Yes! The MIT Media Lab launched an academic journal about design and science. Open, free and under a Creative Commons licence. Eat your heart out old school universities and publishers that let theorists, researchers and academics publish their work in too expensive and difficult to access journals and book.
The new Journal of Design and Science (in short JoDS) is run by Lab director Joi Ito. This is what the website says about JoDS:
“Launched in early 2016, the Journal of Design and Science (JoDS) captures the antidisciplinary ethos of the MIT Media Lab. Like the Lab, it opens new connections between science and design, encouraging discourse that breaks down the barriers between traditional academic disciplines. It explores not only the design of science, but also the science of design.
JoDS intends to incite much-needed change in academic publishing by challenging traditional academic silos as well as the established publishing practices associated with them.
The journal will be hosted on an open-access, open-review, rapid publication platform called PubPub, created by students at the Media Lab. PubPub is a collaborative publication environment with rich commenting features, and powerful, intuitive authoring tools. JoDS articles are authored directly within the PubPub environment, which provides support for multimedia, image integration, and large data sets.
Unlike journals that operate within a formal peer review system and rigid disciplinary framework, JoDS invites jargon-free communication across all fields of design and science, unconventional formats, and widespread community participation. JoDS empowers authors to engage in fruitful, ongoing discussion about their work with members of many different communities, both within and outside of their home disciplines. This rich, peer-to-peer approach to review provides for a much broader array of perspectives, new pathways forward, and emergent topics for further research.”
That’s the spirit. The first issue is promising, with an excellent piece by Danny Hillis about the death of the enlightenment and the rise of the age of entanglement. A must read.
You can find JoDS over here:
jods.mitpress.mit.edu