Roger Malina is stepping down as Executive Editor of Leonardo publications after 40 years of volunteer labor. As part of this ISAST is carrying out a strategic review to try and understand the future of academic publishing.
When Leonardo Journal was founded by Frank Malina, at Pergamon Press, it was different in a number of desirable ways:
- Until the end of WWII academic publishing was carried out by Academies of Art and Academies of Science, and other non-profits such as some Universities, not by commercial publishers.
- Secondly artists were almost never asked to write about their art making and artwork; the founder of Leonardo was told “if you have to plug it in, it isn’t art”. Show it in a cinema museum.
Now there are dozens of academic journals in the commercial and non-profit worlds including MIT Press, the current publisher of Leonardo Journal and Books. And artists can publish in dozens of peer-reviewed
journals. Artists in academic settings often need to publish in peer reviewed academic journals in order to get promoted and tenure.
About the Author:
Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.
He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.