As Editor-in-Chief of IJDesign, I think that I could provide some behind the door view of publishing high-quality open access journal.
The success of IJDesign is the result of collaborative efforts by the design academic community. Many excellent researchers submit the results of their hard work, and also contribute time to do peer reviews. In this way, IJDesign operates as a public common with voluntary contributions from design researchers --- from submission, to peer review, and finally to a final decision of acceptance or rejection. As EIC, I also contribute my share of voluntary work by conducting an initial review on more than 200 articles submitted in 2016, and over 1500 articles in total since the start of the journal in 2006.
The difficulty offering a free-of-charge service to the authors begins after an article is accepted for publication. In order to achieve high quality, the article needs to go through a sequence of editorial steps: to professional copy-editors for language editing, to editorial assistants to verify format and citation accuracy, to graphical designers to design illustrations and icons, to layout editors to format the article, and finally the publication and maintenance of the website. These works often require other professional expertise outside of design research, which is not free --- and should not be free.
In a traditional journal, these after-acceptance works improve the quality of the articles published in the journal. The journal owns the rights to these published articles and later can charge for access to them. However, for IJDesign, the authors retain rights to the published articles, as stated in the copyright statement:
"Copyright for this article is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the International Journal of Design. All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. By virtue of their appearance in this open-access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings."
So, for me the real question should be: who has been paying for these money to support IJDesign? And also, how to ensure the long-term sustainability of IJDesign?
As some of you might know, IJDesign has been financially supported since its inception by funding from Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in Taiwan. While IJDesign publishes articles from authors all over the world, it has been financially supported by MOST for more than 10 years (and occasionally by my own research funding). The MOST funding is in the form of a three-year grant. Thus, every three years, I write a proposal to get the competitive grant. Because of the excellent performance of IJDesign, we have been able to get funding.
However, I think it will be unrealistic to expect that MOST can support IJDesign forever. In order for IJDesign to continue to provide service to the international design academia, it needs to establish sustainable business model to support its operation.
This is why, since 2016, IJDesign has included the following statement to the online submission page: "Starting from 2016, we ask the authors to pay a post-acceptance fee of US$ 1,000 per article in order for the journal to have a sustainable business model. The fee will be used to support copyediting, layout formatting, open access and online hosting and archiving."
Please know that this was a difficult decision made to ensure the long-term sustainability of IJDesign. However, we have not yet charged any author a publication fee. We intend and hope to be able to waive the publication fee, as long as we still have funding support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology. We put in the statement of publication fees as a precaution to make sure that IJDesign will be able to sustain, even if without funding from MOST.
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