Friends,
Letters are now going out from a firm called Bentham Open to scholars in different areas of design research inviting them to join editorial boards of the Bentham Open Journals.
Please look them over with care before accepting such an offer. At my faculty, we encourage people to work as journal editors and journal reviewers. This is an important service to the field. Respectable journals always need more skilled and active reviewers. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, why not contact the editors of our many good journals?
Bentham's flavor of open access publishing is a for-profit venture, and it seems to me organized for profit rather than for scientific or scholarly contribution. The submission fees are too high as far as I am concerned, and I just don't see that Bentham has serious experience in scholarly or scientific publishing.
Few of these journals can have serious impact. Several Bentham journals appear be indexed only in Directory of Open Access Journals as well as Google and Google Scholar. DOAJ is a reference valuable tool, but it is not an index based on any factor other than the fact that a journal is available free on the web. And who on earth would claim articles are "indexed" in Google and Google Scholar? These are search engines, not indexes.
If you'd like a good list of current journals, we'll soon be releasing a widely accessible version of our recent study on design journals. We did it to assist the response of the Australian Deans of Built Environment and Design to the government's Excellence in Research for Australia initiative. Preliminary results went out a month ago, and we are now preparing a better and more useful draft with added information before extending and deepening the study. This lists some 200 or so journals, and among our 300+ informants, none mentioned any journal published by Bentham.
Elsevier, MIT Press, Berg, Oxford University Press, Intellect, and others publish serious journals in design, design research, and cognate fields, along with the independent publishers of specialized journals and journal hybrids. No need to waste time on journals that primarily exist to bring money into the companies that own them. My experience is that all journals need serious reviewers. It's also my experience that good reviewers are often invited to editorial boards.
Best regards,
Ken
Ken Friedman
Professor, Ph.D., Dr.Sci. (hc), FDRS
Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
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