Open Access and Information Retrieval

Discussion Panel at ECIR 2021

Most publications in Information Retrieval are available via subscriptions. These include the ECIR proceedings published by Springer on behalf of the BCS, and the SIGIR proceedings published by the ACM. There is a trend to gradually change this situation to open access publishing. At Springer this is done by giving authors the choice to pay for open access, and by international agreements like Springer’s Compact. At ACM, this is also done by giving authors the choice to pay, and by agreements between ACM and individual institutions.

The panel discusses the effects of this situation on inclusiveness of the field, in particular on how we can support researchers from low income countries. We discuss the experience of researchers with open access in Africa; We discuss business models for open access, in particular how to run a sustainable open access conference like ECIR; We discuss open access plans at Springer, the BCS and the ACM; Finally, we discuss experience with open access publishing in related fields, in particular in Computational Linguistics. The discussion panel consists of:

  • Hassina Aliane | CERIST, Algeria
  • Ralf Gerstner | Springer Heidelberg, Germany
  • Min-Yen Kan | National University of Singapore
  • Haiming Liu | University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom
  • Joao Magalhaes | Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
  • Hussein Suleman | University of Cape Town, South Africa
  • Min Zhang | Tsinghua University, China

The panel takes place online on Wednesday 31 March at 9:00 UTC+2. More information at: https://www.ecir2021.eu/open-access-and-ir-panel/