IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2013 - 8

ICRA 2017 that will be held in Singapore, which is also in the Asia and
Pacific region. The normal rotation
among the regions will follow for ICRA
2019 and after, so that ICRA and IROS
offerings in the same region are separated by approximately 18 months.
Open Access
Over the past few years, there has been
increasing movement to provide open
access through the Internet to articles in
peer-reviewed scholarly journals. This
has been motivated by government
funding agencies who want to see a wide
dissemination of the research results that
have been produced for projects funded
by their agency. Authors have also
wanted unrestricted open access so that
their articles could potentially attract a
much wider readership.
With the push to open access, however, the considerable cost to prepare
articles for publication has not always
been accounted for. This includes the

cost of maintaining the high standards
of quality through a rigorous review
process. Professional associations like
the IEEE and RAS are especially aware
of this requirement, because it encourages the highest quality of work.
To respond to the needs of its
authors, the IEEE has recently moved
to expand the options that it provides
for open access to its more than 125
journals in the IEEE Xplore digital
library. There are three basic options.
The first uses a hybrid open access
model with the author choosing at submission between traditional and open
access options. Upon acceptance with
the open access option, the author pays
a fee to enable unrestricted public
access to the article in IEEE Xplore.
With the traditional option, the article
is available on a subscription basis to
members and libraries.
In the second option for open access,
there are several new fully open access
topical journals such as IEEE Journal on

Six-Axis
Force/Torque Sensors

Standard Features: Six Axes of Force/Torque Sensing (Fx
Fy Fz Tx Ty Tz) * High Overload Protection * Interfaces for
Ethernet, PCI, USB, EtherNet/IP, CAN, and more * Sizes
from 17 mm - 330 mm diameter * Custom sensors available
Applications: Product Testing * Biomedical Research *
Finger Force Research * Rehabilitation Research * Robotics

www.ati-ia.com/ras

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

March 2013

Translational Engineering in Health and
Medicine. These are offered in electronic
form only, and they typically have a
rapid review cycle. The final option is a
multidisciplinary open access mega
journal, IEEE Access, which spans all of
the IEEE fields of interest. More information on these options can be found at
www.ieee.org/open-access.
For our three major RAS publications-IEEE Transactions on Robotics,
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, and IEEE Robotics
and Automation Magazine (RAM)-all
have adopted the hybrid open access
model. In fact, RAM is the only magazine within the IEEE to be approved for
open access.
For the hybrid open access model,
the author can choose to provide unrestricted public access to the article for an
author's fee or to have it available only to
subscribers (as it is at present). In either
case, the review process is exactly the
same, and the open access option is not
known to the reviewers. Upon acceptance of the paper, the author's fee of
US$1,750 will be requested in the
open access case. Note that this is a
substantially discounted fee from that
which was originally charged.
RAS is pleased to offer open
access to its authors so they have
more options available as they
respond to their employer, government, and funding agency requirements. RAS is able to offer this
option while maintaining the highest
standards of editorial quality and a
fair-minded rigorous review process.
If there are other open access
options that you would like to see,
please feel free to contact Vice President for Publications Alessandro De
Luca. Our recent Society survey did
indicate a growing interest in new
electronic-only offerings from RAS,
which would be open access and have
a faster review cycle, so we are evaluating such possible offerings. Thanks
for your continuing interest in our
publications, which have some of the
highest impact factors in the field.
Your feedback will help us to offer
you the best publication products as
we go forward together.

http://www.ieee.org/open-access http://www.ati-ia.com/ras

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2013