Dear Colleagues,

The Ireland International Conference on Education (IICE-2013) is spamming multiple discussion lists and many individual scholars. This is the fifth (!) time they have sent this to the PhD-Design list. In my view, that is four times too many for a conference that is outside our field and posted to this list by a conference firm rather than a list member in our own research community.

This conference has all the earmarks of a problem conference. First, IICE-2013 covers far too broad a range of topics to be meaningful. Second, they're sending the notification and preliminary call for an October conference in August! There is no time for meaningful peer review or for proper revision. This suggests that everyone is accepted — and it is likely that the quality of papers plays no role in the event.

There are other problem signs. For example, there are no confirmed keynote speakers — any keynote speaker of merit would have a calendar booked several months in advance. You can't expect IICE-2013 to book a decent October keynote in August.

But there is more to what makes this conference a problem. The Infonomics Society is the main sponsor of this conference. This society appears on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers.

http://scholarlyoa.com

Other supposed sponsors seem to have no relation to the conference. For example, the link to Canadian Teacher Magazine is inactive and the magazine's own web site shows nothing . While the conference claims to be working "in cooperation with" the European Union and OnEdu, they use the EU flag on the sponsor page without stating the EU organisation which which they supposedly cooperate, and the OnEdu link is inactive.

One fact of this conference makes their purple clear: co-authors of a paper must pay a "co-author fee," whether or not the co-authors attend the conference.

My advice is that list members should avoid the Ireland International Conference on Education (IICE-2013). This conference is designed to separate people from their money. Presenting at a conference such as this will not advance the research or the career of anyone at a serious university. Save your money for conferences sponsored by organisations in our field. There are many such conferences sponsored by our organisations and their SIGs, including those of the Design Research Society, the Design Society, the International Association of Societies of Design Research, the Design and Emotion Society, the Chinese Institute of Design, Japanese Society for the Science of Design, and the Korean Society for Design Science, not to mention AIGA, ICSID, Cumulus, agIdeas and more. We can always debate the ways in which our conferences can do better — there is no debating that these are the conference of our field, sponsored by our organisations or by not-for-profit foundations.

The purpose of conferences organised by profit-driven organisations is profit.

I have no objection with publishing or organising conferences on a profit-making basis, but then we'd need to be talking about collaboration with serious publishers, serious publishers who really work in cooperation with the organisations and government agencies whose flags and logos appear on the conference web site.

IICE-2013 is a highly questionable conference. Since they repeatedly post to this list, I repeat my warning. IICE-2013 and Linda Woods are subscribing to multiple JISCMAIL lists and spamming them with these posts. Treat this conference with caution.

Yours,

Ken

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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