Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge

Editorial / Mission Statement/ Aims & Scope

DIMENSIONS Journal of Architectural Knowledge is an international, peer-reviewed journal initiated in the context of the BauHow5 European Alliance for Architecture and the Built Environment and their associated networks. It addresses design as the core of the architecture discipline and investigates the creation, constitution and sharing of architectural knowledge. The aim of the journal is to explore processes, procedures and results from practice and research with particular attentiveness to the architectural design and to investigate epistemologies of aesthetic practices and research. DIMENSIONS assembles contributions referring to the constitution and body of knowledge in architecture, aiming to exploit specific architectural knowledge, its mediation, investigation and research.

Twice a year DIMENSIONS publishes curated editions on superordinate subject. Calls are launched publically and contributions to the thematic framing of the respective edition are selected in a double-blind peer review procedure. The editions are published in print and Open Access. Beyond the curated editions with thematically framed fields, DIMENSIONS provides a platform to publish all kinds of investigation and research on architectural knowledge, its particularities, the creation, providing and mediation of it as well as its discourse within the principle objective of the journal. These singular contributions addressing the constitution and the body of knowledge in architecture are published Open Access only, in the context of the digital archive of transcript.open.

The notion of dimensions refers to the multidirectional nature of impacts and subject areas of the architectural discipline, including architectural design, construction and technology, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, history and theory of architecture as well as affinities to other fields in interdisciplinary investigation.

Publication ethics and publication malpractice statement

A high scientific and content-related standard is an essential principle of DIMENSIONS's mission. An integral part of this objective is to meet the requirements of good scientific practice and publication ethics. The editorial and publication context of the journal meets this requirement, in bringing together the expertise and experience of academic publishing and leading architectural institutes to form the background of this journal. According to international standards, the guide for ethical editing by the Committee of Publication Ethics forms the foundation upon which the editorial work and procedures of peer-review selection and quality assurance are based. (Cf. http://publicationethics.org). The academic advisors and editors as well as the publishers play a key role in preserving this quality.
As it is the overarching aim of DIMENSIONS to contribute to the body of knowledge in the discipline of architecture, the editors make it their mission to contribute to the scholarly discourse. In the self-understanding as an academic journal of architectural knowledge, DIMENSIONS represents the established body of knowledge as well as it contributes to its future extension and addition. It is the aim of the journal to provide a context for high standard academic publishing in the field of architecture, inviting scholars and writers at all stages of their career to contribute their knowledge, research and investigation to the discourse and thereby emphasize an increase of an informed debate in the architecture discipline and its scientific practice.
In order to allow a transparent procedure and allow equal information to all participants, DIMENSIONS provides an authors’ guide and guidelines for peers to enable comparability consistency for all editions.

Peer Review

All contributions – to the curated editions as well as to the open platform – will be evaluated through a double-blind peer-review. Criteria for selection are the thematic correspondence to the advertised topic of the respective issue or to the overall topic of the journal. It is required, that all contributions to DIMENSIONS relate to the body of knowledge in the architecture discipline. As it is the aim of the journal to investigate the creation, constitution and mediation of architecture specific knowledge, the proximity of research to this umbrella subject is an inevitable requirement for selection.
The peer-review process will be guided by the following superordinate aspects: originality of the work, appropriateness of applied methodology to the research question posed, coherence of the argumentation, comprehensibility of the answer to the questions underlying the contribution, consistency of content with the theme of the respective edition framed in the call for papers or the overall theme of the journal.

For anonymous submission, an external server is provided for submission.

Editorial Review
Apart from the double-blind peer-review as standard procedure for selection, in individual cases DIMENSIONS offers the possibility for editorial review for special formats of reflective or discursive alternative text forms. These form the exception, whereas double-blind peer-review is the general norm. Comparative observations of peer-reviews, discussions or interviews can be additional text categories to be assembled with the full-length articles to broaden the spectrum of investigation in the respective edition’s discourse.