Launching the IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems
In June, the IEEE announced the launch of 14 Open Access (OA) Journals, hence adding onto the other OA journals that some of the other IEEE societies have been successfully offering over the past few years. The IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) is among these 14. CASS has just started up one of these journals, called “The IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems (OJ-CAS)”. This is a new gold fully open access journal, spanning the full scope of the IEEE CASS’s field of interest, and that, as in the other cases, will only publish on-line articles.
OJ-CAS is ready to accept manuscript submissions and prospective authors will find relevant information and instructions on the CASS website, or simply going directly to the OJ-CAS webpage: http://www.ieee-cas.org/publications/open-journal-circuits-and-systems. Articles will be published in the form of regular papers and short papers, in 10-12 pages and 5-6 pages in length in the two-column IEEE Transactions format respectively.
To be considered for publication, all submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed with the very same procedures, scientific and ethical rigor of our existing CASS transactions. Such standards of scientific quality will be upheld by OJ-CAS’s Editorial Board, composed of a truly outstanding team of accomplished experts in CAS fields, most of them have previously served in the same or analogous role, and all of them are equally committed to living up to the same output and service to readers that distinguishes our journals. We are grateful for their volunteering service and personal commitment. The list of members of Editorial Board can be found at the above referred OJ-CAS webpage.
Just like all the other IEEE Open Access journals and being, indeed, accessible without restrictions, OJCAS will publish on IEEE Xplore, protected under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), without requiring IEEE membership from readers or journal subscription fees. That is in contrast with most of the traditional IEEE journals, requiring readers for a subscription or a direct payment per paper to gain access to the articles.
Much has been written about the differences between OA journals and subscription publications and we defer the reader to much more in-depth coverage of this matter, widely available on multiple sources. But a few important points deserve attention.
First off, OJ-CAS will be fully compliant with funder mandates, including Plan S, an international consortium of research funders, requiring, from 2021, that scientific publications resulting from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. Similar initiatives are ongoing or in the making and, as such, CASS owes it to our community to be in front of that and OJ-CAS allows authors to meet this critical requirement.
Additionally, and no less important, the unrestricted access of articles published on OJ-CAS will mean that the reader audience will be intrinsically much broader than any of the subscription-based journals. It is not surprising that open access papers inherently tend to have a greater measured scientific impact than those that are not, everything else being equal.
Along these lines, some interesting consideration should be made. The CAS Society distinguishes itself from some other IEEE societies for an important aspect. That is the strong multidisciplinary nature of any of the CAS topics. The straightforward accessibility of OJ-CAS papers, also to non-IEEE members, goes hand in hand with CASS’s multidisciplinarity. As an example, think of the mutual impact to advances in biotechnologies, or in neurosciences, when non-IEEE researchers in academia or industry will be able to gain access to what our Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) community, or our neuro-morphic technologists, will publish next on OJ-CAS. Or think of the higher cross-pollination that can be ignited between our published research in nonlinear circuits and systems on OJ-CAS and non-IEEE journals such as Nature, or Acta Mathematica, if only the barriers due to subscriptions are lowered. Please note that this is not a blue-sky aspiration. Academic libraries and corporate subscriptions have finite budgets everywhere and will tend to spend it on fewer specialized subscriptions, leaving all other readers to fetch high-quality research publications on open access journals. This is the present and it is poised to extend.
The cost aspect brings us to the last important point. Namely that, unlike traditional subscription-based journals, the costs of publishing on an OA journal, including OJ-CAS, fall on the authors. Provided that, after peer-review, a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the authors are nominally responsible for the payment of an article-processing charge (APC) and that is not negligible (please visit OJ-CAS’s website). However, APCs are often financed by an author's institution or the funder supporting their research. Which means that, depending on the individual circumstances, the net costs to the authors, after the institution/funder’s contributions are accounted, will vary from similar (possibly less) dollar amounts as to a regular transactions paper, too much more if funding is unavailable. The financial agencies are in process to change the granting budgets to include the due APCs. Also, to come forward to you, discounts to authors that are CAS members are offered. It should also be noted that a paper’s APC is only one among the many other components of a research budget. As engineers, it is in our nature to evaluate trade-offs and determine where to invest or to pivot for the max desirable outcome. With all that said, prospective authors should carefully evaluate their specific situation before embarking into an article submission, avoiding rather problematic circumstances with insufficient funding, should the peer-review result into a positive outcome. After all, an open-access published paper has a higher potential to bring more benefit (readers and citations) to authors than regular published same paper.
In conclusion, we are truly excited about the introduction of the IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems. This puts CASS in a very strong position with the rapid proliferation of open access peerreviewed publications, serving our members, opening the doors to a far broader audience and facilitating further knowledge synergy by lowering some access barriers.
Gabriele Manganaro, Mohamad Sawan, and Yong Lian
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Latest Tables of Contents of CAS Sponsored Journals
The latest issues of our CAS sponored journals have been published and the tables of contents can be accessed through the following links:
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
- IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems
- IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine
- IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems
- IEEE Design and Test Magazi