News from the Special Interest Group on Academic Editing

By Ann Philpott, SIGAE facilitator

The Special Interest Group on Academic Editing (SIGAE) started after the 2023 IPEd conference. It holds informal meetings every second month (see dates of meetings for the rest of the year at the end of this article) to discuss issues and questions about this area of editing. No question is considered “foolish” or “strange”. All are welcome. We have a large number of members interested in various aspects of academic editing. Around 200 professional members are listed in the Editors Directory as seeking work in this field. All IPEd guidance related to academic editing can be found on the IPEd website.

Outreach to universities

We began our most recent meeting with a look at the latest work and updates from the Standing Committee on Academic Editing (SCAE). Rhonda Daniels AE, a member of SCAE, drew our attention to the March 2024 update of “Indicative costs of academic editing” and to the recent extensive outreach they have undertaken to improve universities’ awareness and, hopefully, uptake of IPEd’s skilled editors. The email to more than 250 high-level academic stakeholders focused on 4 items: the “Guidelines for editing research theses”, the IPEd Standards for editing practice, the IPEd Editors Directory and the indicative costs of academic editing. See the article in the August Gatherings.

This has been a huge undertaking by SCAE and IPEd’s communication officer on behalf of all IPEd’s academic editors, and SIGAE commends these volunteers for this marketing effort. In the next few months SCAE will update the 2019 “Guidelines for editing research theses” using the third edition of the IPEd Standards for editing practice published earlier in 2024.

Working with students

The discussion then moved to negotiating with students about what tasks we could do for them for “such and such money” – what is included and excluded – and the importance of keeping records of all correspondence and editing. For example, rather than agreeing to make all citations in the end notes and within the body of the thesis compatible with the standard guide that a student needed to use for their university, an editor could note a common mistake that a student was repeatedly making and advise the student to follow this one as an example and apply it to the rest of the citations.

How to deal with ambiguity in the text was also raised. While some editors preferred to state in a comment to a student “Did you mean this … or …? It is unclear as it is written. Please fix”, other editors would simply state in a comment “Ambiguous. Please discuss with your supervisor what you mean here and alter accordingly.” Ultimately, the student has to sign off on what is submitted, so they need to own the words and citation styles they are using.

Marketing

In looking for academic work, it was noted that, while there are almost 50 universities across Australia and New Zealand, the larger, research-intensive universities will have more work for editors as there will be more students writing theses in these large institutions. In Australia, the Group of Eight (GO8) are the University of Adelaide, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and the University of Western Australia.

The discussion moved to the value or otherwise of having a professional website and/or an entry in the IPEd Editors Directory (for professional members). Most seemed to think having both was a good idea and reasonably cost effective, especially at only $60 a year for the Editors Directory. A website gives an editor more of a chance to showcase who they are. The consensus was that having a website or a Directory entry did not result in you being bombarded by emails either! If someone emailed you from the Editors Directory entry, the email advised you that this was a referral from the Directory.

There are now many options for creating your own website using templates, including WordPress, Wix, Weebly and GoDaddy. You can get a domain name through GoDaddy, but there are other providers. Several attendees agreed that there is no need to have “special effects” on your website. Showcase in your writing what you can do for a client.

The upshot of the website discussion is that I am now motivated to visit the websites of academic editors before creating my own website.