Carlos brings up a good point–without a university affiliation or deep pockets access to papers can be difficult. Furthermore, might publishing via open and publicly available platforms provide more avenues for design researchers to connect with the design community as a whole?
- Jed
On Jun 9, 2015, at 10:50 AM, Charles Burnette <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Kari-Hans, Ken and colleagues
Academia.edu<http://academia.edu/> <http://academia.edu/> definitely works for me. I no longer have a University affiliation. I want to write without the strictures imposed by peer review, conference deadlines, and subject disciplines, - just about anything or anyone that wants to control what I say before I have a chance to digest it myself. Academia.edu<http://academia.edu/> <http://academia.edu/> has provided an excellent outlet for my thoughts with over 26,000 document views,( over 4,500 for one paper: Issues, Assumptions, and Components in A Theory of Design Thinking). Most of the views come through Google. Some are probably the result of being able to Tweet directly from my academia.edu<http://academia.edu/> <http://academia.edu/> page after viewing or reading an article. In any event I have reached more people than I could have through most journals, or a book. I get daily and monthly reports of every access indicating what town, country, and search service was used. I used to get the keywords used too. The international access is terrific. I would never have guessed that there were as many people in Nigeria interested in philosophy (or getting a good grade in someone’s class who simply said "read this".). The listing of how many “Views” every posted article receives is an extremely good indication of what people are interested in and a pretty effective way to learn what papers aren’t well received or well written.
Academia.edu<http://academia.edu/> <http://academia.edu/> reminds me of the early EDRA conferences, which were a wonderful blend of student and professional presentations, that helped to launch Design Methods, Environmental psychology, and other innovative initiatives in design thinking and design research. Don’t worry about whether academia.edu<http://academia.edu/> <http://academia.edu/> is a good place to post. It allows you to post your paper to lists of people interested in many different subjects including perhaps the ones that interest you. Try it! I think you will like it.
Or so I believe,
Chuck
On Jun 9, 2015, at 9:39 AM, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Dear Kari-Hans
I agree with you completely. These are the potential dangers of Academia. Academia is a private service like Google or Facebook, with all that this implies. There is a second problem that most people have not considered — this is the question of whether or not the PhD thesis is legitimate. At Academia, people control their own copyright and post to their own site. Because Academia is private, one must trust that the author has written a legitimate PhD thesis. Even so, there is no other requirement beyond trust, and I think that Academia is useful for the general purposes to which people put it. It is up to Academia to continue or not.
Nevertheless, other possible systems raise different problems.
Every system has its own problems. The first is verification. In any university repository, the fact that the university repository hosts the PhD thesis solves the verification problem and the copyright problem. But university repositories have other problems, .
ProQuest solves the trust problem and the persistent system problem, but it does so at the price of a paywall. For ProQuest, universities make the publication agreement and require all students to post a thesis without relinquishing copyright. Students have the right as copyright owners to withhold publication, but they must publish the title and abstract. At the time of publication, each university manages the paperwork and permissions required between the student, the university, and ProQuest. As Lubomir Popov notes, ProQuest changed its policy recently, so all theses are available to no cost to anyone whose university subscribes.
The ideal system is a persistent, open-access system in which every thesis is verified. This is not cheap. Persistent open access systems with full verification require funding and administrative support. More than this, each thesis will require proper copyright permission from the copyright holder — the author. This requires yet more work, and it will require extensive work to locate the several thousand students whose theses have long been available on ProQuest or university repositories.
At one point, I explored such a system. I was able to raise the necessary funds from my university to build the system with the help our our director of information systems and the university librarian. Unfortunately, I was unable to secure the cooperation of other universities. What killed the project was distrust. I queried several universities with PhD programs in design. While there were expressions of interest, others were suspicious. Since my university agreed to fund the project, we would be the de facto host. Several universities that we invited to participate were nervous about this. Some felt that my university would somehow gain a great advantage simply because we funded it and hosted it. Others felt that my university would in some way take advantage of hosting to give greater visibility to our own PhD theses. This was not my plan — a credible repository treats all projects of the same kind in the same way. This is a requirement for credibility. After several rounds of suggestions, nothing seemed to satisfy enough people to make it worth while to proceed. The time was not right, so I let the idea go.
Any official, persistent, open-access system requires several steps. The first is verification to determine that the document is a PhD thesis for a degree awarded by an accredited university. The second is a perpetual copyright permission from the author. Then come the technical challenges that range from hosting and indexing to ensuring that search engines can find each document in any of several ways.
This idea has once again been on my mind, as Heico Wesselius and I have been accumulating a digital repository of PhD theses. This is a a private library within the framework of the CSIRO Design Capacity Mapping Project. We have been organising it to make it available to project collaborators, but we cannot make it public. We do not have copyright permission for each thesis and cannot afford the administrative support required to get permissions.
One thing is clear: Teena Clerke’s decision to post her PhD thesis to Academia is something that offers a serious and reasonable way forward for the field. As Kari-Hans notes, this may only be a temporary solution for a serious long-term need, but it has the advantage right now of being simple, workable, and free.
While we seek a better solution, I hope that everyone with a PhD thesis in design will follow Teena’s lead by posting completed theses to an Academia.edu<http://Academia.edu> page.
Warm wishes,
Ken
—
Kari-Hans Kommonen wrote:
—snip—
I agree wholeheartedly with Ken that it is important to make the theses and other publications accessible.
However, one needs to recognize the potential pitfalls in the reliance of a field of knowledge and of individuals on private repositories and social network systems such as academia.edu<http://academia.edu>.
First, they may (like academia.edu<http://academia.edu> does) require people who want to see your thesis to register and become a customer before they allow them to download your thesis, which is in my opinion not right - academic works should be available also for anonymous users and for people who do not want to become their customers.
Second, if you begin to build your online academic presence on that platform, you may easily become locked-in to their system - eventually having many your academic connections managed by their system, and with no provision for exporting them usefully to some other system.
Third, they may redesign or finish the service, raise prices, or sell out and end up either disappearing or offering you a significantly different service than what you want, without you having any say or channel of influence in the matter.
As we do not have (to my knowledge) a sufficiently featured public, open source, reliable and persistent solution that would replace academia.edu<http://academia.edu> at the moment, it makes sense to use it, but one needs to be aware of the problems, and I hope we all could try to put some pressure on our universities so that they would collectively put together the resources needed for the development of viable open and persistent alternatives.
—snip—
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