Viveka Turnbull Hocking wrote:
> About a year or so ago I started a thread asking about the origins of
> 'the ecology of the artificial' which many of you help me with. This
> culminated in a paper 'An Ecology for Design: From the Natural,
> through the Artificial, to the Un-Natural' which is now published in
> the Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, Vol.3,
> Iss.1, pp.41-54

Thanks very much for this notification Viveka. It sounds like
interesting work that I'd like to read about.

However I'd like to encourage you and all colleagues on this discussion
list to make your publications freely available on the web. This can be
done in several ways and should not cause you copyright problems:

First your own institution may have a research repository (such as
eprints or dspace) where you can do this. This is an excellent route as
it ensures that your work is found by Google Scholar and other academic
search software.

You can also place your work on the archive.org site. This is a
not-for-profit organisation that aims to make all kinds of materials
permanently available for future scholars.

You can also have your own website. If you don't want to get into web
technology you can do this free and easily by using a blog service like
wordpress.com. I do this and it allows me to provide short introductions
to each paper with a link to the full paper on archive.org or my
institution's repository.

There are at least two reasons for doing this. First your research is
paid for by the public in various ways. They pay the taxes that fund
universities directly and also pay research grants. They also pay fees
to attend university. Commercial organisations also help to pay for some
of the work of universities. So all these people pay our wages and they
have a right to see the product of our work. Research in the academy is
only pointful if it is freely shared. Incidentally virtually all the
costs of reviewing and editing for journals and conferences are also met
by academics giving up their time unpaid.

Secondly your own career is helped enormously by making sure people have
free and quick access to your published research. I can't stress this
too much, there is evidence that publications that are freely available
online are much more likely to be cited and how can anybody take an
interest in you and what you do if it's invisible?

If you are worried about copyright, have a look at
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ which tells you the policies of most
academic publishers regarding open-access archiving. You'll see that
most allow it in some form.

Commonground, who publish the journal with your paper, may not be
included as they are not one of the mainstream publishing houses.
Actually I feel there is an even stronger case for giving away this
paper because Commonground have an interesting publishing model but in
practice I feel their approach is greedy and exploitative.

Not only do they collect a hefty fee from authors (through the
conference, this is basically a conference proceedings) but they have
the cheek to charge subscriptions of $50 to anybody who wants to read
the papers. There is a model for "author pays" publication, some very
reputable open-access publishers in the sciences do it, but only on the
basis that the payment ensures free access to everybody.

Design Research Society, IASDR, and many other conference organisers,
make proceedings freely available on the web because we believe that to
be in the best interests of our members and the wider community.
Unfortunately Commonground seem to be mainly concerned with running as
many conferences and journals as they can, using a one size fits all
approach, taking money from everybody, and little evidence of direction
coming from the disciplines concerned.

Best wishes from rainy Sheffield
Chris

...............................................................o^o
Professor Chris Rust FDRS
Head of Art and Design Research Centre (nearly finished that)
Head of Art and Design (real soon now)
Sheffield Hallam University, S1 2NU, UK
+44 114 225 6772
[log in to unmask]
http://chrisrust.wordpress.com/

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the
future of the human race. - H. G. Wells