IACR Business Meeting @ Crypto 2011

"The main (possibly contentious) issue [at the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) business meeting] was the move towards Open Access publication for our conferences. This is starting to become more and more important, as funding bodies are now starting to insist that all govenment sponsored research is made available in one of a number of Open Access methods. In some sense this is only correct, since we do research and it will only become impactful if people are able to read it....The IACR board put forward a plan to move to full Open Access for conference proceedings, i.e. the publication is available immediately world wide for all people. The IACR is looking at a number of offers from both Springer-Verlag and other organizations (e.g. Usenix). The main proposal is to use a variant in which the cost is born by the IACR and not the authors. A vote was taken which was overwhelming in its support for moving to Open Access, indeed no-one was against...."