your chances of success.
Relevant links
Watch the recording: Interview with Laura Portwood Stacer, “Crafting a Winning Book Proposal”
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In this episode of Publish My Book, we explore the peer review process for book manuscripts. We discuss how securing an acquisitions editor’s support is the first critical step before entering peer review, where feedback can vary in depth and rigor. We share tips on suggesting reviewers, managing the often lengthy review timeline, and effectively addressing critiques—whether agreeing, disagreeing, or clarifying misunderstandings. While revisions may feel daunting, they’re essential for refining your manuscript.
Relevant Links
Watch the interview recording: “Conquering the Peer Review Process”
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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In this episode of Publish My Book, we dive into how to approach acquisitions editors with confidence and clarity. We discuss their role in the publishing process, what they're looking for in a manuscript, and how to make a strong first impression—whether at conferences or via email. We share practical tips on tailoring your pitch, respecting their time, and navigating feedback. Acquisitions editors are key partners in your publishing journey, and understanding their perspective can make all the difference.
Relevant links
Hear personal insights and recommendations from acquisitions editors and publishing leaders on navigating the publishing journey
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In this episode of Publish My Book, we explore how to transform a dissertation into a compelling book. We begin by examining the key differences between the two: while a dissertation demonstrates our research abilities to advisors, a book communicates core ideas to a broader audience. We discuss how to distill our arguments, streamline dense sections, and rewrite for clarity and engagement. We also consider our target audience—academic or trade—and address the ethical and legal considerations of permissions for borrowed materials.
Relevant links
Watch the recording: Interview with author and consultant Beth Luey, “Successfully Turn Your Dissertation Into a Book”
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In this episode of Publish My Book, we explore the essential role of a well-crafted book index in academic publishing. A good index helps readers easily locate specific topics, names, or places, making your book more accessible and impactful. Avi discusses different types of indexes—such as subject, author, and sources indexes—and provides guidance on creating one. We emphasize starting the process early, choosing relevant terms, and ensuring accuracy. While some authors prefer to create their own index, outsourcing to experts is also an option.
Relevant links
To learn more about ALE’s indexing services:
Indexing Process
Indexing Services
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In this episode of Publish My Book, we explore open-access publishing, a model designed to make publicly funded research freely available to everyone. Unlike traditional publishing, where readers or libraries pay for access, open access requires authors or their institutions to cover upfront fees—often $4,000 to $6,000—to make their books freely accessible.
We discuss the benefits of open access, such as broader readership, higher citation rates, and increased impact. We also brought up the challenges, particularly the financial burden, and offer practical tips for authors, including applying for grants, adding open-access fees to funding proposals, and exploring models like Subscribe to Open, where libraries pool resources to support open-access titles.
Relevant links
Resources for securing OA funding
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Listen to this interview of Sakina Fatima, Research Fellow, University of Ottawa, Canada; and also, Taher Ghaleb, Assistant Professor, Trent University, Canada. We talk about the coauthored paper Flakify: A Black-Box, Language Model-based Predictor for Flaky Tests (TSE 2023).
Taher Ghaleb : "With our RQs, it's not just a matter of there being a problem with flaky tests. I mean, every researcher in this area already know that flaky tests is a problem. So, when we talk about the problem in our paper — or specifically, about the motivation behind our RQs — it's not about the flaky tests, because that's just the core problem which we already know — but instead, we talk the problem with existing approaches to flaky tests."
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Listen to this interview of Abubakar Mohammed, Manager, Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, Nigeria. We talk about the coauthored paper Cybersecurity Challenges in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry: An Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) Perspective (TCPS 2022).
Abubakar Mohammed : "I would put the success of the paper down to us just generally understanding the audience we want. Because, we were quite clear about who our audience are — we were looking at security experts who need to secure oil-and-gas critical infrastructure — and these experts have been, like us, inundated by nonspecific research talking about loads of other industries, but not the oil and gas industry. So, we were targeting that sort of professionals, and we were targeting government officials who are in charge of making specific legislation to improve the cyber-hygiene of the oil and gas industry."
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Listen to this interview of Arjun Guha, Associate Professor, Northeastern University. We talk about his coauthored paper MultiPL-E: A Scalable and Polyglot Approach to Benchmarking Neural Code Generation (TSE 2023).
Arjun Guha : "My group and our collaborating colleagues really try to pick problems carefully so that we choose a problem that we can attack with the expertise that we have. So, for example, to pull off a benchmark like the one in this paper, you needed a group of students who were all interested in their own weird programming languages."
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Listen to this interview of Ricardo Amaro, Senior Engineering Manager, Acquia, USA, and also a PhD Researcher, ISCTE—University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. We talk about his coauthored paper Capabilities and Practices in DevOps: A Multivocal Literature Review (TSE 2023).
Ricardo Amaro : "One of the main challenges we've been experiencing in DevOps is, let's say, the cultural resistance to change — and really, it's questions like these that, sure, academia have tried to answer, but to be honest, they try from a perspective that's a little bit siloed, because they are not attempting to start a conversation to find consensus."
Link to Guideline for Including Grey Literature and Conducting Multivocal Literature in Software Engineering (IST 2019)
Link to QualCoder, qualitative data analysis software
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Listen to this interview of Isaac da Silva Torres, Postdoctoral Research, TU Delft, Netherlands. We talk about his coauthored paper Guidelines to Derive an e3value Business Model from a BPMN Process Model: An Experiment on Real-world Scenarios (SOSYM 2023).
Isaac da Silva Torres : "I'm an industrial engineer, and I've worked in a lot of companies. Then afterwards, I worked for the government, back in Brazil. And then I came to the Netherlands to do my PhD. But, my work experience, as a business analyst, had always positioned me between business and IT somehow — and being this bridge, well, this worked really well for me. Because, being in between, you really can appreciate, for example, the interests of both sides. I mean, people in business departments, when it comes to digital transformation, for example — they're totally focused on the system — but of course, the people from IT are like, 'Okay, but can you give me the requirements. What exactly do you want?' I'm able to see those two sides, and can act."
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Listen to this interview of Sumon Biswas, Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University. We talk about his coauthored paper The Art and Practice of Data Science Pipelines (ICSE 2022).
Sumon Biswas : "Yeah, it's true, not many people are working in software design and software architecture — at least at ICSE — and in fact, this has been an important discussion in SE research in general: How can we increase contributions in software design and architecture? And there has been an important push, at ICSE, and at FSE as well, to make the research more representative."
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Listen to this interview of Steffen Zschaler, Reader, King's College London, UK; and of Fiona Polack, Professor, University of Hull, UK. We talk about their coauthored paper Trustworthy Agent-based Simulation: The Case for Domain-specific Modelling Languages (SOSYM 2023).
Fiona Polack : "The sort of collaborative environment that brings together researchers from many different backgrounds — that's an environment that's very, very creative — and what's more, it also encourages people to address not just the immediate problem, but also to think how you can solve problems more generally, because you keep meeting the same basic problem, it's just dressed up in a different guise."
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Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publishing, in interviewing Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network, the largest academic podcasting platform in the world. The trio discuss how the New Books Network came to be; how digital technologies open up new tools for academic work; changing media landscapes, including the recent bursting of a podcasting bubble; and the future of academic communication and publishing.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Listen to this interview of Lianglu Pan, PhD Student, and Shaanan Cohney, Senior Lecturer, and also Thuan Pham, Senior Lecturer — everyone at University of Melbourne, Australia. We talk about their coauthored paper EDEFuzz: A Web API Fuzzer for Excessive Data Exposures (ICSE 2024).
Thuan Pham : "The reading pattern in our group goes something like this: When reading to broaden our knowledge and come up with ideas, we focus on the conceptual contribution of a paper, instead of zeroing right in on the technical side. Because, when the conceptual side is good, then the paper can be readily applied to similar problems — and what's more, the technical side becomes vastly easier to understand once you've understood the concept to begin."
Writing guidance mentioned in the episode: Chicago Writing Program and Joseph William's book Style
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Listen to this interview of Lorenzo Rossi, Research Fellow, University of Camerino, Italy. We talk about his coauthored paper A Technique for Discovering BPMN Collaboration Diagrams (SOSYM 2024).
Lorenzo Rossi : "Yeah, this way of structuring the concluding remarks in this paper is a technique we often apply in our research contributions, especially to journals, where the space limitations are less stringent. This structured approach to the conclusion, where we discuss assumptions and limitations as here, really should almost be somehow mandatory for good research work. Because, especially in foundational research, there's no way around making certain initial assumptions. So, without writing these into your published work, you are (consciously or unconsciously) hiding weaknesses of your contribution, and therefore making it harder for others to build upon your findings."
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Listen to this interview of Kangfeng Ye, Research Associate, University of York, UK. We talk about his coauthored paper Probabilistic Modelling and Verification Using RoboChart and PRISM (SOSYM 2022).
Kangfeng Ye : "In this paper, I have four coauthors, all of them senior researchers. And when we reviewed the manuscript internally, we adopted a strategy we call sequential review. In the usual process of review at a conference or journal, every submission gets reviewed simultaneously — all reviewers receiving the same manuscript at the same time. However, we ran our internal review (that is, our revisions before submission) in a sequential fashion: I provided the first draft to one coauthor for review, they gave their feedback, I revised in order to provide that next draft to a different coauthor for review, and so on."
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Listen to this interview of Emerson Murphy-Hill, Research Scientist, Microsoft. We talk about his coauthored paper GenderMag Improves Discoverability in the Field, Especially for Women (ICSE 2024).
Emerson Murphy-Hill : "Too often in papers, the authors get defensive about limitations or threats to validity. Of course, they'll state outright a limitation, like in our paper that we study only one small feature of a company-internal piece of software. But many authors will then grow defensive, claiming, like, 'Well, this is actually a really important piece of software and it's used by tens of thousands of users — our numbers are really big!' But I don't really think that that resonates with readers. I think the defensiveness comes across pretty transparently. So, I think just addressing things head-on is a more effective strategy for having a good and honest conversation with readers and with reviewers."
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Listen to this interview of Ionut Predoaia, Research Fellow, and also, Antonio García-Domínguez, Senior Lecturer — both at the University of York, UK. We talk about their coauthored paper Streamlining the Development of Hybrid Graphical-Textual Model Editors for Domain-Specific Languages (ECMFA 2023).
Antonio García-Domínguez : "I think that the limitations in any work are really opportunities for follow-up research. I mean, essentially, you are identifying for the reader, 'Look, these are the bits that we've not handled just yet — and obviously, we will likely be the first ones to try to tackle that' — but, you know, there's no reason why really any other researcher in the community wouldn't attempt to tackle that from their angle or for their research purposes. They may have the better idea even, right."
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Listen to this interview of Zejun Zhang, Research Scientist, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. We talk about her coauthored paper Hard to Read and Understand Pythonic Idioms? DeIdiom and Explain Them in Non-Idiomatic Equivalent Code (ICSE 2024).
Zejun Zhang : "Following my presentation of the paper at ICSE, it was interesting. I mean, there was, first off, a lot of positive response, but then some people in the audience were asking why we would research the readability of Pythonic idioms, and also, why we would translate those idioms into non-idiomatic code. Now, these questions were coming in relation to our previous work on idiomatic code. Nonetheless, the effect for me was that, for future work, we need to further explore this line of the research and really explain Pythonic idioms so that developers can deeply understand them."
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