The results are in! Our Open Access survey receives nearly 15,000 responses

We are delighted to publish the findings of our record-breaking Open Access survey, run by our brothers and sisters in Taylor & Francis Journals. This survey, circulated in the final weeks of 2012 leading into early 2013, was the largest single survey conducted by our Research & Businesses Intelligence Department to date, receiving over 14,700 responses. We asked the Taylor & Francis author community, which includes authors of Routledge Journals, for their views on Open Access publishing and their level of involvement with it.

Why did we carry out this survey?

Our motivation was a genuine curiosity about the views of our authors towards Open Access, and many related topics, such as peer review, licensing, re-use and metrics.

The Open Access environment has been developing at an extraordinary rate, and we wanted to ensure we had an up-to-date understanding of our authors’ views and needs in response to these changes, in order to adapt our services and policies accordingly. We have long-standing experience of sending out surveys on a number of topics to authors, editors and society partners and believe that this is a very effective way of receiving rapid feedback from those communities.

Overwhelming response

The response to the survey was overwhelming, with nearly 15,000 authors emailing back, answering most, if not all, of the 24 questions. As you can see from the adjacent world map image, the global spread of respondents was pretty good. The responses produced some very interesting findings. Click on the link below to access the report.

We wanted to make the results of the survey available for all to read and so have produced a PDF document providing charts showing the raw results from all the questions in the survey along with details about the survey population and resulting sample. This is provided under a creative commons attribution license.

Read the full report here: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pdf/open-access-survey-march2013.pdf

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New for this edition is a chapter which covers key changes in design culture. Design culture has changed dramatically in the 21st century, the designer-hero is now much less in evidence and design has become much more interdisciplinary.

Drawing on a wealth of mass-produced artefacts, images and environments including sewing machines, cars, televisions, clothes, electronic and branded goods and exhibitions, author Penny Sparke shows how design has helped to shape and reflect our social and cultural development.

This introduction to the development of modern (and postmodern) design is ideal for undergraduate students.

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Fifty Key Writers on Photography is a clear and concise survey of some of the most significant writers on photography who have played a major part in defining and influencing our understanding of the medium.

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This book provides a succinct overview of writing on photography from a diverse range of disciplines and perspectives and examines the shifting perception of the medium over the course of its 170 year history. Key writers discussed include:

• Roland Barthes
• Susan Sontag
• Jacques Derrida
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Geoffrey Batchen

Fully cross-referenced and in an A-Z format, this is an accessible and engaging introductory guide.

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Most web design books developed for the trade market are a series of exercises without a theoretical, aesthetic, or historic framework. In this book, Visual Communication on the Web, web design exercises are accompanied by concise introductions. 

Includes a free one-year subscription to the Interactive e-Text version.

In this book, Visual Communication on the Web, web design exercises are accompanied by concise introductions that relate history, design principles, and visual communication theories to the practice of designing for the web.

Specifically, Visual Communication on the Web teaches the reader to develop one dynamic web page over the course of 14 chapters. Exercises build upon each other so the reader creates and revises the work while learning new code or tools. Predictable mistakes are purposely included so that readers learn how to 'fix' the project while working on it—a much-needed skill for anyone interested in coding. By the end of this course-in-a-book, readers will have created a web page with a centered container div, a Lightbox image gallery, and an external style sheet using HTML, CSS, and copy-pasted and modified code.

The Interactive eTextbook provides concise videos of burrough detailing some of the more complex step-by-step instructions and original chapter introductions by Lester. Users of the eTextbook may also engage in a traditional assessment exercise to test their knowledge of new material. For those who aren’t reading electronically, many of these resources are freely available on the blog, viscommontheweb.wordpress.com.

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eBooks from Taylor & Francis - Helping you to choose the right eBooks for your Library

As we enter 2013, we are seeing more and more institutions and libraries investing in electronic information products and resources. There is increasingly less space for physical books, and students are now accessing more information remotely.

A 2012 IFLA report rightly makes the point that 'eResources present a number of challenges not encountered with the selection and acquisition of traditional analogue materials'. For this reason, at Taylor & Francis we endeavour to offer you as much support as possible to help you integrate our eProducts into your library as easily as possible. And with our eBooks, we have made things super simple.

At first glance, the sheer scale of our eBook backlist and frontlist can be quite daunting. We have over 30,000 eBooks across the Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences and Law, from leading imprints, including Routledge, Focal Press and Psychology Press.

With eBooks covering everything from Language & Linguistics and Philosophy of Film to Commercial Law and Development Economics, there is a lot to choose from. For that reason, we have made our purchase options nice and flexible; subject eCollections, interdisciplinary eFocus packages, Pick n' Mix and more ...

Give our new video a watch and get a snapshot of what T&F eBooks could do for your library:

To fully understand photography, it is essential to study both the theoretical and the technical.

In an accessible yet complex way, Rebekah Modrak and Bill Anthes explore photographic theory, history and technique to bring photographic education up-to-date with contemporary photographic practice. Reframing Photography is a broad and inclusive rethinking of photography that will inspire students to think about the medium across time periods, across traditional themes, and through varied materials.

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Now Available

This title offers an engaging introduction to visual and image studies.

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In order to better understand images and visual culture the book seeks to bridge between theory and practice; asking the reader to think critically about images and image practices, but also simultaneously to make images and engage with image-makers and image-making processes.

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Twitter has been a popular form of communication at Routledge for several years now, and has proven to be a very immediate, personal and fun way of communicating with librarians, academics and students. It also looks like Twitter is a growing communication channel within academic institutions, between students and lecturers, and between the students themselves. A recent study conducted at Michigan State University has confirmed the growing use and importance of Twitter as a learning tool. Read on for a full low down.

"The students get more engaged because they feel it is connected to something real"

Assistant Professor of Education at Michigan State University, Christine Greenhow, conducted a study entitled “Twitteracy: Tweeting is a New Literary Practice”, the results of which were published in the Taylor & Francis journal The Educational Forum. In it, she found that college students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content, the teacher, other students, and they have higher grades.

“Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice,” said Greenhow, who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers. “It’s changing the way we experience what we read and what we write.” “The students get more engaged because they feel it is connected to something real, that it’s not just learning for the sake of learning,” Greenhow said. “It feels authentic to them.”

“One of the ways we judge whether something is a new literary form or a new form of communication is whether it makes new social acts possible that weren’t possible before,” Greenhow said. “Has Twitter changed social practices and the way we communicate? I would say it has.”

Professor Greenhow also noted that Twitter usage among U.S. teens has doubled in less than two years. She states that there are now more than 200 million active users … posting more than 175 million tweets a day.

Read that again. 175 million tweets a day.

And you thought your Twitter stream was crowded?!

Greenhow’s research comes on the heels of another MSU study about changing communication practices among college students. That study, led by Jeff Grabill, found that first-year college students value texting more than any other writing style. Read about the MSU study here

Stay in touch with Routledge Reference. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TandFRef

The Fashion History Reader is an innovative work that provides a broad introduction to the complex literature in the fields of fashion studies, and dress and fashion history.  Find out more about this title here.

This revised and updated fourth edition examines key debates in photographic theory and places them in their social and political contexts. New and improved sections include: key concepts, biographies of major thinkers, and seminal references; a full glossary of terms, comprehensive bibliography and new chapter abstracts; updated resource information, including guides to public archives and useful websites.