Informationsplattform Open Access: Computer Science

Computer Science

In this section we have compiled some information on Open Access (OA) in the field of computer science. If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to send us an E-mail.

 

General information on Open Access in the field of computer science

Open Access is widely practised in the field of computer science. This is due mainly to the fact that computer scientists take the use of the Internet as an information and communication medium for granted. However, only a few more recent OA journals such as the Theory of Computing or the Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting (a DiPP periodical ) have explicitly committed themselves to the OA movement and to the principles articulated in such documents as the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. Relatively few computer science position papers, declarations, essays and overviews on OA are on record (one German example is a press release issued by the International Conference and Research Centre for Computer Science at Dagstuhl Castle). However, it is not without reason that conference papers in computer science formed the analytical basis of a widely-noted study by Steven Lawrence investigating the impact of the online accessibility of publications on citation frequency which appeared in Nature in 2001.

In a position paper on copyright, the German Informatics Society (GI), a signatory of the Berlin Declaration, called on its members "to publish their work in accordance with the Open Access principle, to contribute to the assurance of the quality of OA publications and to support all efforts to secure electronically-available knowledge for future generations". The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) sponsors the Computing Research Repository which is part of the preprint repository arXiv.org. However, as a publisher of leading computer science journals, it seems to have taken a more conservative and wait-and-see approach to OA publishing up to now.

The IEEE Computer Society – with nearly 85,000 members one of the world's leading organisations of computing professionals – publishes many of the top computer science journals. IEEE is a so-called green publisher and it permits its authors to self-archive a preprint of their articles under certain conditions. The Society's Digital Library provides free access to abstracts.

Computer science is one of the pioneers in the area of OA journals. Five of the OA computer science journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) were launched between 1989 and1993. The total number of computer science journals in the DOAJ is 128, which far exceeds that of physics (61) and chemistry (78) (as of September 2008). The Electronic Journals Library (EZB), whose selection criteria are less strict than those of the DOAJ, currently classifies 349 computer science titles as OA (as of September 2008). The number of new journals in this field has grown considerably. Almost half of the computer science journals in the DOAJ (56 titles) were launched after 2004. At least six of the computer science journals in the directory are covered by the Science Citation Index and four of those already have an Impact Factor.

The number of publications in Computer Science(s) or Informatics accessible in repositories with OAI interfaces around the world is approximately 220,000 (source: OAIster Search). The figure for preprints and postprints stored in central, subject-based repositories is considerably lower and lies in the region of 30,000.

However, these figures do not reflect the full range of OA computer science publications because conference papers play a very important role in this field. In fact, with a rejection rate of up to 90%, they are often more prestigious than journal articles. Working on the basis of the 120,000 conference articles which Lawrence (see above) used as the analytical basis of his study, the number of freely accessible computer science conference papers is probably in the four-figure range. Freely-accessible conference papers are not usually found in repositories but rather are scattered across the Web.

In addition to the aforementioned numerical data, the potential of the Internet for the OA publication and dissemination of research results can be illustrated with concrete examples: An advanced exact-phrase search of the entire scientific web for the specialised concept Turing computability using the scientific search engine SCIRUS yielded 1,539 results. Most of those were not in institutional or subject-based repositories but on institute servers. Sixty-two publications were found using the search engine OAIster which specialises in repositories.

In addition to OA publications, there are a number of freely-accessible computer science databases and search engines.

The Encyclopedia of Business Informatics has been freely accessible online since October 2008. Realised collaboratively by German, Austrian and Swiss universities, the project's main focus is on topics such as information and science management, software development, business information systems, information technology, professional education and research.

The goal of the OA movement is open access under fair conditions to all information of relevance to scientific research. Outside the area of scientific publishing, the OA focus in computer science is on Open Source software. The use of the term Open Source to describe such free software is not confined to computing professionals. In addition to well-known examples such as Linux, MySQL, CDS/ISIS or Open Office, Open Source software includes a number of programmes specially designed for scientific applications. One organisation dedicated to the cataloguing and promotion of free software is the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Its goals include the dissemination and further development of the free-software licence GNU General Public License.

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Open Access journals

The following journals are sorted by year of foundation. The Journal Impact Factors are taken from the online edition of the Journal Citation Reports (Copyright 2008).

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Subject-based repositories and databases

Subject-based repositories

  • Computing Research Repository (CoRR):
    A repository for preprints which is part of the     arXiv.org preprint archive. CoRR's sponsors include the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Papers in CoRR are classified in two ways, by subject area (36 in all) and by using the 1988 ACM Computing Classification System. The repository contains some 20,000 preprints.
  • Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL):
    NCSTRL is a search service for and a distributed repository of computer science technical reports from universities and research organisations. Using a uniform interface and a uniform results display, technical reports from 22 leading universities and seven research organisations can be accessed selectively (via OAI interfaces).
  • The Digital Library of IEEE Computer Society features a large number of freely-accessible abstracts.

Open-Access-Databases and search engines

  • CiteSeer/IST:
    Digital library and search engine for computer science literature.
  • Computer Science Bibliography (DBLP):
    International computer science database maintained by Michael Ley at the University of Trier. Besides journal articles, DBLP contains a large number of conference papers. The total number of records exceeds one million. The bibliography can be browsed by journal, conference proceedings and links to relevant personal homepages.
  • The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies:
    A searchable collection containing the collection over two million references, mostly to journal articles, conference papers and technical reports. More than half of the references contain a link to an online version of the paper; abstracts are available for 800,000 papers.
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Member of the open-access.net Scientific Advisory Board from the field of computer science

 

Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Roediger - University of Bremen, spokesman for the German Informatics Society (GI) Intellectual Property working group.

 

Other board members

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