Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Replacement for TRIZ Journal: The Plan
An open letter to all friends of TRIZ:
As you may have heard by now, the TRIZ Journal, which became part of the Real Innovation Network after I sold it in 2006, is at great risk. A few weeks ago, the owners of the TRIZ Journal (Schofield Media) defaulted on their debt and their assets were seized by one of its lenders (or something to that effect—the details are sketchy). It appears the employees were discharged and while the website stayed up for another couple of weeks, it’s now down (and up at times, but not being maintained.) Many of you have written to me about your concern that access to the archives be preserved, and your frustrations of the past six months or so, when articles were being submitted and not published.
Right now there are a few priorities. Taking them in order, priority one is ensuring there’s a reliable place to archive past TRIZ Journal papers so they are easily searchable and accessible to the community. Second is providing a forum for the publishing of future papers. And third, many people would like to see the interactive community discussions continue.
Volunteers have been hastily working on these three priorities over the past few weeks and I’m pleased to say they have found a solution to priority one and they are close to solutions for priorities two and three:
Priority One: BMGI, a company that published an excellent book on TRIZ and that offers TRIZ programs has offered to host the library. BMGI’s website already has a free and easily accessible repository that it refers to as its research library. Many of you know Dr. Phil Samuel from BMGI who’s been a frequent author, speaker and participant in TRIZ events around the globe.
To ensure proper permission is granted, we’re simply going to ask that if you’d like to have your paper made available through BMGI’s research library, you resubmit it using the following link: http://www.bmgi.com/publication-request. For those of you who have published multiple papers, BMGI will work with you directly to make the process quick and easy (so you don’t have to upload all of your papers).
Anything that was previously published on the TRIZ Journal will be “grandfathered” meaning it will not go through any additional review or scrutiny before being accepted for publishing.
Priority Two: Volunteers are needed to act as a reviewing body for future article submissions. If you’d like to participate, join the discussion on the LinkedIn Group, “The Continual Improvement Lab,” and share your ideas about the reviewing process. Andrea Zimmerman of Zmarketeers will coordinate this effort. There are still many details to work through.
Priority Three: Andrea has already created the LinkedIn group mentioned above to initiate a dialogue and she is moving forward with a more robust tool to create an on-line community. I know Andrea; she is both passionate and highly capable. I urge you to give her your support. The website is being designed for more robust, discipline-specific community forum discussions, conference reports, member blogs and other resources to be determined by OUR community. The CIL website will link to BMGI’s research library. BMGI and Zmarketeers share the TRIZ community’s desire to prevent future uncertainty about the newly-compiled body of knowledge by establishing copyright agreements that favor long-term author rights and allow for sharing across media locations.
I am very encouraged that it appears the TRIZ community’s needs will be met by the two solutions that will be provided by BMGI and Zmarketeers. The two are working closely together and the two solutions will be linked to make movement back and forth as seamless as possible. A Virtual & In-Person Roundtable was held on Monday, August 29th to share ideas and get more community feedback. For information that came out of the event or news about the forthcoming website, join the discussion on LinkedIn or contact Andrea directly at andrea@zmarketeers.com
All my best,
Ellen Domb
Past editor of The TRIZ Journal, 1996-2006
