Peter Brett - Blog - The IEEE does not do Open Access

"Summary: By the commonly-accepted definition of the term, IEEE journals offer real Open Access (OA) publishing options if and only if your funding body mandates Open Access publishing. Introduction This time last year, I posted a survey of journals and Open Access in the field of remote sensing. As I have been being encouraged by my department to publish in the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (where I currently have a paper going through its second review stage), over the last year I have been trying to determine what, exactly, IEEE Publishing means when it claims to offer 'open access' ... The IEEE claim to offer three options for OA publishing: hybrid journals, a new IEEE Access mega journal, and 'fully OA' journals. One the bright side, the IEEE seems to treat all three the same way in terms of the general process, fees, etc., so I will not discuss the differences between them here.  Some aspects of the IEEE's approach to OA are quite clearly explained in the FAQ, and provide an interesting contrast with the the policies at unambiguously fully OA journals such as PLOS ONE. The IEEE charge an APC of $1750 per paper; PLOS ONE charges $1350. The IEEE requires copyright assignment; PLOS ONE allows authors to retain their copyrights. The IEEE's licencing of APC-paid OA articles is almost impossible to determine; PLOS ONE is unambiguously CC-BY.  But what is that licence? Exactly how open are 'OA' articles published in IEEE journals? With reference to RCUK's definition of OA, the first point is clearly satisfied — users can read the paper free of charge on IEEE Xplore. Trying to pin the second point down has been quite a quest.  The IEEE allows authors to distribute a 'post-print' (the accepted version of a manuscript, i.e. their final draft of a paper after peer review but before it goes through the IEEE's editing process and is prepared for printing). This can be placed on a personal website and/or uploaded to an institutional repository. At the University of Surrey, for example, papers can be placed on Surrey Research Insight. Unfortunately, this 'Green OA' approach does not satisfy the RCUK's requirement to enable re-use; the licence is very explicit. As per the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual, the IEEE requires the following notice to be displayed with post-prints: '© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.'  With Green OA clearly ruled out as an option, what about when an APC is paid (also known as 'Gold OA')? This is option preferred by RCUK. I initially tried to figure this out by e-mailing the IEEE intellectual property rights office, but I never received any reply. I also e-mailed the editor of TGRS, and this also elicited no response.  My last and most recent attempt involved e-mailing IEEE Xplore tech support, asking where on the website I could find licence information for a specific recent 'open access' TGRS paper that I had downloaded ... This then got passed on to the IEEE's 'open access team' who then in turn attempted to pass it on to the IPR office to be ignored again. However, I now had an e-mail address to e-mail with a more specific request ... Finally, I received a moderately-illuminating reply ... From this e-mail, it is clear that paying an APC for the IEEE's 'open access' publishing options normally provides very little real benefit over simply self-archiving the accepted version of the manuscript. Either way, tools such as Google Scholar will allow readers to find a free-to-read version of the paper; if you are using the IEEE journals LaTeX templates, this version will be almost indistinguishable from the final version as distributed in printed form.  Furthermore, the IEEE APC-supported 'open access' publishing option is not Open Access, by either the BOAI or RCUK definitions of the term, because re-use is forbidden. Gold OA is clearly also not normally an option when publishing with the IEEE.  The only exception to this is if you have a mandate from a funding body that says your publi