October 2020

Dear IACM colleagues,

It is an honor to serve as President of IACM. It was a pleasure seeing so many of you at the July 2020 vIACM conference. The tremendous efforts by Greg Paul (vIACM 2020 Program Chair), Zoe Barsness (Past President), Brandon Charpied (Executive Director), the IACM Board, and IACM membership to make the event a success paid off. The formal and informal feedback we received about the event indicated that it was a strong success. A few quotes from the member survey highlight the general sentiment that many of us shared:

“It is always wonderful “seeing” the community. While I would have loved to meet everyone in person, the virtual conference exceeded my expectations in every way.”

“vIACM showed that virtual conferences are a viable option for scientific exchange that does not require hundreds of people to travel.”

In addition to the positive feedback, we also received helpful suggestions for future conference planning, both for in-person and virtual events, as well as for other IACM offerings and potential offerings. Thank you to the 172 IACM members who completed the survey!

We do not yet know yet our plans for the July 2021 conference. We may meet from July 11-14, 2021 at the Makedonia Palace Hotel in Thessaloniki, Greece as originally planned back in March 2019. However, as each day passes, the possibility of a hybrid or fully virtual conference becomes more necessary for the conference planning team and the IACM Board to carefully consider because of health, travel, and financial constraints and issues facing so many of us. Our plan is to make decisions regarding the IACM 2021 conference in November and December, and we will update you about our conference plans as they unfold.

Planning for the vIACM conference was but one task the leadership team worked on this past year. The most significant new initiative that we have undertaken is our move to self-publish our journal, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research (NCMR). As you may recall from our announcements this summer, beginning on January 1, 2021, IACM will publish NCMR as a Platinum Open Access (OA) journal with support from Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Publishing Service (CMU LPS). Platinum Open Access—also referred to as Diamond Open Access—means that NCMR will be completely free for BOTH authors and readers, for all of our past archives as well as future articles. Moving forward, authors will retain the copyright of their published work in NCMR, rather than having to sign over those rights to a publisher, such as was done with Wiley in the past.

Coinciding with our move to Platinum OA publishing, NCMR will be adopting open science practices for all of the many types of articles that the journal publishes. NCMR will continue to publish quantitative research studies (experiments, surveys, content analyses), qualitative research studies, meta-analyses and comprehensive literature reviews, case studies, theoretical and conceptual papers, and replications.

Qi Wang (NCMR Editor-in-Chief), Lan Ni (NCMR Associate Editor), Jimena Ramirez Marin (NCMR Associate Editor), and Alicia Utecht (NCMR Editorial Assistant) have been doing tremendous work behind the scenes preparing us for this transition and developing new guidelines, policies, and procedures for the journal. They have been working closely with me, the IACM Publications Committee (Zoe Barsness, Jennifer Parlamis, and Noam Ebner) and the CMU LPS librarians (Rikk Mulligan, David Scherer, and Ryan Splenda) to make our move to self-publishing a reality. On behalf of IACM, I would like to offer all of them our most profound gratitude for their efforts in moving NCMR to a Platinum OA and open science journal. The move to Platinum OA will make our work more visible and accessible to the world, and the move to open science practices will increase the quality and rigor of the research we publish. I am hopeful that these changes will catapult the journal to the next level so that it becomes the premier outlet of choice for negotiation and conflict research, across all disciplines.

Finally, I will close my column by sharing something I learned recently while online shopping—a favored pandemic activity for many of us I imagine. It occurred to me while browsing the Amazon website that IACM is a non-profit organization and as such can be supported by the AmazonSmile program so that every time you shop on Amazon’s website or in the app, AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your eligible purchases to IACM. Simply choose the International Association for Conflict Management as your charitable organization on the smile.amazon.com website and then shop online the way you normally do. Supporting IACM could not be easier!

 

Best regards,

Taya Cohen

IACM President 2020-2022