More monkeys
If my life ever stops being weirdly (but amusingly) ironic, I’ll look down to see if I’ve died and somehow just not noticed it yet.
Not two days after I whinge about not having any OA whuffie, I get a pitch to do an article for an IR-themed journal issue. Before you even ask, the journal in question is not an Elsevier organ, the green-OA terms look just barely acceptable, and one of the issue editors is someone I respect a good deal.
But I cringed, because (I suddenly realized) it isn’t all writing I dislike, just academic-research writing. Probably a grad-school hangover, and a stupid one at that, but there it is. Introduction, lit review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, bibliography, shoot me now please.
It’s the lit review that really gets me. In college and grad school (not so much library school, though) I had the uneasy feeling that my professors knew every article that had ever been written about my topic, and would descend upon me in rivers of red ink if I missed even one. (I didn’t even start a dissertation, either. Go figure.) The literature wasn’t a support or a source of useful background—it was an evil devouring hydra with more necks than a chicken-house.
So I didn’t answer the request right away. Ugh, need the whuffie, but double ugh, academic writing.
Cuddled in bed for a nap with a Goth-kitty, however, I started thinking about all the things I’d like to say about the journal theme, and they started fitting themselves together in my head around anecdotes from my real-life work experience, and… damn it, there’s the article, there it is right there, it’s just not strictly research-academic-type writing.
Bleh, so I don’t need the whuffie so bad I can’t risk losing it. I pitched them the article idea, because the worst they can do is say no and get somebody else, you know? And I can still write the article and send it somewhere, though I admit to more screaming horrors at the notion of writing articles purely on spec. (Like I don’t have anything else to do with my off-work time?)
I’ve got a great title for it, though, thanks to my former coworkers at Mason. “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.” My low peasant sense of humor has me grinning like a loon at the thought of that title coming up in a search of a research-article database.
So we’ll see. Maybe I kick another grad-school monkey off my back by giving this particular article-monkey a ride. If the pitch flies, I’m gonna try to negotiate the OA terms, though, at least as they’re expressed on SHERPA. Publishing is too damn slow, that’s all there is to it.