Launching the Open Journal of Circuits and Systems CAS Society News By Gabriele Manganaro, Mohamad Sawan, and Yong Lian

1. 4 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE FOURTH QUARTER 2019
CAS Society News
Launching the Open Journal
of Circuits and Systems
I
n June, the IEEE announced the launch of 14 Open Ac-
cess (OA) Journals, hence adding onto the other OA
journals that some of the other IEEE societies have
been successfully offering over the past few years. The
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) is among
these 14. CASS has just started up one of these journals,
called “The IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems
(OJ-CAS).” This is a new gold fully open access journal,
spanning the full scope of the IEEE CASS’s field of inter-
est, and that, as in the other cases, will only publish on-
line articles.
OJ-CAS is ready to accept manuscript submissions
and prospective authors will find relevant information
and instructions on the CASS website, or simply going
directly to the OJ-CAS webpage: http://www.ieee-cas
.org/publications/open-journal-circuits-and-systems. Ar-
ticles will be published in the form of regular papers and
short papers, in 10–12 pages and 5–6 pages in length in
the two-column IEEE Transactions format respectively.
To be considered for publication, all submitted manu-
scripts will be peer-reviewed with the very same proce-
dures, scientific and ethical rigor of our existing CASS
transactions. Such standards of scientific quality will
be upheld by OJ-CAS’s Editorial Board, composed of a
truly outstanding team of accomplished experts in CAS
fields, most of them have previously served in the same
or analogous role, and all of them are equally committed
to living up to the same output and service to readers
that distinguishes our journals. We are grateful for their
volunteering service and personal commitment. The list
of members of Editorial Board can be found at the above
referred OJ-CAS webpage.
Just like all the other IEEE Open Access journals and
being, indeed, accessible without restrictions, OJ-CAS
will publish on IEEE Xplore, protected under the Cre-
ative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), with-
out requiring IEEE membership from readers or journal
subscription fees. That is in contrast with most of the
­traditional IEEE journals, requiring readers for a sub-
scription or a direct payment per paper to gain access
to the articles.
Much has been written about the differences be-
tween OA journals and subscription publications and
we defer the reader to much more in-depth coverage of
this matter, widely available on multiple sources. But a
few important points deserve attention.
First off, OJ-CAS will be fully compliant with funder
mandates, including Plan S, an international consortium
of research funders, requiring, from 2021, that scientific
publications resulting from research funded by public
grants must be published in compliant Open Access
journals or platforms. Similar initiatives are ongoing or
in the making and, as such, CASS owes it to our commu-
nity to be in front of that and OJ-CAS allows authors to
meet this critical requirement.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2019.2945431
Date of current version: 19 November 2019
By Gabriele Manganaro, Mohamad Sawan, and Yong Lian

2. FOURTH QUARTER 2019 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 5
Additionally, and no less important, the unrestricted
access of articles published on OJ-CAS will mean that
the reader audience will be intrinsically much broader
than any of the subscription-based journals. It is not
surprising that open access papers inherently tend to
have a greater measured scientific impact than those
that are not, everything else being equal.
Along these lines, some interesting consideration
should be made. The CAS Society distinguishes itself
from some other IEEE societies for an important aspect.
That is the strong multidisciplinary nature of many of the
CAS topics. The straightforward accessibility of OJ-CAS
papers, also to non-IEEE members, goes hand in hand
with CASS’s multidisciplinarity. As an example, think of
the mutual impact to advances in biotechnologies, or in
neurosciences, when non-IEEE researchers in academia
or industry will be able to gain access to what our Bio-
medical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) community, or
our neuro-morphic technologists, will publish next on
OJ-CAS. Or think of the higher cross-pollination that can
be ignited between our published research in nonlinear
circuits and systems on OJ-CAS and non-IEEE journals
such as Nature, or Acta Mathematica, if only the barri-
ers due to subscriptions are lowered. Please note that
this is not a blue-sky aspiration. Academic libraries and
corporate subscriptions have finite budgets everywhere
and will tend to spend it on fewer specialized subscrip-
tions, leaving all other readers to fetch high-quality re-
search publications on open access journals. This is the
present and it is poised to extend.
The cost aspect brings us to the last important point.
Namely that, unlike traditional subscription-based jour-
nals, the costs of publishing on an OA journal, including
OJ-CAS, fall on the authors. Provided that, after peer-
review, a manuscript has been accepted for publication,
the authors are nominally responsible for the payment
of an article-processing charge (APC) and that is not
negligible (please visit OJ-CAS’s website). However,
APCs are often financed by an author’s institution or
the funder supporting their research. Which means
that, depending on the individual circumstances, the
net costs to the authors, after the institution/funder’s
contributions are accounted, will vary from similar
(possibly less) dollar amounts as to a regular transac-
tions paper, too much more if funding is unavailable.
The financial agencies are in process to change the
granting budgets to include the due APCs. Also, to come
forward to you, discounts to authors that are CAS mem-
bers are offered. It should also be noted that a paper’s
APC is only one among the many other components of
a research budget. As engineers, it is in our nature to
evaluate trade-offs and determine where to invest or
to pivot for the max desirable outcome. With all that
said, prospective authors should carefully evaluate
their specific situation before embarking into an article
submission, avoiding rather problematic circumstanc-
es with insufficient funding, should the peer-review re-
sult into a positive outcome. After all, an open-access
published paper has a higher potential to bring more
benefit (readers and citations) to authors than regular
published same paper.
In conclusion, we are truly excited about the intro-
duction of the IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Sys-
tems. This puts CASS in a very strong position with the
rapid proliferation of open access peer-reviewed publi-
cations, serving our members, opening the doors to a
far broader audience and facilitating further knowledge
synergy by lowering some access barriers.
Wewant
tohear
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