For some time the CIB membership has desired that conference papers be Scopus-indexed and more formally published so the profile of their work is raised. Indeed many members have stated that their funding to attend CIB conferences depends on proceedings being published in this way.
CIB’s iCONDA database is not profiled by any major libraries or publication indexes; it is what could be described as grey literature[1].. .
In 2021 CIB explored the option of self-publishing at the behest of its Programme Committee. With a limited staff and budget, CIB does not currently have the resources necessary to ensure self-publishing would be initiated correctly and accurately, nor that it would continue in that accurate manner into the future. So in early 2022, CIB negotiated a one-time contract with the Institute of Physics (IOP) Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, to publish the proceedings of World Building Congress 2022. This is also where the Sustainable Built Environment (SBE) conference series is published, see for example. Publishing with IOP raises the profile of CIB proceedings papers by being indexed with a known publisher.
Our contract with IOP came after abstracts had been accepted for WBC2022 and in the middle of authors’ paper writing, and thus we had to change the rules for paper formatting to meet IOP’s requirements. This was communicated regularly throughout the paper authoring phase, but we apologise that this caused confusion amongst authors as to what format to use. Through the Scientific Committee we have attempted to hold authors accountable for using the IOP format, and about 75% have now used the IOP style or something close to it. We also communicated that if IOP style were not used CIB would only be able to publish the papers in the iCONDA database.
At the time of this news story about 250 of the 424 WBC2022 papers are “IOP ready” with about 50 going only to the iCONDA database. The remaining 125 are in the revision stages.
Some authors were concerned by the publishing organisation’s name including the word ‘physics’, stating their paper is not about physics. Authors should recognize that IOP publishes many journals and conference series. In our discussions with the IOP, they felt the World Building Congress papers were sufficiently broad enough to cover built environment research in many facets, and that papers would be satisfactorily within scope.
Moving forward, CIB is pursuing a long-term relationship with IOP which will add value to members’ research profile. Individual CIB conferences including those organised by Working Commissions will be encouraged to publish their proceedings with IOP, and we will help negotiate publishing fees for this
We hope this article helps clarify our plans for publishing of future conference proceedings. This has been widely desired by our members. Once again we apologise for any inconvenience caused during the implementation for WBC2022, but the majority of authors have told us that they value the higher status for CIB and Commission conferences that use this route for their proceedings.
[1] https://guides.lib.monash.edu/grey-literature/whatisgreyliterature.
It should be noted that previous CIB proceedings do not have all the characteristics listed here, for example, they have gone through a formal peer-reviewed process for previous conference acceptance.
