Hello to Ken, Ursula, Gunnar, Don and others who have made contributions to this thread in the past few days:
I’m going to offer some commentary based on my experiences of having recently and successfully co-leading an effort to launch a new journal dedicated to the scholarly examination of issues that affect and are affected by design education and its relationship to practice and research titled “Dialectic.” This will be a somewhat lengthy post, but one that I hope will prove useful to the readership of this listserv.
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Dialectic is modestly but adequately funded by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) on behalf of the AIGA Design Educators’ Community (DEC). I’m a member of the national steering committee of this organization, and have been since the summer of 2013, when the idea for Dialectic was originally proposed. Those of us who lead the editorial and production team at Dialectic have had to deal with almost all of the issues that Ken (and Gunnar and Don) have articulated in response to Ursula’s inquiries. I won’t re-mention all of these, except where I believe I can offer a bit of insight based on what we’ve learned as we’ve engaged in this process, but will rather try to offer input on a few others that affect how scholarly journals must function to meet the variety of needs and aspirations of their readerships.
To begin:
I concur quite strongly with Ken’s assertion that if someone can effectively re-think and then EFFECTIVELY RE-DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT the entire journal publishing and procedure, not only would She-Ji and Dialectic (and, I suspect several other journals…) welcome this, but it would constitute a welcome new way of dealing with a long-entrenched and particularly wicked problem. With that stated, I tend not to see a world where that’s going to happen anytime soon because of the following issues, factors and conditions that I’ve couched in responses related to the experiences my colleagues and I on Dialectic have had since the summer of 2013:
01
When we began trying to determine how best to publish Dialectic—and we stated from the outset that we wanted it to be as broadly accessible to the widest array of scholarly and practice-based communities across design as possible—we ALSO had to determine how it would be funded, and how various aspects of the editing and production processes would be CONSISTENTLY and RELIABLY paid for. The two adverbs in that last phrase are of critical importance to the SUSTAINED life of any journal, and we quickly found that no credible publisher in the U.S. or around the world (more articulation on what I mean by “credible publisher” will appear in item 03 below…) would publish Dialectic if they knew we were calling for a crowdsourced funding model to fuel the bulk of our financial needs. Bear in mind that a publisher’s reputation is very much on the line when a new journal is being proposed to them, and one of MANY factors they assess before they agree to greenlight a publication is whether or not they perceive “your team” to be capable of sustaining a VIABLE, scholarly publication over a period of time long enough to polish rather than tarnish their reputation.
With all of that stated: it took us about 15 months to engage in the process of interacting with representatives from the big five academic publishers—Taylor and Francis, Reed-Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and Sage—AND six university publishers before we settled on what we felt was the best means to produce the journal we felt our community of scholars and practitioners wanted and needed. We wound up going with a university-based publisher.
(The university publishers had been recommended to us by various members of the national steering committee of the AIGA DEC; I myself had pretty extensive experience with two of them over the years.) We were repeatedly made aware of the fact that any group or individual representing any published was assessing us, and our proposal, just as much as we were assessing them. Bear in mind: each group must “pass muster” in the eyes of the other. Which brings me to item 02…
02
The money we were able to secure from the AIGA national office to support the biannual publication of Dialectic would NOT allow us to meet our goal of making its contents as broadly accessible as we wanted them to be IF we chose to publish through one of the “big five.” I’m not in any way disparaging this group here—rather, I’m simply (VERY simply—if you’d like more detail, that will have to come in separate post) stating that, in general, our funding support was not going to “jive” with their monetization models. Among other things that turned us away from them, as Gunnar pointed out a day or so ago, was that we were NOT willing to demand that the authors who chose to publish with us surrender their copyright authority by doing so. Additionally, we wanted to be sure that almost any design educator, scholar or researcher with semi-regular access to electricity and web access could read and download the content the authors who choose to publish with us (and whose work meets our publication standards) create WITHOUT HAVING TO PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE. SO—after several more months mutual “sizing up” between us and the aforementioned university publishers, we wound up applying to publish with, and were accepted by, Michigan Publishing. There were some strict criteria, articulated by both us and them, which brings me to item 03…
03
As Ken has mentioned previously, there’s “a need to manage the peer review process at a high level of quality.” We were, and still are, as insistent on this as the authorities at Michigan Publishing were and still are. Indeed, there is a constant, almost daily need to effectively manage the process of assigning, routing, tracking and then processing the reviews of the submissions that our editorial staff deems worthy of advancing past an initial, or “desk” review process. There is also an acute need for a credible journal to ensure that the people charged with reviewing a given submission actually have the experience and the wherewithal to engage in this process to good effect.
I haven’t been writing or editing as long as others on this list, but the past 17 years have taught me several VERY hard lessons about the kinds of bad things that can happen with scholarly work that is ineffectively reviewed/assessed, or that is reviewed by people who don’t put the necessary time, the critical thinking or the due diligence into the process. We have received an average of 50 submissions across eight categories for scholarly publishing in response to our calls-for-papers in each of our first issues, and over half do NOT make it through the initial/desk review process, but the half that DO require rigorous assessment of the type that can only be offered by a select few who have constructed the knowledge necessary to offer useful, suable critical commentary, which brings me to item 04…
04
One of the other painful lessons that those who “look from the outside in” at scholarly publishing often don’t see is that lots of people who submit work for possible publication in scholarly journals—the credible kind, the ones who are strictly reviewed and critically edited by people who have accrued the experience and the knowledge necessary to do this well—often simply don’t write well. This means that even though they might have engaged in research, scholarship, critical inquiries or design experiences that could yield real benefits to a given journal’s readership, they don’t or won’t or can’t write accessible, well-structured prose. Often, they can’t contextualize their work in the scholarly landscape that exists around it, or they can’t effectively structure and then extend their essential arguments, or they really don’t have much to actually “say…”
No amount of funding, from any sources, devoted to fueling the publication of journals is going to fix this problem anytime soon. We’re finding that, at least in the U.S., large numbers of graduate students enrolled in the design disciplines emerge from their studies having NEVER taken a course, much less two or three, devoted to teaching even the rudiments of scholarly, research-based, critical or any other types of upper-level writing. We’re finding that earning a PhD, DDES, MFA or MDES, and having had to engage in the dissertation of thesis production processes associated with these, is NO GUARANTEE that a piece submitted by someone who has had these experiences can craft work publishable in a CREDIBLE (there’s that pesky term again…) journal. I’ve been teaching at least one of these courses per academic year at my American university since 1999, and I’m finding that this situation is by far the exception in grad education here rather than the norm, which brings me to item 05…
05
Because Dialectic is supported by the AIGA DEC, part of our mission has been and still use to use opportunities at the design education-focused conferences and portions of conferences that the AIGA hosts each year are devoted to addressing the problem I described in Item 04. SO—myself and other members of Dialectic’s editorial team have taken to running workshops at each of these conferences that are open to all participants that cover off on, in more detail than I can get to here, HOW the critical review process re: academic publishing works, and why it works that way, AND—perhaps of more benefit to our participants—we run an exercise we’ve come to call “the bell test.” It’s designed to help prospective authors—both those who consider themselves “experienced” and those who are hoping to publish their first piece of scholarship—improve how they engage in the process of writing. It begins by having four participants sit round a table with a single “hotel-style” concierge bell placed in table-center within arm’s reach of everyone. Each participant is given a two- to three-page piece that contains the opening ~500 words of a potential scholarly piece (with all mention of author’s names and affiliations redacted; these pieces are crafted by us based on actual submissions we’ve received in the past). One participant begins to read the piece aloud while the others follow along on their copies. As soon as ANYONE “has a problem” with ANY phrase, sentence or paragraph in the piece, he or she must literally ring the bell—which stops the reading—and verbally articulate the nature of the problem. We’ve now operated the bell test at four AIGA DEC-sponsored conferences, and have found that the first few bell rings tend to be triggered by grammatical or syntactical problems, but, as the session progresses, they evolve into calls to “Don’t make a claim like that without evidence!,” “Why isn’t this author mentioning the scholarship of Dr./Ms./Mrs./Mr. A. B or C as a primary reference for this research/scholarly endeavor/line of criticism that this author is attempting to write about,” and “This author is writing as if the reader has ‘magical foreknowledge’ he/she may not have, SO—the author ‘needs to do more explaining here’ than he/she seems to be willing to do.” All of this brings me to item 06, the last item in this discourse…
06
I’m a Full Professor at a public, Tier One Research University in Texas in the U.S., which means that portions of my salary are indeed paid by taxpayers from the state of Texas, and that other portions of it are paid for in part by the tuitions students at my university pay to enroll in our coursework each year. Part of my responsibility as a Full Professor here, as stated in official policy documents from my university and from the college I teach within at that university, is to comport myself in ways that ensure that I cultivate knowledge THAT CAN BE EFFECTIVELY SHARED WITH UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDENTS. To this end, one of the “most valued” activities—and those are the exact words that appear in these documents—I can undertake as a Full Professor in my discipline is to engage in the “production, management or editing, or some combination of these” of a “credible [there’s that word AGAIN, goshdawgitt…] journal in [my] discipline.” The only remuneration I receive for the hundreds of hours per year that this requires is the boost in pay I got when I was promoted to the rank of Full Professor—and, at my university, you only achieve that rank by engaging in “most valued academic, professional or creative activities,” and the merit-base pay increases I receive per year for doing this (which are relatively modest). Engaging in this type of activity, and doing this well/effectively, is, pardon my Texan slang, “a key part of this gig,” and one many of us have chosen/gone into with eyes wide open.
As Ken and others on this list have stated repeatedly, more pressure than ever is being placed on design faculty at the early and middle stages of their careers to publish their scholarship, research and criticism. Couple with this, at least in the U.S., is the fact that the generation of people who taught the likes of me when I was in grad school in the 1990s are either now retired or are about to, and there aren’t that many people who studied when I did stepping up to take on these types of roles. If those few of us who have accrued the necessary experience—and I’ll be the first to admit, I have a long way to go—wait back until more money is made available to support our editing, what becomes of the generation “coming up behind us,” many of whom need mentorship, like we did when we began. (I got LOTS of mine from some of the people who founded this list, often from getting feedback of the type that you get when you attempt to publish, even if your work is rejected…)
FINALLY: those of us who produce and edit Dialectic have also noticed that a large number of potential authors send us material that makes it pretty clear that they haven’t done much scholarly READING, much less of the critical kind, of material that gets published in the likes of She-Ji, Design Studies, Visible Language, Design and Culture, The International Journal of Design, Design Issues, and Dialectic.
FIN.
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Michael R. Gibson
Professor, Communication Design
Graduate Programs Coordinator, Design Research and Interaction Design
The University of North Texas
College of Visual Arts and Design
https://unt-ixd.com/
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Producer, Dialectic: a scholarly journal of thought leadership, education and practice in the discipline of visual communication design published by the AIGA DEC (Design Educators Community) and Michigan Publishing
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