Making steady progress

1 Open Access

One question that comes to my desk every year is the question of Open Access. Would it be helpful for the visibility of AOT publications to make all papers available for free reading? It would certainly drive usage, we have seen this with free articles in AOT and with other Open Access journals. But it requires payments by the authors to cover regular editorial costs. For AOT these article processing charges are currently set to 2000 Euro by our publishing partner De Gruyter.

Looking back at the past 2 years it is obvious that some academic authors have funds to cover these costs and use these funds to buy the Hybrid Open Access that De Gruyter offers. Their articles are not only free to read but are published with a full CC BY NC ND license. But until now, most authors from industry do not have regular funds for publication. And hence, AOT has to stay as a subscription-based journal.

2 A few words about editorial quality

Peer review (PR) is a cornerstone of editorial quality management. For those who are not familiar with this procedure: Every scientific paper that is submitted to AOT goes first to an editor. If the paper matches the scopes of the journal and if it is written in an appropriate language, the editor does a similarity check (to exclude plagiarism) and finally, starts the peer review process. For this process at least two independent experts are invited to deliver a detailed comment on different aspects of the paper. Usually, the author will not hear about who these experts are (single-blind PR). After both experts have concluded their comments an editor will make a decision and send the verdict to the corresponding author.

Just a few weeks ago, German journalists uncovered a number of predatory publishers who were not conducting serious peer review [1]. And the problem is huge: They discovered that more than 5000 German scientists have published in predatory journals in recent years. It should be noticed here that AOT follows a strict peer review process and adheres to best practice in scientific publishing.

3 Welcome to Associate Editor Allen Yi

The editorial team of AOT has been strengthened by the addition of Allen Yi. Allen is Professor for Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State University. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University in 1993. He subsequently joined Corning Precision Lens as a staff scientist. In 2002, Professor Yi joined Ohio State University.

His research activities have been in the general area of precision engineering with a focus on high volume optical fabrication, freeform and microoptics fabrication as well as micromachining processes for medical and biomedical device fabrication. Professor Yi’s current research interests include compression molding of glass optics and injection molding of high precision polymer optics.

He has acted as author, reviewer and as guest editor for AOT and now he is very warmly welcomed as Associate Editor to our editorial team.

Andreas Thoß

Publisher

Advanced Optical Technologies