Informationsplattform Open Access: Engineering

Engineering

In this section we have compiled information on Open Access (OA) in the field of engineering. 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 engineering

Compared to other scientific disciplines, the field of engineering is a special case. This has to do with the fact that research in this discipline is mostly industry-orientated which leads to a different publishing attitude on the part of engineers. Very scientifically-orientated engineering papers are generally published in the scholarly journals of other disciplines, for example physics or chemistry. However, most engineering articles are more practically than scientifically orientated and are published in journals which are financed through advertising. For this reason, it would appear, at the moment, that the best way to promote Open Access in the field of engineering is to propagate the green road of OA self-archiving in parallel with, or after publication in, a toll-based journal.

Another reason why OA journals play such a minor role in engineering is that this field tends to be nationally orientated. The internationalisation of the scientific sector is often cited as an argument in favour of OA. However, this is not an argument that convinces engineers because, due for example to standardisation in the machine tool sector, the products they develop are mostly produced for the domestic market only. An international readership is hardly likely to be interested in research and development in this area. This is also evident from the list of engineering journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Many of these periodicals are written in the national language of the country in question and only in a few subfields of engineering are the majority of journals in English. To a large extent, the engineers we interviewed were not familiar with the journals listed in the DOAJ. For this reason we are not in a position to comment on the quality of these periodicals. Therefore, we cannot provide a list of high-quality OA engineering journals in this section.

Subject-based repositories do not play the same role in the the field of engineering as they do in disciplines such as physics.

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft - the leading institution for applied research in Europe - wishes to increase the quota of freely accessible publications. The publications of its members are available free of charge from its institutional repository Fraunhofer-ePrints. The database of the FORS research project of the Fraunhofer Information Centre for Regional Planning and Building Construction (IRB)  is freely accessible on the Internet.

References

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Open Access journals

  • High-quality facsimiles of the complete volumes of the journals «Tec21» and «Tracés» of the Swiss Association of Engineers and Architects and of the volumes of the predecessor journals dating back to 1874 are openly accessible and searchable online under the title Baugedächtnis Schweiz Online (Memory of Construction in Switzerland Online). The collection comprises some 345,000 pages in all.
  • The journal DISP-Online is an inter-disciplinary scientific journal for regional development, urban planning and construction, landscape and environmental planning, landscape architecture, regional and environmental economy, and transport planning. Universities, public bodies and planning agencies can apply for a free subscription in exchange for a subscription to a publication of the applicant's organisation. Interested private individuals can access all articles (from 1996) and book reviews (from 2000) free of charge.
  • Professional Engineering Publishing, a subsidiary of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers has an extensive portfolio of mechanical engineering journals. Since July 2007 it has been offering its authors the fee-based option of having their published research made openly accessible.
  • The Logistics Journal is an international electronic journal on technical logistics (intralogistics). It is operated by the Scientific Society for Technical Logistics (WGTL). Articles are published in two categories:
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Subject-based repositories and databases

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