Campus webinar: How to get your academic work published

With the academic publishing landscape rapidly changing, it can be difficult for early career researchers to know where and when to take that first step on the journey. Yet, the benefits for your career can be transformative: job offers, promotions, research grants and a network of like-minded scholars. 

Here, we demystify the publishing process, providing guidance on approaching publishers, writing proposals, how much or how little to use generative artificial intelligence, the role of open access and what goes into the production of a finished academic title. 

In this 60-minute discussion, we ask four academic publishing experts from Campus+ partner institutions, the University of Edinburgh, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech and the University of Westminster for their advice on going from Word document to published work.

Our panellists are:

John Atkinson is manager at University of Westminster Press. His career extends from one of the biggest HE publishing firms, Simon & Schuster Academic, to the smallest, his own – which was acquired by Liverpool University Press in 2020. He also sits on the organising committee of the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA).

Corinne Guimont is director of Virginia Tech Publishing and Press. She works with faculty and students to create digital publications using a range of tools and platforms. Her background is in information science, digital humanities and e-textbook publishing. 

Emily Sharpe is senior commissioning editor for literary studies at Edinburgh University Press. She commissions research monographs and edited collections, scholarly reference works and critical editions in Shakespeare and early modern literature, modernist literature, postcolonial studies and contemporary literature.

Lisa Yaszek is professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech. She explores science fiction as a window into culture and has published award-winning books including Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (2016) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (2021).