How Open Science Promotes Collaboration and Accessibility

February 27, 2020

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting new tools and resources offered by IEEE in support of the Open Science movement.

Engineers and technologists are making new discoveries and building the next generation of technology everyday. Through their research articles, they share valuable insights, information and data about their most recent findings. The Open Science movement enables wider access to research and authors are able to disseminate their findings to the technical community and spark innovations more than ever before.

The overall goal of Open Science is to make research broadly accessible and transparent, through expanded publishing options. One driver is open access publishing, which helps authors gain exposure for their groundbreaking research and application-oriented articles.

IEEE embraces these changes within scientific publishing and provides a series of tools to its communities of authors and researchers to help accelerate and enhance the information dissemination and publishing processes.

Another key value is the speed of delivering findings to the scientific and technical communities. Regardless of where an article will ultimately be published, the vital process of selection and thorough peer review takes time, no matter how successfully a publisher streamlines the process (in some IEEE journals, for example, the submission-to-publication workflow to just over six weeks). In the meantime, researchers increasingly want to establish prior art (credit for discoveries) and obtain feedback from the community prior to publication and sometimes prior to submission for publication.

With this need in mind, IEEE recently launched a preprint server, TechRxiv (pronounced “tech archive”), which provides researchers across a broad range of fields the opportunity to share early versions of their work and respond to comments and recommendations for improvement, prior to formal peer review and publication. Following proper guidelines, papers can still be submitted formally to a conference or journal after posting to this online platform, as well.

Preprint servers benefit the scientific and technical community by allowing early visibility to results, establishing a channel for obtaining early feedback that can help enhance quality prior to publication and they establish prior art, heightening the visibility (and potentially citations) of the findings prior to publication.

Created as a hub for the engineering, computer science and technology communities,TechRxiv aims to increase the accessibility of scientific findings, enhance collaboration among researchers, improve research and help build the future of scholarly communication. TechRxiv was created and is overseen by an advisory board of subject matter experts across a wide range of fields from various universities and research organizations to ensure the platform would meet the needs of the technical community.

Researchers working in the fields of electrical engineering, computer science and related technologies are encouraged to submit their unpublished research to www.techrxiv.org to gain expert insights before formally submitting their paper for publication, and perhaps make valuable new connections with colleagues in their field of interest.