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