Open Access Publications - IEEE Xplore

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Open Access Publications: More Than a Business Model? Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2012.2215151. Date of publication: 15 October 2012. Abdelhak ...
[from the EDITOR]

Abdelhak Zoubir Editor-in-Chief [email protected] http://signalprocessingsociety.org/ publications/periodicals/spm

Open Access Publications: More Than a Business Model?

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started writing this editorial while I was attending the European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) held on 27–31 August in Bucharest, Romania. The conference was a rewarding experience, not only from a technical perspective, but also as a forum for numerous discussions with colleagues from across the globe, particularly on the development of signal processing conferences and publications in signal processing journals. One of the topics that was extensively discussed is the impact factor (IF) of a journal and Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2012.2215151 Date of publication: 15 October 2012

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE Abdelhak Zoubir, Editor-in-Chief — Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany AREA EDITORS Feature Articles — Marc Moonen, KU Leuven, Belgium Columns and Forums — Andrea Cavallaro, Queen Mary, University of London, UK and Andres Kwasinski, Rochester Institute of Technology Special Issues — Fulvio Gini, University of Pisa, Italy e-Newsletter — Z. Jane Wang, University of British Columbia EDITORIAL BOARD Moeness G. Amin — Villanova University Sergio Barbarossa — University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Italy Jeff Bilmes — University of Washington Helmut Bölcskei — ETH Zürich, Switzerland Yen-Kuang Chen — Intel Corporation Bernd Girod — Stanford University Jenq-Neng Hwang — University of Washington Michael Jordan — University of California, Berkeley Visa Koivunen — Aalto University, Finland Vikram Krishnamurthy — University of British Columbia Jian Li — University of Florida–Gainesville Mark Liao — National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan Hongwei Liu — Xidian University, China Tom Luo — University of Minnesota V. John Mathews — University of Utah

whether it is a measure that should be used to select where to publish one’s own research results. An interesting question that arises from this central topic is whether it is good practice to use the IF as a criterion for recruitment, tenure, or promotion. The IF has been well covered by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) President K.J. Ray Liu, in his “President’s Message” published in the July 2012 issue of this magazine [1], so I will not elaborate any further on the IF in my editorial. Open access (OA) publication is the other topic that received much attention in the discussions among colleagues at coffee breaks and meet-

Satoshi Nakamura — Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan Kuldip Paliwal — Griffith University, Australia Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu — Télécom ParisTech, France H. Vincent Poor — Princeton University Ali Sayed — University of California, Los Angeles Yoram Singer — Google Research Victor Solo — University of New South Wales, Australia Sergios Theodoridis — University of Athens, Greece Patrick J. Wolfe — Harvard University Min Wu — University of Maryland ASSOCIATE EDITORS— COLUMNS AND FORUM Rodrigo Capobianco Guido — University of Sao Paulo, Brazil Aleksandra Mojsilovic — IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Douglas O’Shaughnessy — INRS, Canada Gene Cheung — National Institute of Informatics Alessandro Vinciarelli — IDIAP–EPFL Michael Gormish — Ricoh Innovations, Inc. Xiaodong He — Microsoft Research Lina Karam — Arizona State University Fatih Porikli — MERL Stefan Winkler — UIUC/ADSC, Singapore Carlos Óscar Sánchez Sorzano — UAM, Spain Azadeh Vosoughi — University of Rochester Danilo Mandic — Imperial College, UK Roberto Togneri — The University of Western Australia

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2012.2217551

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ings with publishers during the conference. In an article titled “IEEE Journals Tackle Open Access” [2] that appeared in October 2011 in The Institute, the member newspaper of the IEEE, it states the following: The majority of IEEE’s transactions and journals are now giving authors the option of making their articles available for free in the IEEE Xplore digital library. All but three of the 86 journals produced by IEEE Publishing Operations are including the IEEE Open Access choice as of 30 September. Additionally, 12 journals published by the IEEE Computer Society and all six of the

ASSOCIATE EDITORS—E-NEWSLETTER Marcelo Bruno — ITA, Brazil Gwenael Doerr — Technicolor, France Shantanu Rane — MERL Yan Lindsay Sun — University of Rhode Island IEEE PERIODICALS MAGAZINES DEPARTMENT Jessica Barragué — Managing Editor Geraldine Krolin-Taylor — Senior Managing Editor Susan Schneiderman — Business Development Manager +1 732 562 3946 Fax: +1 732 981 1855 Felicia Spagnoli — Advertising Production Mgr. Janet Dudar — Senior Art Director Gail A. Schnitzer — Assistant Art Director Theresa L. Smith — Production Coordinator Dawn M. Melley — Editorial Director Peter M. Tuohy — Production Director Fran Zappulla — Staff Director, Publishing Operations IEEE prohibits discrimination, harassment, and bullying. For more information, visit http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/whatis/policies/p9-26.html.

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING SOCIETY K.J. Ray Liu — President Alex Acero — President-Elect John Treichler — Vice President, Awards and Membership Wan-Chi Siu— Vice President, Conferences Min Wu — Vice President, Finance Mari Ostendorf — Vice President, Publications Ahmed Tewfik — Vice President, Technical Directions

[from the EDITOR]

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journals published by the IEEE Communications Society now include this option when they’re submitted for publication. More journals will be added each month, with the goal of eventually extending the option to all IEEE journals. The IEEE Board of Directors approved the above option in August 2010; the interested reader can download the policy from [2]. Today, all of the journals published by the IEEE include the OA choice. This is indeed a fast-moving trend, and while the IEEE is still experimenting with the model, many publishers have no option but to choose OA publishing. For example, the signal processing-titled journals of The European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) follow two different models. While one journal has been an OA journal for several years, the other one (by another publisher), although available electronically, offers OA publishing as an option at US$3,000. The interesting question to ask is why has OA publishing become so important, and why are research funders so much more interested in the public access of research findings? To facilitate the answer to this question, one should recall the history of publication and why journals were launched. Because authors were able to share their most recent findings quickly with their community and were given the benefit of a fast, public time-stamp on their work, they preferred journals to books. At the same time, broad access to research results is an essential component to research advancement. However, research results are often not available to the broadest community of potential users. OA is online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Thus, it overcomes many of the problems we experience with paper publication. When I had my first OA journal paper published with my student in a special issue some years ago, I asked myself “Why should I pay to get my paper published while in the past I published without any charge?” This is a legitimate question that many of us ask ourselves. In an Internet publication by Peter Suber [3], director of the Harvard Open Access Project, I found a very interesting

analogy of OA to television broadcasting. He writes “OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment.” Although this statement is plausible, the answer may not satisfy some of us. In the very early days of publications, scholars published work for impact. While book authors received royalties, authors of journal articles did not. They were rewarded by a more timely publication. Even when journal revenue grew, authors continued to publish journal

THE INTERESTING QUESTION TO ASK IS WHY HAS OA PUBLISHING BECOME SO IMPORTANT, AND WHY ARE RESEARCH FUNDERS SO MUCH MORE INTERESTED IN THE PUBLIC ACCESS OF RESEARCH FINDINGS?

articles without remuneration. This tradition has been maintained ever since. With the increase in printing costs, journal subscription prices have risen since the 1980s several times faster than inflation. We have reached a point where wealthy institutions cannot afford access to the full range of literature. With the exponential growth of published work, the problem will aggravate in the future because priced access to journal articles would not scale with this growth, even if prices would remain at today’s level forever. The cost factor is only one of many reasons for the rise of OA. Is OA something we should favor? Even if OA means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, OA publication is the model of the future. It is widely accepted that OA journals enable us to share our knowledge with a worldwide community instantly and at virtually no cost. This model also accelerates the pace of innovation and facili-

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [4] NOVEMBER 2012

tates interdisciplinary research. Governments see this as an opportunity to get a better return on their investment in publicly funded research. The fee to be paid by the author (or the author’s sponsor) is in some cases very high. A study in [4] showed that the price range could be up to US$3,900 with the highest prices by journals with high impact factors from major international publishers. On one hand, we cannot argue that OA journals enable timely access to publications by a world readership, and on the other hand allow only those who can afford to pay the fee to publish in OA journals. The high fee to publish in OA journals is currently a big burden, although in some cases OA journals have a subsidy and usually waive in cases of economic hardship the fee. Can publishers maintain an author fee that is thousands of dollars? In [3], Suber states “There is a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and we are far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination.” If the fee becomes affordable, I am confident that there will very soon be a time where all journals will have no option but to be OA journals. Despite the fast-moving trend of OA publishing, I believe that magazines, in particular IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM), should continue to be distributed electronically and also in printed form. During the week ending on 31 August, I asked an esteemed colleague and friend whether he had already read the September issue of SPM, whose availability was announced via email to all SPS members on 23 August. His answer was “Not yet, I usually wait until I get the paper copy.” He may not belong to a minority, which could probably be attributed to the nature of the publications in SPM that are different from other publications that focus on new research results. SPM publishes tutorial articles with comprehensive surveys of important theories, algorithms, tools, and applications related to signal processing. Each issue includes articles from three main categories— special issue articles, feature articles,

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and columns/forums. A special issue consists of tutorial-style articles, which focus on a central theme in a mature, critical area that is interesting to a broad audience. Feature articles, also written in a tutorial style, address relevant subjects related to general signal processing fields of interest. Column articles and forum focus on a wide range of topics in signal processing and are divided in categories with different objectives and dynamics. For many years, I too waited impatiently to hold SPM in my hands and scan through the exciting articles. This issue’s special theme is “Fundamental Technologies in Modern Speech Recognition.” Research in this area started in the 1970s and continues to be challenging and raises many new questions as signal processing technology advances. Shortly after I started writing this editorial, I attended a keynote speech

titled “Automatic Speech Recognition: Past, Present, and Future” by a leading scholar at the aforementioned conference. This also confirmed how exciting and how important this subject is for future communication technology. Despite the commercial success and widespread adoption, the problem of large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition is far from being solved. I would like to thank all the contributors for submitting high-quality articles for the special issue and the guest editors for their effort and timeliness in facilitating the peer-review process. I also thank all authors for columns and forum. I encourage more colleagues to get involved and participate in SPM; I welcome their suggestions for timely and most interesting topics for special issues, feature articles, or columns. With their contributions, the dedication and enthusiasm

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of all volunteers, working together with guest editors and authors, we shall move SPM, the flagship magazine of the SPS, to greater heights. REFERENCES

[1] K.J. Ray Liu, “Citation impact,” IEEE Signal Processing Mag., vol. 29, no. 4, p. 8, July 2012. [2] (Oct. 2010). IEEE Statement on Open Access and Public Access [Online]. Available: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/briefings/business/most-ieee-journals-are-now-openaccess [3] P. Suber. (June 2012). Open Access Overview [Online]. Available: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/ fos/overview.htm [4] D. J. Solomon and B.-C. Björk, “A study of open access journals using article processing charges,” J. Amer. Soc. Inform. Sci. Technol., vol. 63, no. 8, pp. 1485–1495, Aug. 2012.

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