DJM:

Please refrain from using bashing words (i.e. "pathetic") to express your opinions. There is no call for it, as we are all supposed to be professionals here. I would respond by asking IAAI journal to quit wasting trees by (sure looks like it to me) half the magazine being made up of strictly advertising. I like to read both periodicals for the information contained within their articles.

The main problem why I won't publish to the IAAI is because by their own rules, I am not allowed to even copyright my own articles I author if I want to submit them for review and publication. The last three articles were reviewed by people who had no background or understanding in the basics of the articles content and had no business reviewing and critiquing them. If the IAAI wants Peer-reviewers for the editorial board (which I completely support), they should endeavour to at least make sure they people they select at least have a basic understanding of the general concept. Or to put it another way, fire investigators should be reviewing other investigators, attorneys reviewing legal articles, engineers reviewing engineers, chemists-chemists, and so on. While there are many that clearly would qualify across these field of expertise lines on some issues, many would not.

Another issue I have raised directly with the international, is that even if I publish my own articles to my own website (not formally anywhere else), then they will refuse to publish. Even if the article is extremely important and published by several industry trade magazines, with full permission to republish granted from the author, they won't publish. The IAAI require to be the first source for all new information and while nice in theory, the IAAI membership looses out on a tremendous amount of important information (SAE, JFS, SFPE, etc) based solely on some bad internal policy decisions.

Just my observations and expressions of extensive past discussions with the IAAI Editorial Staff.

Chris Bloom