Effective Web Dissemination of Construction IT Research Publications

Scientific publishing has undergone a number of paradigm shifts triggered by new technologies. The last technology leap, the world wide web, has made possible a new form of publishing called open access (OA), which places scholarly publications freely accessible for anyone on the web, using voluntary work and a variety of revenue models (other than subscription income) for sustaining the publishing activities. OA is eminently in line with the basic openness principles of science and the status of scientific results as a public good, and it is also cost effective for society as a whole. Despite its evident advantages OA publishing is still only in its infancy and has had a big impact in only a few scientific communities, such as high-energy physics. In civil engineering, and in construction information technology (IT) research, OA is still a relatively rare form of publishing. In the European Commission funded SciX project a generic system for scientific OA publishing was developed and was tested for running a number of services intended for the IT in architecture and civil engineering research communities. In addition the barriers for more widespread use of OA were studied. In this paper the different forms of open access: the peer-reviewed electronic journal, subject-specific, and institutional repositories, are first presented. After that the paper presents some of the results from the theoretical part of the project. Finally the paper briefly describes the architecture of the publishing platform and illustrates it with some of the pilots from the construction IT domain. It concludes with a discussion of the experiences obtained in setting up the pilots.