Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Imagine you can read all published articles
for free and at the same time you can also
publish for free while retaining the copyright.
Sounds like the perfect publication model?
Well, that is exactly what IFAC is offering for
all of its events since the beginning of this
month. This means that PapersOnLine (or
short POL), which is where all IFAC event pro-
ceedings go, is classified as Diamond Open
Access (which already sounds as cool and
valuable as it is). This also means that POL
fulfills the highest standards with respect to
the ongoing discussions about Open Access
(OA) including the claims of ‘cOAlition S’ and
the associated funding agencies.
But let me go one step back and start with an
explanation of Diamond OA. While Gold OA
and Green OA might be a household name
for one or the other within the color naming
system of OA types, Diamond OA (or also
referred to as Platinum OA) is maybe lesser
known. For Diamond OA, the article must be
immediately open access right after publica-
tion without any embargo period, and nei-
ther the reader nor the author needs to pay
anything. Furthermore, the author retains the
copyright, while an open license can remove
most restrictions on distribution, use and re-
use.
In Sept. IFAC Council voted in favor of mov-
ing POL towards this Diamond Open Access
model and the transition started on the 1st
of October. Of course, authors will only ex-
perience this change after their next paper is
accepted to an IFAC conference: Instead of
transferring the copyright to IFAC, a Creative
Commons (CC) license will be issued. A CC
license enables the free distribution, sharing
and reuse of an otherwise copyrighted paper,
or more general pieces of ‘work’. Therefore,
these licenses are typically used for all kinds
of open access work. More specifically, we
offer the CC BY-NC-ND license as this keeps
the most rights with the author. This license
requires attribution, i.e. citation of the original
author when copying, it does not allow others
to copy and distribute the paper for commer-
cial purposes and prohibits others to make
derivate works e.g. by remixing the content.
However, due to my missing law degree and
the shortness of this column, I highly recom-
mend the interested reader to look into one of
the many well-explained websites describing
the creative commons licenses.
To summarize: You don’t pay to read any pa-
pers on POL, you don’t pay to publish on POL
and all authors retain the copyright of their
paper from now on. All related fees are cov-
ered by IFAC (and not by the IFAC events!),
making this the perfect deal for our commu-
nity, not to say ‘the best deal ever’ (as some
self-proclaimed deal-makers would put it).
So, don’t hesitate, the next IFAC ‘freebie’ is
just around the corner: Submission deadline
of contributions for the IFAC World Congress
is 31 October 2019!
With best regards from Stuttgart
Frank Allgöwer