SEMANTiCS takes this opportunity to declare its position on scientific publishing and the conference's future publishing policy.
SEMANTiCS is dedicated to an open science policy founded on three pillars: (i) open access, (ii) open reviews, and (iii) open formats. We are not there yet, but we are working hard to manage this transition and aim to implement our full open science policy by the year 2019.
For 2018, we took a first, important step towards open access by signing an open access contract with a reputable publisher. Authors will keep full copyright over their published papers and the proceedings will be available free of charge to anybody. Nevertheless, SEMANTiCS is constantly investigating alternative open access publishing opportunities in cooperation with strategic partners to bring scientific publishing to its full potential.
Building on the experiences and learnings from other open review initiatives, SEMANTiCS plans to implement an open review policy by 2019. Reviewers will get the possibility to optionally contribute to our open review process by making their reviews accessible to the public and contribute to a strong scientific discourse.
In addition to well-established print-centric formats, SEMANTiCS is planning to also publish its proceedings in an open, state-of-the-art, web-centric format to encourage the community to adopt open publishing practices and to improve the accessibility to corresponding research results. We already started a first open format pilot in 2017 with the Poster & Demos proceedings (see http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2044/), where all papers were officially published as HTML/RASH. Having received a warm welcome from the community, we are planning to extend our open format policy to all contributions to SEMANTiCS by 2019 at the latest.
SEMANTiCS is dedicated to open science and we encourage and appreciate any feedback.
We hope for your support to bring open science to reality.
Your sincerely,
The SEMANTiCS Advisory Board
The 2018 Organization Committee
