Online Scientific Writing

ASSAf hosted a workshop on science writing in early 2008 for selected individuals in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, including South Africa. A workshop was accordingly held in August 2008 involving subject specialists (drawn from many South African higher education institutions), most of whom were engaged in one way or the other with writing support for graduate students and young staff. From those experiences, a decision was made to explore a higher-impact and more sustainably beneficial approach to meeting needs in this area through the setting up of a free online training course system, offering training via the internet at a number of levels. By providing certification, the system is a strategy for facilitating the (external) acquisition by postgraduates of various levels of science writing skills and assist institutions in terms of project planning/execution. Another motivation for this information and communication technology (ICT)-based project is to encourage students to take personal responsibility for aspects of their professional growth. According to organisers, "[c]ertainly, many employers may welcome more concrete indications of the existence of such skills, which are often considered implicit in dissertation-based qualifications, but found in subsequent practice to be wanting."

The free online course system in scholarly/scientific writing for formal publication is built on 4 tiers:

1. Details of resources in the field, continuously updated and improved through feedback and effective intellectual oversight.
2. An interactive self-study lecture series on key topics in this area, drafted communally by experts and likewise kept up to date on the basis of feedback and oversight. The model for this is the free online course offered by the World Federation of Science Journalists for its online course in science journalism accessible here.
3. A system of enrolled mentors able to be linked by email or telephone to individual young scholars struggling to master specific publication-drafting tasks.
4. Occasional block short courses to enable face-to-face mentoring of groups of aspiring scholars/scientists to take place.

Associated with this project was a 2-day Pretoria, South Africa, regional workshop, held in March 2012, invited 25 medical scientists under the age of 40 who live in the Southern Africa region and who are in their final year of (or have recently completed) their Master's or Doctoral programmes. They also were in the process of preparing a journal article for publication and had no, or very limited, access to mentoring and other professional help in scientific writing. Mentoring was provided (1-on-1 and in groups), with advice and corrective action suggested by scientific experts. Workshop content included:

• Scholarly/scientific literature: what it is; what are its written and unwritten rules; and how its integrity is protected;
• General logic and structure of an article/paper;
• Citation practices;
• Drafting, submitting, and publishing an article/paper: journal choice; copyright; and other publishing issues.

Science

According to ASSAf: "Many South African institutions already offer a variety of short courses or services in scientific or scholarly writing for publication, not only to their own postgraduate students/staff, but also to interested (fee-paying) professionals from other organisations and institutions. Some of these offerings are based on continuous or periodic contact instruction, others are online, and yet others combine these modalities. While these efforts to satisfy a large perceived demand are undoubtedly valuable and effective, it is possible that a nationally coordinated, low cost-to-user online course system may greatly widen the scope of benefits, and permit over-stretched researchers at institutions to concentrate more on content than on enskilling issues, at least as far as writing for publication is concerned. It is possible that a cross-institutional 'faculty of mentors', including retirees, could be assembled to participate in the training programmes."