Review Process
APEN’s Aims in Producing a Refereed Conference Proceedings
As the peak body for professionals working in extension and practice change, APEN strives to foster professional development opportunities for its members and other outreach professional working in the Asia-Pacific Region and internationally. One aim within this broad vision is to provide a medium for the peer-review and publication of papers in Refereed Proceedings.
Thus the APEN 2006 International Conference is not only a gathering at which members meet and hear presentations from other professionals in similar fields, but provides a rare venue for peer-review of papers. This is particularly important because we extension agents have no journal devoted to our fields of work in Australasia, while most of our colleagues other areas of research and development do have such professional journals.
The Paper Review Process
The peer-review process for APEN 2006 started with a Call for Abstracts in June 2005. Over 120 authors submitted abstracts to the website for oral or poster presentations, and about 90 submitted full papers for review by the end of November. Theses papers were allocated among 28 selected reviewers from various specialist disciplines – such as practice change, training and communication, capacity building, social research and community resource management.
Paper reviewers uploaded files with their comments to the website and authors responded to these, in one to four iterations of paper revision. About 85 full papers were finally ‘approved’ for publication in the refereed proceedings in February.
The web-based proceedings is available with previous conference proceedings through The Regional Institute website at http://www.regional.org.au/au/apen/2006
The review process adopted meets the criteria set by the Department of Education Science and Training (DEST) for “Refereed Conference Proceedings”.
Paper reviewers
APEN and the Conference Committee extend sincere gratitude to all 28 members of the conference review panel, who worked hard to make the review process possible.
Catherine Allan |
Adaptive management, action and participatory research |
Barrie Bardsley |
Extension research and adoption theory |
David Beckingsale |
Program evaluation in NRM, agriculture, community |
Ruth Beilin |
Social research, visual sociology, gender and rural issues |
Lucia Boxelaar |
Social research, social capital, community capacity |
Peter Cakebread |
Animal science research and extension. Animal ethics |
Anne Crawford |
Social and action research, practice change |
Jo Crosby |
Pasture research and extension. Program management |
Jessica Dart |
Program evaluation, participatory technologies |
Tony Dunn |
Extension, social research, rapid rural appraisal |
Kathryn Goyen |
Consulting, extension, training and management in agriculture |
Bob Gray |
General extension and training in agriculture and resource management |
Jonathon Howard |
Engagement relating to water, catchment management, communities |
Geoff Kaine |
Victoria Extension - agriculture and horticultural industries |
Chris Linehan |
Research and extension management. Horticulture, cropping and grazing systems |
Kate McCormick |
Agronomic services, farmer training, rural practice change |
Bron McDonald |
Program evaluation, program logic. Dairy and other industries |
Alice Melland |
Dairy and pasture research and extension |
Joanne Millar |
Participatory approaches in NRM and agriculture, incentives for conservation |
John Moran |
Research manager, dairy and livestock systems, Australian & international development |
Ruth Nettle |
Research and extension, group training, social and action research |
Rob Norton |
Agronomic research and farm advisory |
Mark Paine |
Social and behavioural research, knowledge systems |
R. John Petheram |
People aspects of R&D in agriculture, forestry and NRM |
Val Pollard |
Rural development in small-scale farming setting. Training Australia and internationally Private consultant, Victoria. |
Horrie Poussard |
Change practices influencing catchment health, biodiversity and water quality |
Brian Robotham |
Sugar agronomy and farm machinery |
Frank Vanclay |
Social research in relation to land use and landholder behaviour |