1. British Academy PDF: The Dirty Secrets

2. Secret No.1 : Academic Contribution (Inform & Inspire) PDF has got to make an original contribution to knowledge. Think about time-honoured orthodoxies in the literature. How is your PDF going to revise this orthodoxy?

3. Audiences and Salesmanship Consider audiences (concentric circles) There is the obvious appeal to the 5 scholars who work on the same subject as you. That’s the easy bit. But how are you going to make sure your PDF appeals to more than just 5 scholars? How you appeal to 100 people, 1000 people, 5000 people, etc is different to how you appeal to 5 people. Big themes, Big Ideas, Big Debates.

4. From PhD to PDF to World Domination Demonstrate progression from PhD. Funding bodies like to see intellectual development. How does this PDF build on your PhD? How have your intellectual horizons broadened. Where is this PDF going to take you? Hopefully, it’s going to make you a research leader in your field. That’s what the Academy will want to hear.

5. Academic Outputs: University presses & top publishers (OUP, CUP, Palgrave, MUP, EUP, Routledge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton etc). Tip – the Academy has its own monograph scheme with Oxford University Press, specifically for PDFs.) Be specific: alert the Academy to particular series; shows you have thought this through. 3* & 4* journal articles; Special issue of a journal; Workshops (one held at the Academy); International Conference; Consider inter-disciplinarity (have one potential article that transcends your discipline).

6. Secret No. 2: The Public (inform and enlighten) Academy increasingly likes projects with broader appeal. Not surprising: Department of Business, Innovation and Skills part funds the scheme. Academy has a Press and Public Relations Officer. Public and media appeal is really, really, really important to them. Think, therefore, about public appeal. Involvement with newspapers, museums, arts centres, theatres, etc. IMPACT is important. With that in mind…

7. Secret No. 3: The Policy World inform and influence) Academy has a Policy Centre. Academy organises Public Policy forums. Academy produces Policy Reports. Ergo, think about how your PDF might have policy-relevance. How might you distil ‘lessons learned’ for practitioners in government. If your PDF deals with big themes (power, money, politics, science, democracy, foreign policy – you name it), there will be policy relevance.

8. Secret No. 4 : Internationalism (inform and globalise) Academy wants PDFS that: Create dialogue and partnerships with institutions overseas. This doesn’t mean having a cup of tea with 1 like-minded scholar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It means: creating links with will raise the global profile of a) YOU; b) YOUR DEPARTMENT; c) YOUR UNIVERSITY; and d) THE ACADEMY. Conferences, workshops, research centres, think tanks. Snob value: relationships with the University of Strawberry Fields is not going to appeal to the National Academy for Humanities and Social Sciences. Recognise that the Academy already has links overseas; it’s looking for PDFs that engage with these institutions (Ankara, Athens, Nairobi, Tehran, Rome, Amman, Jerusalem, 23 field centres across Asia).

9. Secret No. 5 : Know Your Host Institution The Academy needs to know that you are in safe hands; the appeal of Warwick University might be self-evident to you, but not necessarily to the Academy. What can Warwick do for you? What can Department X at Warwick do for you? What can supervisor X do for you? What professional training does the University offer? What resources does the University possess (MRC, great international links, research support, etc).