The big difference between journalistic integrity and academic integrity is that scholars own the literatures they publish in - as such, we chase out bad work. Journalists "own" or work for news sources, but their subjects don't. So there's a different stake. We want our own literatures to reflect our truth regimes, to be reliable.
There are some sciences where financial gain has changed the reward structure (pharma, medicine, engineering IP). But if a journal wants to keep its warrant to reputation, they find and fix problems. Peer review isn't perfect and also doesn't pay. Nobody does this for money, so there's no inherent reward in falsification. Our only currency is reputation.
I agree with Don. Norman's career experience covers a comprehensive array of literatures, from his early work in cognitive psychology to the formation of the HCI field, the strong turn toward design, while folding in social sciences, engineering, innovation management and other major fields along the way. These fields all have different publication approaches and their peer-review and implicit quality rules may differ. But there are universals and you've summed it up well, briefly. And I'd love to know what you think about the journals best-suited for different design scholars and careers.
At the PhD level and beyond its expected that we (and by extension our students) know the top journals and the reputable publishers, the rules of review, and the expectations of trust and veridiction. Design, being a more creative field, does not get a pass from this. Design journals have a terrible habit of giving authors a pass over (usually) social sciences-based claims that are poorly cited to precedent, superficially informed, or just plain wrong. Since design isn't a "core content" science, we really need to do better when developing and interpreting interdisciplinary research that draws on theoretical foundations from other fields.
And we as authors might be critical and suspicious of the quality and need for new entrants. The original purpose of journals was to establish communications among peers in a discourse community, not to burnish one's credentials. So good journals encourage historical relevance to reinforce a strong sense of the invisible college to which the authors belong. That's why you often won't get published in a journal without citing key papers (whether really needed or not) by the authors on the editorial board.
You may notice publishing innovations are very slow to diffuse in any field. Design journals still look like scientific journals, and social media has never caught on (not really). Peer review hasn't changed that much. Open access publishing is primarily a business model issue, it's not addressing the form of the research article or scholarly communication itself (not very much). OA wasn't disruptive to the big publishers because the major publishers can afford to change business models to adapt. But OA did disrupt the low end, by opening the field to hundreds of new crappy o predatory pay-to-publish OA journals that ride this trend.
Perhaps I've added enough - these are critical issues for a PhD discourse, perhaps we should contribute these ideas in a shared blog. That would be a contemporary form of scholarly communication -
Peter
PETER JONES, PH.D.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
FACULTY OF DESIGN
T 416 799 8799 @redesign
E [log in to unmask]
OCAD UNIVERSITY
100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada M5T 1W1
-----Original Message-----
From: Don Norman [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: May 31, 2015 5:27 PM
Subject: Re: Hoaxes in science
I do wish to reassure this group that reputable publications and journals do not lie. They are sometimes deceived, but when this is discovered, they issue an apology and retract the publication.
Authors (whether scientists or others) do lie, but it is the job of reputable journals to discover when this has happened.
In the particular example being discussed, the paper was published in a non-reputable journal, one that takes money for publishing, promises to do a full refereeing, but in fact does not. It is not in existence to aid science: it is in existence to make money. So a good journalist could have discovered this by examining the reputation of the journal.
BUT: The fact that a journal might charge to publish your work or that it might be published by a for-profit company does NOT mean it is not reputable. Many of the world's best journals are starting to charge because of the extreme costs of publishing (editorial costs, mostly), and their lack of income. Many of the world's best journals are published by for-profit companies (e.g., Elsevier or Wiley). But they do not link the ability to pay to the acceptability of the paper. Most have ways that impoverished authors do not have to pay.
But yes, beware of the rogue journals that do not thoroughly vet their articles.
(This topic has been discussed numerous times on this forum, and I do not wish to repeat the arguments here. The link I forwarded was simply a reminder that we all have to be careful about which journals we submit to and which ones we cite. It is unfortunate, for this adds yet more work to our already overworked life.)
Don
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Katherine J Hepworth <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> In the tradition of I.F. Stone<https://vimeo.com/123974841>
> investigative journalists start their work from the position that all
> powerful people and organizations lie. This of course includes
> universities, professors, and academic publishers.
>
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