Technical papers and Open Access Publishing

An ongoing discussion on the official IEEE LinkedIn Group addresses the issue of Open Access Publishing. Roger Pollard, 2010 IEEE Vice-President, Technical Activities started discussion by noting that the US and other countries are moving toward free access to research papers funded or partially funded with public money.Numerous IEEE members have chimed in, some wondering how this will affect standards activity because IEEE currently sells standards. One professor noted that universities expect faculty to get their research published in prestigious publications such as IEEE Transactions and conference proceedings. With Open Access Publishing, that takes away some of the prestige.

Others noted that sometimes they would like to not only read a conference paper, but get a video of the conference presentation. One person commented that he would gladly pay to download papers that included videos.

For me, Open Access Publishing would help my article research. Although I’m a member of several IEEE societies (Instrumentation &Measurement, EMC, Product Safety Engineering, and Communications), I sometimes find papers that I think would help only to find that my membership doesn’t get me access to the work.