As of this writing, I’ve worked in the academic industry for slightly over 3 months. More on this later.
Claire Morgan sent me this article on academic self-publishing. There are good points and bad points regarding self-publishing, which are exaggerated particularly so for the academic industry. I should know, since I’m making a web application for internal use in a university.
As part of my work, I learnt a lot about how the Ph.D. degree students go through their academic years, and what are the processes they go through. Yeah my web application is going to be used by staff and future doctors (albeit Ph.D.’s). Go me.
One of the more important parts of being a Ph.D. student is publications. It’s not necessary to publish any papers but they help increase your credibility. Perhaps in helping with raising the impressions of examiners who attend your thesis defence. Every little bit helps, I guess.
But you can’t just publish your work anywhere. The publisher has to be of repute and your work must be peer reviewed.
This means self-publishing is looked down upon even more by the academic industry.
But wait!
There are 2 points I found interesting in Claire’s article.
The 1st point is that you don’t have to publish your entire work. Maybe a non-vital piece of your research but is still informative and useful. “Non-vital” is of course relative to your entire research work as a whole.
The 2nd point is that you can publish mistakes or research results that didn’t go anywhere. These don’t help you and your final research publication, but they might help some other poor fellow from wasting resources going down that route.
So what’s happening lately for me?
As I said, I’m working in a university now. Well, technically they outsourced the work to me so I’m still considered self-employed. We’ll see…
I’m stationed in a research lab. I’m surrounded by Ph.D. students. My manager is a Ph.D. student. Or at least he’s the project officer who’s my liaison between the IT support department and me. But psshht, semantics.
As part of my work, I’m using ASP.NET MVC (model-view-controller) and jQuery. Both of which I’m not familiar with at the start of my contract. Fun times… I was more of a back-end kind of guy.
Speaking of back-end, my spreadsheet library is doing well. Go check out SpreadsheetLight if you haven’t, and it’s also on NuGet (which I just learnt about, even though I’ve been using Visual Studio for like donkey years. Like I said, I’m more of a back-end guy. How do you pronounce “NuGet”? Like “nugget”?).
So yeah, if you haven’t, go read that article. Tell me what you think.