Friends,
Two issues came up in Lily's thread on credit for photographic materials in research publications, copyright transfer and open access publishing. These deserve a footnote.
Is it good to transfer all rights to a journal publisher? No. This is a serious debate in many fields and has been for years. Open-access publishing will not by itself address this challenge. Many open-access journals also attempt to capture author rights. (Open access differs to online publishing — nearly all journals have an online presence, but subscription journals are restricted to subscribers, either on paper or behind the paywall of a digital resources collection.)
There are many outstanding open access journals in the natural sciences. The funding that made the open access revolution function well in the natural sciences has not been as accessible in other fields. As a result, many open access journals in other fields represent other problems.
At the best, these problems include the failure of high quality but minor journals to achieve impact and visibility. This problem is worse in the case of pedestrian journals of mediocre quality. Finally, there has been an explosion of well-intentioned, poor quality open access journals created by different universities and organisations under the impression that the world needs more journals where people can publish. This rests on the confusion of partly aligned and partly conflicting interests. Young researchers must publish to get hired, to keep a job, or to get promoted. Universities and other research organisations must know that the research they fund through salaries is worth paying for. Internet technology and the World Wide Web make it possible to create more journals — this may appear to answer the problem for young researchers that need to publish. Unless those journals are read and the articles put to use, however, it does not answer the needs of universities and research organisations.
The goal of publishing is to increase the stock of human knowledge. Offering people a place to publish is quite different to the concept of the journal as a venue for research and thinking that will increase the stock of human knowledge. A journal that no one reads is a waste of time and money — and publishing in such a journal is a waste of the time that an author uses in research and writing.
There is also the problem of predatory publishers whose business model involves parting young and inexperienced researchers from their money in the form of author fees to publish in an unread venue that would merely be a waste of time and money if it were not for the added drain of fees. I will address this issue another time.
Fortunately, the design field has one open access journal that meets all needs at the highest level of achievement. This is the International Journal of Design.
http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/index
The International Journal of Design has standing, visibility, and credibility among the leading journals of the design field. It is widely read and highly cited, ranking 8 in global standing (Gemser et al. 2012: 12). It is also indexed by the main indexes, with the unusual standing of full indexing in all three Web of Science indices, SCI-E, SSCI, AHCI, as well as Scopus.
IJD is edited by design scholars for design scholars, and the copyright policy was created with the research community in mind:
"Copyright for articles published in this journal 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 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriv 2.5 License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/>. 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."
IJD is a not-for-profit journal sponsored by the Chinese Institute of Design with further support from the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology and the Taiwan National Science Council. IJD has a further advantage for authors as compared with high quality open access journals in the natural sciences, because IJD charges no page or publication fees.
When considering an open access journal, authors should keep in mind that it is adverse to an academic career to publish in a mediocre or poor quality journal that no one reads. University hiring and promotion committees have long since adjusted their standards to allow for the online publishing explosion. Publishing in The Rumplestiltskin Journal of Ergonomic Spinning will not yield academic gold.
Yours,
Ken
References
Gemser, Gerda, Cees de Bont, Paul Hekkert, and Ken Friedman. 2012. “Quality Perceptions of Design Journals: The Design Scholars’ Perspective.” Design Studies (2012), pp. 4-23. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.09.001
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Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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