Maintaining Quality, Enhancing Distribution by Open Access
Dennis W. Hess, Robert F. Savinell · Journal of The Electrochemical Society · 2014
For more than 110 years, the raison d’etre of The Electrochemical Society has been the broad and effective dissemination of technical and scientific information through technical meetings and publications. Specifically, archival publications make available, to current and future generations, peer-reviewed advances in scientific and engineering fields within the scope of ECS. Many of these entities can benefit greatly from this content via online publication. Our intent is to provide the best quality and widest dissemination possible to our members and to the scientific/technological community at large. The radical changes in scholarly publishing venues made possible by the Internet, and recent advances in electronics technology, greatly expand the potential for wide availability of the content covered by ECS. Of immediate interest in this regard is the unrestricted access to scholarly work via the Internet referred to as Open Access (OA). Because professional societies serve authors, readers, and developers of scientific and technological content, we feel that ECS and other societies should lead the way in the establishment of low cost, effective, and efficient OA approaches. Toward that end, ECS has embarked on a quest to ultimately offer full OA (no charge to authors, readers, libraries, or institutional members) for our four peerreviewed journals. The first step toward this goal is the implementation of our Author Choice Open Access program, which began early this year. As the name implies, authors now have the choice of having their accepted papers published as Open Access articles. Because this intent represents a new paradigm for ECS, we must determine the appropriate business model to realize our goal. Details of the various possibilities are described in other articles in the spring 2014 issue of Interface (http://www.electrochem.org/dl/ interface/spr/spr14/if_spr14.htm) and on the ECS website (http:// www.electrochem.org/oa/).