Today I got an email from an academic publisher…
They were telling me the good news that I could submit a paper for publication in their journal, and that the cost to DCU (if my paper were accepted) had been reduced to 18 Euro per page. If anyone wanted to read my paper they would have to either subscribe to the journal at the cost of 240 Euro per year (for 4 issues), or pay a hefty price to download the paper from the publishers web site.
I shook my head in amazement. Are there still people out there that do that? In the field of Computing we have long moved over to Open Access publishing. For example all of my academic papers are available for download for free from the Web, and none of them cost me a penny to put them there.
In fact its you, the Irish and European taxpayer, that is paying for most of this research in the first place, so surely its only right that you should have free access to view its outputs.
Here in DCU, and in particular in the School of Computing, we have pushed this ideal to the limit. All of our Ph.D. theses are published on our own open-access repository called DORAS – see http://doras.dcu.ie/. Many of us choose to place all of our published output (conference papers, book chapters, journal publications) there as well.
My colleague Prof. Alan Smeaton informs me that
"DORAS has been in operation for almost 3 years and there are now 578 research publications from the School of Computing available online http://doras.dcu.ie/view/groups/groups2a.html, more than any other School, Faculty or research centre in the University. These have had 34,490 individual downloads of the full PDF of the publications, with the most-downloaded paper being:
Coogan, Thomas and Awad, George M. and Han, Junwei and Sutherland, Alistair (2006) Real time hand gesture recognition including hand segmentation and tracking. In: ISVC 2006 - 2nd International Symposium on Visual Computing, 6-8 November 2006, Lake Tahoe, NV, USA. http://doras.dcu.ie/259/
which has had 1,081 individual downloads."
In a new initiative we have decided to make available presentations by all of our Ph.D. students, where in a recorded video of an academic talk they describe their research and their progress to date. These recordings are normally made after the students have completed about 2 years of their research program, and they then appear on this website in a blog posting. So now as well as browsing the printed word, you can also hear our research being presented directly “from the horses mouth”.
Open Access is the future of the dissemination of academic research.
(Of course there are occasions when we might have to keep quiet for a while about what we have discovered – there may after all be valuable Intellectual Property that we would need to take action to protect first.)
They were telling me the good news that I could submit a paper for publication in their journal, and that the cost to DCU (if my paper were accepted) had been reduced to 18 Euro per page. If anyone wanted to read my paper they would have to either subscribe to the journal at the cost of 240 Euro per year (for 4 issues), or pay a hefty price to download the paper from the publishers web site.
I shook my head in amazement. Are there still people out there that do that? In the field of Computing we have long moved over to Open Access publishing. For example all of my academic papers are available for download for free from the Web, and none of them cost me a penny to put them there.
In fact its you, the Irish and European taxpayer, that is paying for most of this research in the first place, so surely its only right that you should have free access to view its outputs.
Here in DCU, and in particular in the School of Computing, we have pushed this ideal to the limit. All of our Ph.D. theses are published on our own open-access repository called DORAS – see http://doras.dcu.ie/. Many of us choose to place all of our published output (conference papers, book chapters, journal publications) there as well.
My colleague Prof. Alan Smeaton informs me that
"DORAS has been in operation for almost 3 years and there are now 578 research publications from the School of Computing available online http://doras.dcu.ie/view/groups/groups2a.html, more than any other School, Faculty or research centre in the University. These have had 34,490 individual downloads of the full PDF of the publications, with the most-downloaded paper being:
Coogan, Thomas and Awad, George M. and Han, Junwei and Sutherland, Alistair (2006) Real time hand gesture recognition including hand segmentation and tracking. In: ISVC 2006 - 2nd International Symposium on Visual Computing, 6-8 November 2006, Lake Tahoe, NV, USA. http://doras.dcu.ie/259/
which has had 1,081 individual downloads."
In a new initiative we have decided to make available presentations by all of our Ph.D. students, where in a recorded video of an academic talk they describe their research and their progress to date. These recordings are normally made after the students have completed about 2 years of their research program, and they then appear on this website in a blog posting. So now as well as browsing the printed word, you can also hear our research being presented directly “from the horses mouth”.
Open Access is the future of the dissemination of academic research.
(Of course there are occasions when we might have to keep quiet for a while about what we have discovered – there may after all be valuable Intellectual Property that we would need to take action to protect first.)
