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Friends, Ranulph, Chris, and Catherine each state important points. I agree with them - conferences serve more purposes than simply publishing or exposing one's own research. For my school, presenting at a conference is an effective mechanism for determining who cares enough about attending to do the work of submitting a presentation. It enables us to fly the flag and therefore justifies the cost. It is part of the publishing mechanism but not central. Nevertheless, conferences are vital for other reasons. To cut conference funding and conference attendance would diminish the general development of research networks and the entire research agenda. That said, I've fairly well shifted my attention from large conferences to small, focused events where it is possible to "confer" in dialogue with other participants rather than rush from room to room finding out what the program contains. This past year I co-chaired Wonderground, but I did not do it because I like big conferences. I did it because I like working with Eduardo, Martim, and Terry. My preference is small, focused conferences such as the forthcoming conference on events and event structures at Denmark's Design School. Conferences -- even large ones -- nevertheless serve many purposes. They give people a chance to meet and to survey the field. They function as a kind of ecological wetlands between research at home and formal publication, and they give people a chance to gather responses and gain insight on one's own work and on the field. In some places, conferences also serve as a training ground for doctoral candidates and inexperienced or younger researchers to begin presenting their work. These deserve discussion. Eliminating conference support is yet another unfortunate outcome of the audit-driven mentality that finds the reasons and purposes of conferences to diffuse to measure in quantitative terms. Can conferences be more fruitful to serve the field better -- our field, any field? Yes. That is a specific thread in its own right. Despite the problems that pop up in specific conferences or the uses to which some put them, the medium of the conference remains relevant to design research as it does to most fields. Terry's note on the use of specific journals as a metric deserves a further comment. This kind of policy will prove to be a real problem on a national level. In some fields, some schools establish lists of target journals that serve for tenure and promotion. Only these journals count. This is especially the case in some North American universities. On the one hand, publishing guarantees visibility, but the fact that citation rankings occur to and from journals in only one data base -- without including citations to books or monographs -- means that impact ratings do not measure true impact on a field, only impact between and among journals in the database. This gets sillier still when one realizes that journals have a limited number of pages per year. This places a limit on the number of possible articles that any journal can publish. In a field of 10,000 scholars with only one journal, only a couple dozen scholars -- and only a couple dozen schools -- will have any "impact" in a given year. A single university can afford -- albeit mistakenly -- to pursue the "top 5" journals strategy. An entire nation cannot, at least not if it wishes to bring all its universities and research centers up, rather than to use a proxy measure that will inevitably sort out all but a handful of research universities, relegating the rest to second-class or third-class ranking. It seems to me that Australia's policy will have the effect of sorting out status among Australian universities, reinforcing the dominant status of the "big eight" while reducing the standing of the other 30 or so Australian universities. In international terms, this will be a disaster, especially since education is one of Australia's most profitable international industries. One can use journals in a metric system, but it must be reasonable and appropriately wide to encourage research and raise the research capacity of the nation as a whole. This means using a metric that genuinely covers the fields it measures, and allows opportunity to all universities rather than an elite few. The elite will remain elite. The others deserve a chance to improve. In Norway, the government uses a publishing metric to measure research productivity. The government maintains a database of research publishing channels. The database includes journals and academic or scientific publishers, with all approved channels on level 1 and some select channels on level 2. A journal article is worth 1 point or 3 points respectively, a monograph is worth 5 points or 8 points, and a book chapter is worth 7/10 point or 1 point. Each publication by a faculty member accumulates a number of points and each school tallies up and presents all its publishing points in each publishing year. The ministry allocates basic research funds to research-based universities, university colleges, and professional schools based on the total number of points. Our database shows 85 journals with the word "design" in the title. We admittedly miss some design and design research journals that do not use the word - the new journal Artifact is an example. (Artifact is registered, but it does not show up in searching design as a title word.) Nevertheless, the broad spectrum covers much of the field. If you would like to see for yourself, go to URL: http://dbh.nsd.uib.no/kanaler/ No system is perfect, but a broad system, works well enough. It counts respectable journals while placing greater emphasis on a smaller selection of elite journals. For those who wish to look further into citations and impact, I would suggest visiting the section of William Starbuck's web site titled "Citations of Journals Related to Business." Go to URL: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~wstarbuc/ The focus is business and management journals, but the discussion is a lucid and useful analysis of issues and challenges that affect all fields, especially if the Howard regime controls your life and future as a scholar. Andrew van de Ven addresses many of these issues in an important new book forthcoming on Oxford University Press, Engaged scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Visit his personal web site at to read chapter 1 and chapter 9 as PDF downloads. http://webpages.csom.umn.edu/smo/avandeven/AHVHOME.htm Van de Ven discusses the problem of why so much research is not used, and how we can do better in fields of professional practice. Gads. I seem to have too much to say these days, but Terry's question and the further contributions got me rolling. If the issues of impact and fruitful use interest you, do, please, have a look at Starbuck and Van de Ven. Yours, Ken -- Prof. Ken Friedman Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language Norwegian School of Management Oslo Center for Design Research Denmark's Design School Copenhagen +47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM +47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat email: [log in to unmask]