June 2018 From the IFAC President

Get to know IFAC-PapersOnLine

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Have you heard of POL? Do you have an idea
what  POL  stands  for?  And  no,  this  is  not  an
abbreviation for a German soccer club, such as
FCB, BVB or VFB (although, now that I think of
it,  German  soccer  skills  would  also  be  an  in-
teresting subject for the presidential column at
the time of the World Cup). POL stands for Pa-
persOnLine. Most likely,  your  work  is actually
already on PapersOnLine if you have presented
your research outcomes at one of the various
IFAC events all over the world (or even at some
co-sponsored  IFAC  events).  And  why  should
one be interested in POL? Because PapersOn-
Line was set-up such that it is supposed to be
most  beneficial  for  the  control  community  in
general, and hence also for you!

Let me start with the greatest advantage. Pa-
persOnLine is Gold Open Access. This means
that  the  site  is  Open  Access  in  nature  -  no
charge  is  made  to  individuals  for  reading  or
downloading, immediately after publication. As
an  individual,  this  means  you  have  access  to
papers from IFAC Symposia, Congresses, Con-
ferences and most Workshops free of charge,
wherever  you  are.  As  an  author,  this  means
that  all  interested  researchers  have  no  diffi-
culty accessing your results, independently of
which subscription their university or employer
agreed to. Of course, Open Access should not
be the only point authors should consider. All
papers accepted at IFAC events are published
in  PDF  format  in  PapersOnLine  -  searchable
and citable. In fact, its papers are indexed on
Scopus, Thomson Reuters Web of Science and
Google Scholar, thus enabling citations, facili-
tating the search and improving the visibility of
your papers. Furthermore, all papers published
on the web site can be cited using the IFAC Pa-
persOnLine ISSN and the individual paper DOI
(Digital  Object  Identifier).  The  IFAC-Papers-
OnLine  proceedings  series  are  published  in
partnership with Elsevier, and hosted on Scien-
ceDirect and they have an Editor-in-Chief, Juan
Antonio de la Puente, who has done a tremen-
dous job in the last years. For more informa-
tion or for interesting new Gold Open Access
papers, you can browse through https://www.
sciencedirect.com/journal/ifac-papersonline
.

‘But if everything is Open Access, who pays for
the infrastructure etc.?’, you might ask, or ‘How
can IFAC make profit in this business model?’.
In fact, it is quite the opposite. IFAC pays the
uploading fee to POL for all papers from IFAC
events. Hence, neither the event organizers nor
the conference registrants have to pay for POL.
This is a common misunderstanding concern-
ing  IFAC  events.  IFAC  does  not  receive  any
money or profit from IFAC events or from their
published  event  papers  but,  on  the  contrary,
subsidizes  them,  amongst  others,  by  provid-
ing the upload to POL. This conforms to IFAC’s
aims and constitution, which states that IFAC
“does not engage in any activity with financial
or political aims” but has the primary objective
to “serve all those concerned with the theory
and application of automatic control and sys-
tems engineering, wherever situated”.

I can say, I am very happy in how POL has de-
veloped and the benefit it brings to our com-
munity. Therefore, I invite you to also take ad-
vantage of it - whether as an author or as an
interested reader.

Best wishes from Stuttgart, Frank Allgöwer

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