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Dear Colleagues, The problem of dodgy journals and conferences is serious. Victor raises valid concerns about the new Sage Open. From what I have been able to discern from the Sage Open web site, there are visible problems. To what field or discipline does this journal belong? If it belongs to no clear field or discipline nor to an interdisciplinary field, then who will read it? If no one reads it, how can it have impact and how can it help scholars when they publish for promotion or tenure decisions? Sage Open is especially puzzling because it is not edited by scholars, but rather by in-house Sage employees with advice of some kind from an editorial advisory board. While open access is becoming increasingly significant, Sage Open does not demonstrate a valid use of the traditional reasoning behind publication fees. These are normally applied to science grants with built-in funding for publication, and therefore, they apply to specific discipline-focused journals in the sciences. Since this journal makes an appeal to people in fields that do not provide such funding, Victor’s concern is well founded. What makes this especially questionable is that it is focused on the need of younger scholars and recent graduates to publish. There are now a dozen or so publishers and conference organizers who have made a big business of this. This is the first time I have seen such a move from an otherwise respected publishers. It is cynical and saddening. With respect to Fil’s question, there are partial solutions. With respect to warning people about problematic journals and conferences, this is best done at the department and faculty level for many reasons. We should be aware of these and we should be explaining to students and to staff members why the problem journals are conferences are, indeed, problematic. With respect to identifying good journals and strong publishing venues, help is on the way. An article will appear in the January issue of Design Studies that identifies forty high quality, peer-reviewed journals in the design fields as part of a study to determine those journals that the field respects and prefers based on several factors. The article goes on to determine those journals ranked highest on different criteria, but all forty journals are serious, worthy journals. You will find the online preprint at this URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.09.001 Lin-Lin Chen suggested that it would be useful for the field to have a directory of journals. Deirdre Barron, Ann Prince, and Rachel Mosel are now working on a directory that extends the work Gerda Gemser, Cees de Bont, Paul Hekkert, and I did for the Design Studies article. We had originally hoped for late November completion, but it now looks like the directory will be ready in January, soon after the article is published. The directory will include journal titles with ISSNs, URL for the journal web site, publisher data, descriptor, and other useful data. We will publish it as an interactive PDF so that people can use the active URLs to click through to journal web sites. We’ll announce it widely, and we’ll make it available for download. This will be an Open Source document under Creative Commons license so anyone can use, share, or distribute freely, and we’ll provide PDF copies to all journals and as many schools as we can reach. While the first directory will be limited to the forty journals we cover in the Design Studies article, we hope to expand coverage in the future to a larger selection of journals. Ken Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 39214 6078 | Faculty -- Fil Salustri wrote: —snip— I suppose the first step could be to establish a set of criteria by which journals can be judged. I would be surprised if such a thing doesn’t already exist. I honestly don’t know. Does anyone else? —snip— Erik Stolterman wrote: —snip— This is becoming a growing problem. The oversight of academic publication decisions should be in the hands of the same research community that it serves. I would like to support Victor’s statement and hope that all of us take our individual responsibility when it comes to this issue. —snip— Victor Margolin wrote: —snip— I would like to open a discussion on this list about the growing number of commercial conferences and on-line journals that invite participation from scholars. A recent on-line journal from SAGE invites scholars to submit their articles to a broad on-line journal on the humanities and social sciences. SAGE promises peer review but doesn’t give any indication of who the peers are. We have already had a discussion about the pitfalls of the Common Ground design conference and ensuing publication, both of which are set up to separate scholars from their dollars, pounds, Euros, or zlotys. The SAGE journal charges scholars $195 for publication and promises the validation of a peer review and on line publication. Others are similar. As with Common Ground, these journals publish lists of prominent scholars who are supposedly on their advisory boards. Some of these scholars may agree without thinking enough about what they are doing. Others are surprised to find their names on such lists. These tendencies and others to come, fueled by a growing number of PhDs who need to publish, will only confuse our field and other academic fields. They are not meaningful places to publish nor are they set up to foster discussion and debate in any particular field. My own opinion is that we would be better off without them. They represent a kind of inflation and meaningless activity that is not good for the global academic economy. —snip—