In terms of the history of design research and its publications, Ken's
comments on VDM Verlag seem a bit odd.
A lot of the theory and research foundations of design research was
published by VDM Verlag. This occurred particularly for the engineering
design research on which a lot of the theory of Art and Design design
research is based (for example, the WDK publications). A lot of cutting
edge design research in engineering design is currently published by VDM,
see, for example,
http://www.tower.com/tower_search/search_2.cfm?keywords=vdm%20verlag&div_id=
1
One of the problems of the current publishing market is there has been a
significant sales shift away from theory books towards a market that
comprises a small number of best seller novels from a small number of very
large publishers, particularly the big four. The spread of titles at an
airport bookshop is fairly representative of the majority of sales of the
whole publishing industry.
VDM and similar small publishers make available books and new knowledge
that would not be of sufficient commercial viability for the larger
publishing houses. Realistically, unless a publication is going to be in the
sort of market where it might be sold through airport bookstores, it will
most likely need to be published by one of the small specialist publishing
houses. For commercial reasons, these will naturally have to operate
differently from the big four.
One of the key commercial criteria for the second and third tier and smaller
publishers is whether they are likely to lock in sales to university courses
with large numbers of students. This means the acceptance and apparent judge
of value of new titles is no longer in terms of the quality of new
knowledge they contain but rather in terms of how they present lower level
(undergraduate and below) routine knowledge from around 10 years ago (the
curriculum development cycle delay).
I suggest the idea that acceptance for publishing is a measure of the
quality of the new knowledge or the value of the author is tenuous. The
idea that publishers somehow filter on the basis of the quality of the
knowledge contained in a book has mostly disappeared. The measure is
typically primarily whether a book will sell well and make good profits.
From a critical perspective, the idea of using publishing houses as a
measure of 'quality' of a publication , like using citations as a measure of
quality, is hard to justify.
For most people wanting to publish new knowledge, I'd suggest a better
decision making mechanism is to find a means by which their publication is
easily and cheaply available, rather than the status of the publisher. In
the past, publisher name and publisher teams might have meant something
significant. Times have changed and are changing further and faster.
From the point of view above, the roles of lists of previously prestigious
publishers are mainly as a tool of conservatism to attempt to keep things
the way they were. We can do better.
Disclosure, I'm director of a small publishing house (Praxis Education).
Best wishes,
Terry
--
Dr Terence Love
PhD (UWA), B.A. (Hons) Engin, PGCE. FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Director,
Praxis Education
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
--
<snip>
LAP and VDM exist primarily to publish PhD thesis projects in a
print-on-demand basis. When they acquire the rights to publish, they
encumber copyright in a way that makes further publishing in book form or
journal articles difficult or impossible.
Lambert Academic Publishing and Verlag Dr Mueller are operations that exists
to publish theses under circumstances adverse to the authors. Their business
model is so troubling that I personally see it as nearly fraudulent. They
trawl the web sites of all universities looking for recent thesis
completions. When they find them, they send enthusiastic invitations to
every author. VDM has a number of imprints, but none of these gives authors
any serious impact or visibility.
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