UU English Department Blog
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On Studying Jane Austen, and a Sanditonian Wishlist
Photo by Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash Author and crime reporter Ann Törnkvist explains why she studied “Jane Austen as global author” at Uppsala University.
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So Why Do Fake Invitations to Publish Exist?
By Andrew Cooper
Academic publishing is a dysfunctional industry, and predatory publishing is a symptom of the fundamental problems which categorise it. Academics are required to publish frantically – and in practice their careers depend largely on the frequency of their publications, specialists are required to determine their quality. Legitimate publishers use academics as free labour, charge high subscription fees, enforce inequitable contracts upon university libraries and have waiting times for publication longer than junior lecturer’s contracts. Predatory publishers exploit these problems by avoiding them completely – and charging a moderate fee.
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Typical Features of Predatory Publishers’ Invitations
By Andrew Cooper
So, you have – hope against hope – received an email from a publisher assuring you that you can get a quick turnaround on your splendid article and add another desperately-needed line of text to your currently obviously padded list of publications. Then, on a second reading, you notice a few grammatical, spelling and pragmatic errors, such as the emails starting:
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A Curse o’ Both our Ages: Lockdowns, Quarantines, and Delayed Post in Two Pandemics
By Suzanne Ericson
My mum is one of those increasingly rare people who still send birthday cards. Until recently, these cards have arrived like clockwork – exactly one week before the big day. But Covid-19 changed this family tradition, just as it has, of late, changed so much that we previously took for granted. Still, when the latest birthday card was delayed by not just days but weeks, I turned to the website of Sweden’s leading postal service for an explanation. There it was: a short paragraph titled “How corona virus is affecting our deliveries.” The recent increase in parcels and packages as more and more of us shop online, coupled with new regulations and higher-than-normal staff absences, means that postal delays are now to be expected. Thankfully, this is a minor inconvenience. Unlike some of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, late post is rarely a matter of life or death.
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Why Emails from Predatory Publishers Are Full of Obvious Errors
By Andrew Cooper
As anyone who has a previously-unheard of and recently deceased great-uncle in the Iraqi Special Forces who has left them eighty million dollars (80,000,000USD) knows, email scams work. They generate money in pretty much the same method as a puffball mushroom reproduces – by sending out thousands upon thousands of spores in the hope that one will land somewhere hospitable. In the case of the financial spam scam, the spore is an email and the hospitable environment the mind of a very naïve or vulnerable person.
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Predatory Publishing in Academia
By Andrew Cooper
If a junior university lecturer wants to get on in life, earn promotion and (hooray!) tenure, we have to publish as much of our research as possible as quickly as possible – the motto is “Publish or perish!”
Well, nobody wants to perish.
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020
By Daniel Kane
This text was translated and published in Dagens Nyheter 6 November 2020.
Louise Glück, a writer of concise and often deeply melancholy lyric poems, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This should surprise no one. Glück, after all, is a former Poet Laureate of the United States who has previously won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and many others.