Academic Writing Month and the social landscape of academic practice

Public scholarship projects are a space to think out loud, build support networks and work collaboratively, says Anna Tarrant.
With the 2014 REF deadline looming and job search committees eyeing up ways of banking a few more high quality REF-ables, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the pressure to produce. As an early career researcher this is particularly the case – you know what prospective departments are looking for. But despite increasing advances in open access publishing and peer-review, getting published still takes considerable time and personal commitment. Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) may therefore seem like impeccable timing or a bid to push already overworked academics over the edge.
Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write 50,000 words of fiction in a month, Charlotte Frost (then a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) set herself a similar task in 2011 for her own academic writing. Using PhD2Published, the publishing resource she had set up the previous year, she then extended the invitation world-wide. More...