Dear Colleagues,

The problem of dodgy journals and conferences is serious. Victor raises
valid concerns about the new Sage Open.

From what I have been able to discern from the Sage Open web site,
there are visible problems. To what field or discipline does this
journal belong? If it belongs to no clear field or discipline nor to an
interdisciplinary field, then who will read it? If no one reads it, how
can it have impact and how can it help scholars when they publish for
promotion or tenure decisions? Sage Open is especially puzzling because
it is not edited by scholars, but rather by in-house Sage employees with
advice of some kind from an editorial advisory board.

While open access is becoming increasingly significant, Sage Open does
not demonstrate a valid use of the traditional reasoning behind
publication fees. These are normally applied to science grants with
built-in funding for publication, and therefore, they apply to specific
discipline-focused journals in the sciences. Since this journal makes an
appeal to people in fields that do not provide such funding, Victor’s
concern is well founded. What makes this especially questionable is that
it is focused on the need of younger scholars and recent graduates to
publish.

There are now a dozen or so publishers and conference organizers who
have made a big business of this. This is the first time I have seen
such a move from an otherwise respected publishers. It is cynical and
saddening. 

With respect to Fil’s question, there are partial solutions. With
respect to warning people about problematic journals and conferences,
this is best done at the department and faculty level for many reasons.
We should be aware of these and we should be explaining to students and
to staff members why the problem journals are conferences are, indeed,
problematic.

With respect to identifying good journals and strong publishing venues,
help is on the way.

An article will appear in the January issue of Design Studies that
identifies forty high quality, peer-reviewed journals in the design
fields as part of a study to determine those journals that the field
respects and prefers based on several factors. The article goes on to
determine those journals ranked highest on different criteria, but all
forty journals are serious, worthy journals.

You will find the online preprint at this URL:

  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.09.001

Lin-Lin Chen suggested that it would be useful for the field to have a
directory of journals. 

Deirdre Barron, Ann Prince, and Rachel Mosel are now working on a
directory that extends the work Gerda Gemser, Cees de Bont, Paul
Hekkert, and I did for the Design Studies article. We had originally
hoped for late November completion, but it now looks like the directory
will be ready in January, soon after the article is published.

The directory will include journal titles with ISSNs, URL for the
journal web site, publisher data, descriptor, and other useful data.

We will publish it as an interactive PDF so that people can use the
active URLs to click through to journal web sites. We’ll announce it
widely, and we’ll make it available for download. This will be an Open
Source document under Creative Commons license so anyone can use, share,
or distribute freely, and we’ll provide PDF copies to all journals and
as many schools as we can reach.

While the first directory will be limited to the forty journals we
cover in the Design Studies article, we hope to expand coverage in the
future to a larger selection of journals. 

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61
39214 6078 | Faculty 

--

Fil Salustri wrote:

—snip—

I suppose the first step could be to establish a set of criteria by
which journals can be judged.  I would be surprised if such a thing
doesn’t already exist.  I honestly don’t know.  Does anyone else?

—snip—

Erik Stolterman wrote:

—snip—

This is becoming a growing problem. The oversight of academic
publication decisions should be in the hands of the same research
community that it serves. I would like to support Victor’s statement
and hope that all of us take our individual responsibility when it comes
to this issue.

—snip—

Victor Margolin wrote:

—snip—

I would like to open a discussion on this list about the growing number
of commercial conferences and on-line journals that invite participation
from scholars. A recent on-line journal from SAGE invites scholars to
submit their articles to a broad on-line journal on the humanities and
social sciences. SAGE promises peer review but doesn’t give any
indication of who the peers are. We have already had a discussion about
the pitfalls of the Common Ground design conference and ensuing
publication, both of which are set up to separate scholars from their
dollars, pounds, Euros, or zlotys. The SAGE journal charges scholars
$195 for publication and promises the validation of a peer review and on
line publication. Others are similar. As with Common Ground, these
journals publish lists of prominent scholars who are supposedly on their
advisory boards. Some of these scholars may agree without thinking
enough about what they are doing. Others are surprised to find their
names on such lists. These tendencies and others to come, fueled by a
growing number of PhDs who need to publish, will only confuse our field
and other academic fields. They are not meaningful places to publish nor
are they set up to foster discussion and debate in any particular field.
My own opinion is that we would be better off without them. They
represent a kind of inflation and meaningless activity that is not good
for the global academic economy.

—snip—