All Change: Reflections on Design Research Journal Publishing, 2014–2021

Introduction

This issue of the Design Journal draws Volume 24 to a close. As such, it marks a turning point in the history of the journal. The current Editor, Paul Atkinson, and Editorial Assistant Kirsty Christer, who has performed vital functions key to the smooth running of the journal, are handing over the charge to Louise Valentine. The Design Journal is, of course, no stranger to change. The purpose of this piece is to give an overview of the various changes that have taken place over the years of this Editorial Team’s tenure: not only in the editing and publishing of the Design Journal itself, but also more widely across Design Research and in the field of academic publishing as we have experienced it. Assessing the impact of these changes will hopefully provide some valuable guidelines for the future of the Design Journal and its contributing authors.

History

To provide some historical context, the Design Journal began life in 1997 to act as the affiliated journal of the European Academy of Design – the scholarly society Rachel Cooper founded in 1995. The brainchild of Cooper and Jack Ingram, an academic journal was seen to be a logical extension to the biennial international conference the society had already established, and a way of furthering the research presented at those conferences and from further afield. The single pilot issue, originally launched as Volume 0, was published by Gower Publishing, an imprint of Ashgate Publishing (online, this issue now appears as a supplement to the three-issue Volume 1, which was published in 1998). The journal continued to be published by Gower and then Ashgate as three issues per year until Volume 10 in 2007. From 2008, publication was taken over by Berg Publishers and in 2011 (Volume 13) the frequency of issues was increased to four per year. From 2013, the Design Journal was published by Bloomsbury (the owners of Berg) and the Berg name was dropped. The current publishers of the Design Journal, Taylor and Francis, took on the publications of all of Bloomsbury’s academic journals in 2015, and from the second half of Volume 18, the Design Journal has been published under Taylor & Francis’ Routledge imprint. Shortly afterwards, (from Volume 19), Taylor and Francis increased the number of issues per year to six. Across all of this increase in the number of issues, the average number of articles has also increased from between 5-6 articles to between 7-8 articles per issue.

The current Editorial Team have had a long involvement with the journal. Paul Atkinson started initially as a reviewer before becoming a member of the Editorial Advisory Board in 2000 and was given the position of Associate Editor in 2009. In 2014, Atkinson took over from Rachel Cooper as Editor, with Louise Valentine as Associate Editor and Kirsty Christer as Editorial Assistant. When we first started, submissions to the journal were in transition from email attachments sent directly to us by authors to submissions made completely online using the electronic submission platform Editorial Manager. At least we no longer had to endure submissions being submitted in hard copy only or as files on easily corruptible floppy discs, as the original Editorial Team had had to cope with. The online submission system has seen the automation of an increasing number of time-consuming actions that used to have to be done by hand, including selecting and personally inviting reviewers, and emailing reviewers and authors to chase overdue reviews and revisions, as well as keeping a record of each version of an individual article at each stage of revision. Technical checks are now also carried out at the submission stage to ensure that articles meet a number of pre-selected criteria before even reaching the editorial team and being considered for review. While this may not be as personal an approach as we might like, the sheer volume of submissions received today would be unmanageable without the Editorial Manager system.

The double-blind peer-review process still takes a significant amount of time, but the quality control this process puts in place remains a priority. However, when we first took over the running of the journal, academic publishing took place at a more leisurely pace generally. When selected for one of the four issues of the year, an article would typically spend around three months in production. During this time, the editorial team used to be in direct contact with the production team and the typesetters to resolve any issues arising, but now, many of the production processes have become automated or dealt with directly by the publisher. We now publish an issue every eight weeks, with articles sometimes spending as little as two weeks in production. Hopefully, the loss of a more personal touch might be compensated for by the increased speed of publication, and of course, because of the limitations of the size of each issue, it is now perfectly normal for articles to be published online a significant amount of time before they finally appear in print.

Expansion

Since 2013 we have witnessed a 500% increase in submissions and a 300% increase in publishings. The huge increase in submissions to the Design Journal pays testament to the Editorial Team’s efforts in trying to grow the journal in a number of ways. We have gradually increased the size of the Editorial Board and ensured it consists of a wider geographical spread of members with the aim of preventing any Western/Eurocentric bias and encouraging the geographic spread of submissions. Increasing the geographic spread of our readership has also been an aim since the start, and to this end, numerous Special Issues covering design practice and design research in different countries and areas have been produced, including Australasia, Turkey, The Netherlands and the Balkans to name a few. Special Issues have also been produced to address the specific concerns of guest editors, and these have ranged from Design and Emotion and Design and Empathy to Craft Futures and Service Design. More recently, the longstanding approach of producing a Special Issue every two years that presented a selection of the best papers delivered at the previous EAD conference, expanded into full articles, has been replaced by online-only supplementary issues containing full versions of all the papers delivered at each conference. This has helped enormously in enabling full proceedings to be produced for a conference that has increased massively in size over the years, and their hosting by Taylor & Francis has ensured far wider dissemination and citation of the research presented at those conferences than print-only proceedings could hope to accomplish.

Changes in academic publishing

A number of changes have also occurred in the area of academic publishing over the period of time this editorial team have led the journal. As hinted at above, some of the changes in the Design Journal’s publisher have been due to the takeover of smaller publishers by larger organizations. A 2015 report by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers suggests that this has been happening across the whole of the industry across all academic disciplines, leading to a skewed situation where out of 10,000 journal publishers globally, 95% publish only one or two titles each but the top 100 publishers publish 67% of all journals, and the four largest (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis) all publish well over 2,000 journals each (Ware and Mabe 2015, 45).

Being a part of the portfolio of one of the largest publishers of academic journals has brought with it a number of distinct advantages. We now have access to a wider range of tools and reports which help us understand our audience better. Our subscription profile has changed over the years, as has the way our audience accesses the Design Journal. In 2013, our articles were published in print only but by 2015 articles had been made available online as well; volume 18 was our first to be published online at the same time as being published in print. Subscribers could opt for a print-only or print and online subscription, with the latter being the more popular option with higher education institutions around the world. An archive containing online versions of all previous issues soon followed so it is now possible to browse right through the 24 year history of the journal. As the appetite for high-quality design research has increased, so has its availability, and online publication has brought new audiences to the journal. The number of article downloads has increased year on year and is now eight times higher than in 2016. A large proportion of our readers continue to be based at higher education institutions, and more researchers based in Asia are downloading and reading our published articles online.

However, as the number of articles submitted to the journal increases, so too must the need for reviewers. This has proved one of the biggest challenges to the editorial team over the last few years. Each standard article passing the initial checks is sent out to be reviewed by two people. When the volume of submissions was around one article per week, finding reviewers was not difficult. We were able to rely on a relatively small number of experienced reviewers who were willing and available to review one or two articles each year. Many had been involved with the journal and the European Academy of Design since their earliest days. Reviewing was seen as part of scholarly activity and not too onerous a task, indeed it was even considered an honour. By 2019, there was a noticeable change, driven by at least two factors. Firstly, we now receive six times the volume of submissions that we did in 2014, reflecting an increased pressure from many institutions for academic staff to publish (either to enable academic employment, for their own career advancement, or to attract income to their institution through research assessment exercises). Secondly, the feedback we get from reviewers is that they have many more demands on their time, leaving less time available for reviews. The pattern of increased submissions seen in this journal is common to other journals in our disciplines, meaning that many are being asked to review more submissions for more journals. Unsurprisingly, researchers must prioritize and limit the number of review assignments they can take on, selecting only those where the topic aligns closely with their own specific areas of expertise. The articles we receive cover an increasingly wide range of design topics, meaning that it can be difficult to locate potential reviewers with specialist expertise, as well as those with sufficient experience to provide more generalist reviews.

The editorial team with the full support of the Board is responding to some of these challenges with recent plans to start of a College of Reviewers. The College will enhance the peer review system by developing mentoring opportunities and providing reviewers with up-to-date knowledge and resources needed to conduct consistent, fair, and high-quality peer review. Our aim is to develop in a diverse and inclusive manner to reflects the journal’s aims and scope; contribute to leadership and benchmarking of best practice in the international design research community. Its objective is to be a group of active design academics and researchers drawn from a range of institutions and career experience, from Early Career Researchers to senior academics. Recognizing that the reviews might be specific to a design discipline or more general towards design research, its argument, methods and methodologies, members will be reviewing articles which are outside of their own specific areas, particularly when more suitable expertise is unavailable. In support of this, we are offering training and mentoring opportunities with our Editorial board to ensure that College members are given appropriate support and recognition. We are also reaching out to all those readers, authors and current or potential reviewers who would like to join the College.

Changes in size of the PhD community

Alongside the numerous changes in academic publishing, there have been significant changes in the field of design research itself. Design research has developed, matured and become firmly established across a wide number of institutions across the globe within a relatively short timeframe, and this growth has forced the consideration of a number of questions.

The doctoral design research community, for example, continues to grow significantly. The development is global with individual institutional offerings, such as Carnegie Mellon’s Transition Design (USA), TU Delft’s Doctoral Design for Values (Netherlands), Industrial Design Center School of Design’s PhD Design (India), Izmir University’s PhD in Design Studies (Turkey), Tongji University’s Design Research and Design Innovation program (China), RMIT School of Design’s PhD Design, (Australia), and Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts Design PhD (UK). National initiatives also contribute to the growth and in the UK, including the Collaborative Doctoral Awards program, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through, for example, the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH), and the Economic and Social Research Council’s Festival of Science #ESRCFestival. Collectively, they are contributing to many more people seeking to publish their design research

In 2015, our gaze again landed on the sustained growth in the field of design research, specifically doctoral degrees and their associated research training communities. In terms of affirmatively furthering design research through journal publishing, we asked how we can better service the growth of this part of our community: what more can we do to meet their needs?

In response to the amplified volume of publishing submissions, the continued strong international growth of doctoral design researchers and in support of design becoming a research-based discipline, we identified the skill of publishing as an area of value creation. We needed, and still need to, further support the skill of publishing design research. And the need is arguably most acute in the doctoral community as they become the discipline’s future leaders. The mantra being, ‘encourage design researchers to start developing the skill of publishing earlier’ specifically through sole-authoring.

The service solution: introduction of a new element to the Design Journal (2017) being PhD Study Reports as a basic contribution to the conversation being facilitated. The intention has been to act as a mentor in the constellation of mentoring design research: on the role of evidence and the rigour required to make an argument in writing; the skill of editing an argument and removing basic weaknesses such as bias or a lack of critical debate between the author’s work and that of those that have come before them or stand in opposition to their position or methodology.

We introduced the new section in Volume 20 (2017) and since its arrival have shared the work of 35 doctoral design researchers: 51% European, 31% Asian, 3% North American, 9% Australasian, 6% South American. This data details where a researcher is studying for their doctoral degree, yet it belies the country where researcher gained their undergraduate degree and, perhaps where they will return for employment. If we analyze the same data, we see a different picture where 43% Asian, 3% African, 9% Australasia, 3% North American, 29% European, South America 6%. This is worth reflecting on as it signifies a major shift in the nature and dynamic of the design research landscape.

Meanwhile, building on the growth spurt of people with a design and-or design related PhD is the emerging generation of Early Career Researchers who are under pressure to publish and gain experience as researchers. While we can see this pressure differs from country to country, as an editorial team, we continue to iteratively attend to these service questions in loyal pursuit of developing impactful design researchers.

While many things in publishing have changed, the idea of quality for journal articles remains a constant with the basic tenets presented eloquently by Nigel Cross (2019, A1-9) ‘Purposive - based on identification of an issue or problem worthy and capable of investigation; Inquisitive - seeking to acquire new knowledge; Informed - conducted from an awareness of previous, related research; Methodical - planned and carried out in an efficient and disciplined manner; Communicable - generating and reporting results which are testable and accessible by others.’

Support for authors and editors

Another benefit of being part of a large academic publishing family (Taylor & Francis currently publishes more than 2,700 journals) is that we have access to a wide range of resources to support authors, reviewers and editors. Our publisher tells us that Author satisfaction with the Journal and its referee process is good, but there is always room for improvement. Part of this will be ensuring that authors understand how we can work with them and what resources they can draw on. Authors submitting to the Design Journal can now access a suite of services (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/) from copy editing and instructions on structuring, preparing and submitting an article, all the way to sharing and promoting their work in order to maximize the impact of their work. This type of self-promotion has become increasingly important as the ‘impact’ of published work has become a crucial benchmark of the value of published research. The job of publishing articles no longer ends with them appearing in print. Each article now has an ‘afterlife’ during which it can be more and more widely disseminated and further promoted by the author and others through, for example, social media. While support from institution colleagues and supervisors remains crucial, such author resources provide an additional level of support. They can open up opportunities for those located in disciplines or geographical areas where the research culture is less fully developed.

Some further steps we must take as a journal are to examine more closely the support we provide to reviewers during the review process so that it is not only clear what is being asked of them, but that the format in which they provide their feedback is streamlined and fit for purpose.

Global reach and altmetrics

The journal continues to be read by a wide global audience, with article downloads increasing steadily. As online access to research articles increases, researchers and publications must still demonstrate the impact of their research. In particular, those carrying out publicly funded research have a responsibility to make the outputs of their work available to stakeholders within and beyond traditional research communities. Altmetrics is one measure of engagement with digitally published research. It measures the volume and type of attention paid, looking at how frequently an article has been mentioned in, for example, social media, news sources and blogs. Types of mention are weighted differently (a mention in a policy document or patent is worth more than a Tweet) and a score calculated. While volume of attention is not necessarily a proxy for quality, it does indicate a relevance to and connection with broader audiences. It might take a number of years for a piece of work to gain traction and its impact to be fully realized. This can be tracked through Altmetrics. Authors must be conscious of the potential impact of their work at all stages of their careers and work with the journal to ensure their work stands out in a crowded research landscape.

In closing

The Design Journal is a construct for conversing about design research, a vehicle for publishing research and a means of documenting the discipline of design’s developments. In its current publishing family of Taylor and Francis it is afforded the highest level of production, author services, and editor services and together offers a distinctly valuable added dimension. It helps us to further enhance publishing as part of the research training throughout an individual’s career, and to understand publishing as part of the professional practice of an academic design researcher. This is especially true today where the PhD is a core requisite for individuals looking to enter and develop a career in higher education communities, be that to enter teaching, an advanced research career or an entrepreneurial route to a new business start-up. The Design Journal is ready to support the next chapter of training in the craft of preparing and publishing design research. It is here to continue to consciously reflect and iterate on the culture of design research through the lens of publishing.