Advantages for Authors

So why would you want to publish your work in a knowledgeblog? What are the advantages over traditional publishing? What are the disadvantages.


It’s easy

Publishing a paper on a knowledge blog is easy. Or, at least, it is no harder than the work of writing the paper in the first paper. This is not true of traditional publishing.

Take writing a book chapter. The typical proceedure is this:

  • Author writes a paper in about a week
  • Author sends the paper to the publisher
  • Author get and respond to scientific reviews,
  • Nothing happens for a year
  • Publisher sends back some comments
  • Nothing happens for 6 months
  • Publisher sends back proofs, marked “Urgent” asking for a one week reply.
  • Author realises that formatting has gone wrong, gets very stressed.
  • Eventually book gets published
  • Dust gathering…

Of this process, only the first three are of any actual use. For knowlegde blogging, this is about it.


It’s quick

Submission and publication is the same thing. People will be able to see your article as soon as it’s written, even during the review process. If the review process takes too long, you know who the reviewers are and can ask them personally for comments. Once the reviewing is done and the paper is accepted, there is no article preparation time, there is no waiting for the next edition and there are no print delays.


You retain control

You retain copyright over the text and images. If you have your own blog and want to use it, you can publish there and link through to knowledgeblog.org. If you don’t have a blog, you can publish straight-forwardly here.

If you want advertising to raise cash, you can do that. If you want special features for multi-media, you can do that. If you want it blue on a pink background, you can do that. And if you can’t be bothered setting anything at all up, you can do that as well.


You retain credit

Your authorship is publically acknowledged. If you want, you can publish on your own blog, so credit and a public face your words remains yours.


You control formatting

With knowledge blogging, authoring, submission and publication all happen in the same way, at the same time. While you are writing, you see the current version. When you have finished and submit, the page that you see is directly what is published.


You choose reviewers

You get to choose at least some of the reviewers, and the system is public. You can choose reviewers who will do a high-quality review, and who review promptly. If you don’t want a one line review from someone who hasn’t read the paper, then don’t chose reviewers who do this.


You control the timeline

You don’t need to wait on the editors to chase up reviewers; you know who they are, you can make sure you get someone who is quick,

2 Comments

  1. Alan Shortt

    March 9, 2011 @ 2:30 am

    Im using worprss to publish my own proto-electronic textbook of uk primary care. the platform offers all the advantages you describe and then some – not least instant updating and ability to export as ePub or other format – including publish on demand within days should you still want a hard copy – I think (hope) there’s the added value of a kind of inbuilt automatic development/upgrade pathway – functions I’m missing today are likely to be added soon enogh by some industrious developers. My blog as book works quite well I think but I’m excited by the possibilities more widespread recognition and adoption of WordPress as publishing platform will bring

  2. IB Clever

    March 26, 2011 @ 5:11 pm

    I agree with what’s stated above that blog publication has a lot of advantages. I have nothing against with paper publication however there’s huge difference when it comes to blog or online publication such as you’ll never run out of print.

    Thank you.

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