Open Access Options

An increasing number of research institutes (University of California, UCL, TU Delft), research councils (NWO, EU H2020, NSF), and research data providers (see GitHub's new Terms of Service) mandate open access.

The proceedings of all ESEC/FSE 2017 tracks and workshops will be published through ACM SIGSOFT. This means that the following open access publication options are available.

Open Access in the Digital Library

Authors who wish to obtain perpetual open access through the ACM Digital Library, can use ACM's author-pays option. The costs are $700 for a paper with at least one ACM member as author.

Open Access through Self-Archiving

Alternatively, authors can choose ACM's regular copyright transfer (or licensing) agreements, which are free of charge for authors. Under these agreements, the paper will be visible in the Digital Library for subscribers only.

Authors choosing one of these options have the right to post peer-reviewed pre-print versions of their papers to personal websites and institutional repositories. Such self-archiving can be used to meet the mandates of (green) open access.

ESEC/FSE encourages all authors to self-archive their paper. ESEC/FSE will collect links to these self-archived versions, and will integrate those links with the on line program at the ESEC/FSE 2017 web site.

Note that links to home pages tend to break after a while. We therefore strongly suggest to use institutional or subject repositories (such as ArXiv) to store pre-prints.

Since ESEC/FSE adopts double blind reviewing, publishing a preprint with author names will make it easy for reviewers to identify the authors with a simple web search. ESEC/FSE 2017 reviewers are instructed not to try to disclose author identities themselves. Nevertheless, we suggest authors to publish their preprints after the reviewing phase is over, if possible.

Additional Open Options

Besides open access, ACM SIGSOFT has the following additional ways in which content is made available openly:

  • The full ESEC/FSE 2017 proceedings will be freely available through Digital Library during the month in which the conference takes place, starting two weeks before the conference.

  • The full ESEC/FSE 2017 proceedings will be freely available via the ACM SIGSOFT Open TOC page during a period of one year.

Note, however, that these are limited in duration (a month or a year), and hence do not meet common open access mandates (which require perpetual availability).