Scholarly communication regularly faces the challenge to communicate across the gap between the expertise of the subject-matter experts and that of their readers, students, other disciplines, or communities outside of academia. Collaborative writing sprints are a chance for scholars to engage their readers directly by making them co-authors in the writing process.
The Book Sprints methodology has been used for ten years to create collaborative publications; by professors, students, and learn design experts to write open textbooks; by representatives of different disciplines mapping and defining an interdisciplinary field in formation; by academics and community activists to formulate guidebooks and manifestos.
Guided by a Book Sprints facilitator, the scholars and practitioners with different backgrounds constantly check each others biases and jargon, and thus ensure a publication both reader-friendly and useful for the target audience. And because the target audience is already engaged, each contributor becomes a valuable multiplier in the dissemination of the publication. The contributors are supported by an online collaborative writing environment developed by the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation and a team of Book Sprints’ designers and copy-editors co-creating the book in a five-day sprint.
This session explores some of the learnings of the last ten years in collaborative scholarly writing and publishing.
