Dear All,
There remains one issue to consider with respect to publishing venues. This is conferences. Many fields now struggle with this problem of fake conferences and predatory publishing. These are two sides of the same counterfeit coin.
Increased pressure to demonstrate research capacity and research achievements has led to an explosion of these problems. Fake conferences and fake open access journals are the most visible because these permit the greatest profit for the least investment and effort. Since academic staff members and researchers in all university fields face the same challenges, all fields struggle with this problem.
Putting it another way, the problem is that many people are attempting to represent that they do research without respect to the actual quality or meaning of their work.
Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing firms and journals was an excellent guide to sorting through the swamp of fake journals. Now that Prof. Beall no longer maintains the list, it is more important than ever for researchers to learn how to discern good venues.
There has never been a similar list for conferences.
The for-profit conference industry first came to my attention in the mid-1990s when a serious and highly respected engineer and scientist in the former Yugoslavia became tired of living on an academic salary. The market economy in the former eastern Europe began to explode. This professor had organised several successful serious conferences in his life as a real academic. Sensing a market opportunity, he decided to enter the conference business as a freelance conference organiser.
When I got my first invitation to his ventures, he was organizing nearly two dozen conferences a year. These were always in exotic or highly desirable locations. Some conferences focused on specific themes. Others offered a wacky and implausibly broad range of themes. A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggested that he must have been making $3,000,000 to $5,000,000 a year net profit.
In 2013, an article in The New York Times discussed the problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html
A good conference is a place to meet peers and colleagues, and a good conference paper can generate feedback and interest before moving on to become a journal article.
My advice with respect to conferences is only to participate in serious events sponsored either by a university or by a respected discipline association specifically known to you. If you don’t know the association sponsoring a conference, it is not well enough known in your field to attract the audience of listeners whom you want your paper to reach.
Be careful to distinguish between a university as the sponsor and host contrasted with a university as a rented site. Some conference organizers now rent space at universities in down-time — they advertise the conference as a conference *at* the university rather than a conference sponsored *by* the university. It is wise to check closely. If you are not sure, ask someone designated as an associate dean for research or research director at your university.
Every serious research field has plenty of room for papers at legitimate conferences. With as many real conferences as we have in the design field, there is no need to pay for acceptance at a fake conference.
There is a crucial difference between ordinary for-profit publishing of books and journals and for-profit organizing of conferences. For-profit journal publishers and book publishers have a massive investment in staffing, production, and distribution. While some publishers charge too much for their books and journals, they nevertheless have a massive investment on which they try to earn a return. Real journals, even when they are expensive, provide a genuine service to the research community. The same is not true of for-profit conferences. These are cash cows where eager — or desperate — research present work to an essentially meaningless audience.
We should support not-for-profit conferences sponsored by learned societies, professional organisations, and universities. I have been critical of profit-making conferences hosted by profit-making conference organisations that exist to earn money from researchers and scholars too new in the research field to recognise the differences among kinds of conferences.
The problem of for-profit conferences will continue to grow until universities and national research assessment agencies begin to address this. The large number of fake conferences will only begin to shrink when researchers no longer receive credit for taking part in these events.
It is important to support and improve serious, not-for-profit research conferences while warning researchers against profit-making ventures with no connection to learned societies, professional organisations, or universities. These conferences do not serve the field. Doctoral programs and research groups should protect research students and inexperienced researchers from predatory conference organisers. These waste valuable resources without improving research or advancing research careers.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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