ISSMGE Releases Manual Discussing its Open Access Policy

The ISSMGE has made a commitment to making their journal and conference papers free to the geoengineering community, including over 10,000 papers dating back to 1936! I am posting the entire letter from my friend and colleague, Professor Dimitrios Zeccos from the University of Michigan and the founder and managing director of Geoenginer.org.  He also a committee chair for ISSMGE.

Dear colleagues,

I thought the following news may be of great interest to our community:

The President of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE), Roger Frank, recently announced ISSMGE’s open access policy, a policy by which ISSMGE makes a commitment “on open access for all publications under its auspices.” Among other commitments, ISSMGE intends to use its cyber-infrastructure to promote the open-access of quality technical material. More here: http://www.issmge.org/news/issmge-releases-its-new-conference-and-publication-manual-including-its-open-access-policy

The ISSMGE website currently hosts an online library that includes papers from several conferences that have been published under its auspices. The library can be found here: http://www.issmge.org/publications/online-library

This month, ISSMGE proudly announced that all papers published in all eighteen International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ICSMGE) starting with the 1st ISSMFE in 1936 conference in Harvard have been digitized, are archived, and are available for download online for  free through the library. The most recent one that is archived is the 18th ICSMGE Paris conference in 2013 and very soon we hope to archive the papers of the 19th ICSMGE papers that is held next week in Seoul. More information on the announcement here: http://www.issmge.org/news/issmge-announces-the-open-access-to-all-papers-published-in-the-international-conference-on-soil-mechanics-and-foundation-geotechnical-engineering-published-since-1936

You can use the search function of the database and search with author names such as Terzaghi, Casagrande, or Peck (among many others) and download immediately 20-30 papers published in this series of conferences. In total the library includes nearly 10,000 papers and hundreds of thousands of pages (including reports, introductory material, etc.), all readily available to the visitors of the library.

This initiative was undertaken under the leadership of ISSMGE President Roger Frank and I encourage you to support it through your own professional activities. Many individuals, technical committees, and member societies have been involved in the progress made to date,  and we hope many more will continue to do so. If you are involved in the organization of a conference under the auspices of ISSMGE, please contact us and we will also gladly support the indexing of all your papers in the database. We have also found that there are many different alternative schemes by which publishers are willing to allow open access of papers that they publish. We, the professionals, just need to push in that direction.

On  behalf of the ISSMGE,

Dimitrios Zekkos

Chair of Innovation and Development Committee of ISSMGE

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Dimitrios Zekkos, Ph.D., P.E.

http://www.dimitrioszekkos.org

 

Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Managing Director, Geoengineer.org, The International Information Center for Geoprofessionals http://www.geoengineer.org

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