At 12:01 -0500 5/4/03, air-l-request@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]