Technical professional organisation IEEE, US, is seeking to increase the impact that scientific research can have on technology innovation with its first online, open-access (OA) 'mega journal' – a journal that covers a range of disciplines instead of a single-topic focus.
IEEE Access provides free online access to applications-oriented articles, meaning they explain how research can be applied in technology today. The journal is designed to appeal as much to industry as it does to academia while using a faster peer-reviewed process that maintains high article quality.
IEEE Access follows a binary peer-review process, which means submitted articles undergo the same rigorous editorial review, but the process ends with the article being accepted or rejected as opposed to undergoing multiple rounds of revisions. This results in faster publication while protecting the integrity and quality of the scholarly research.
IEEE Access is part of a growing portfolio of open-access publishing options offered by IEEE. IEEE's 425,000 members are increasingly asking for more OA options, as are organisations funding research such as the US government and Research Councils UK (RCUK). Under the model, authors pay $1,750 for each accepted IEEE Access article, and the public can then access the published article for free.
Besides IEEE Access, IEEE also offers four fully open-access, single-topic journals. Additionally, more than 100 of IEEE's existing subscription-based journals now offer an open-access option, allowing authors to choose to either publish in the traditional manner – with access provided only to paid subscribers – or pay a processing fee to publish open access and make the articles openly available to all online. For authors, these journals retain the benefit of publishing with established Impact Factors, a measure of average citations per article in a journal.
According to a 2011 report from ISI Journal Citation Reports, 17 of the top 20 most-cited journals in electrical and electronic engineering are already published by IEEE. More than 80 percent of downloads from IEEE's Xplore Digital Library database of articles come from outside the United States. The organisation expects the addition of a broad, open-access mega journal to lead to even more global sharing of information that can help bring new products and innovations to market faster.
