[Air-l] Re: Prestige and Online Publishing

Adrian Miles adrian.miles at uib.no
Sat Apr 5 17:52:09 PST 2003


At 12:01 -0500 5/4/03, air-l-request at aoir.org wrote:
>1. If you are based in an academic institution, does publication in
>e-journals count for less 'points' when being considered for promotion and
>tenure?

in Australia the federal government criteria is peer review, whether 
it is dead tree or electronic is irrelevant. In the past I have 
argued successfully (in approx. 1995) that self published content was 
also legitimate as long as you could demonstrate peer endorsement (in 
that example I did this by providing unsolicited emails applauding 
the particular online, self published, project).

In terms of promotion that is a different issue, as promotion is 
never only based on merit but always involves some absurd combination 
of personal and institutional politics. in this context where you 
have published may in fact be an issue, and would vary from 
department to department, institution to institution.

my personal view and experience is that good academics can tell good 
journals from poor, whether they're on paper or screen.

regarding the other thread and rights. I'm currently chair of this 
years Digital Arts and Culture conference and all papers are being 
published by RMIT publishing under their subscription only electronic 
service. However this was negotiated as a non exclusive licence which 
means authors retain republication rights. This was done to help meet 
the Australian government's requirements for the proceedings to be 
recognised as 'real' academic labour. (the major critieria are peer 
review and publication by a professional publisher.) However since 
this is subscription only I have also negotiated a special issue of 
Fine Art Forum (electronic) which will include the same content so 
that it is in the public domain, again on a non exclusive basis.

In my own publishing, most of which is electronic, like Danny Butt I 
refuse to sign contracts that disallow me from republication, and if 
it is an elect. journal that is subscription only (eg. Postmodern 
Culture) then I always ensure i have permission to mirror the content 
personally with the appropriate acknowledgements.

Like others here I have problems where the academic publishing model is:
we provide the content unpaid
we do the reviewing unpaid
we often provide the editorial labour, unpaid
we or our institutions are required to pay considerably for 
subscriptions, whether page or screen based.

in this model I don't see what the publisher actually contributes in 
an electronic publishing apparatus, and remain very interested in 
trying to develop open source publishing engines that support open 
publishing, peer review, and so forth.

cheers
adrian miles
-- 
    
+  MelbourneDAC2003 digital arts and culture conference 
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+  hypertext rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]





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