This week (23-29 October 2023)  is International Open Access Week 2023. The theme of this year's event is "Community over Commercialization" and its goal is to encourage "a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not." You can read more here. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, I like to think that LIPIcs has followed the theme of this year's open access week well since its foundation and has provided an affordable and high-quality open access publication outlet to conferences in computer science. 

Since October 2017, LIPIcs has published 195 volumes with a total of 8,261 articles and approximately 143,000 pages. The LIPIcs series has grown steadily from 25 published volumes (with approximately 1,100 articles) in 2017 to 36 published volumes (with roughly 1,450 articles) in 2022. However, there is still room for some growth and I encourage the steering committees of high-quality conferences in any field of computer science that do not publish their proceedings in open access form to ask their communities whether that's in their best interests and whether they'd prefer to switch to LIPIcs. 

In my, admittedly very biased, opinion, the editorial board of LIPIcs evaluates all applications to publish in the series carefully and maintains a dialogue with the conferences in the LIPIcs community, providing feedback as needed in order to try and contribute to the healthy developments of those events. Of course, the editorial board realises that each conference knows what is best for its community, but sometimes an external opinion can help to identify weaknesses that might be developing in the way a conference is run and that are best pointed out by an external body. In any event, the keyword is "dialogue" and we all benefit from an open exchange of opinions in all facets of our work and life. 

This coming October 31 will mark the end of my third and last two-year term as chair of the editorial board of LIPIcs. From November 1, Meena Mahajan will be the chair of that board. I wish Meena the best of luck for her new role, even though she doesn't need any luck. I have no doubt that, with the support of the editorial board, she will continue to foster community over commercialisation and increase the impact that LIPIcs has on the computer science community.  

If you are reading this blog post and your conference publishes its proceedings with LIPIcs, I'd be very grateful if you could post your opinions on LIPIcs and a testimonial with your experience of working with LIPIcs either as comments to this article or by sending me a piece of text that I can use as a guest post on this blog. 

On behalf of everyone involved in LIPIcs, I thank the computer science community for its support!