[open-science] Going open access - conference proceedings

[Thomas Kluyver]

I hope this is an acceptable place for a very mundane, practical question
about openness.

I've been asked to help organise a small engineering conference next
September. The conference has been going for a number of years, and the
proceedings have been published by one of the big commercial publishers.
The latest edition costs over £100 as an eBook. Naturally, we are keen to
move to an open access publication.

We floated the idea of open access at this year's conference, but there
were reservations about the recognition of such papers by universities,
grant agencies, etc. Engineering seems to use conference publications as a
major part of evaluating research, whereas the academic fields I'm more
familiar with focus on journal papers. If people don't get a well respected
publication out of it, they may not be able to justify coming to the
conference, and it's so small already that it can't survive many people
dropping out.

Has anyone dealt with a similar situation before? Are there open access
publishers that are well respected in the engineering world?

Also, can anyone give me an idea of how much more open access proceedings
are likely to cost? I've never approached publishing from this angle
before. I'm familiar with APCs over 1000 for single articles - is it simply
multiplied by the number of papers in the proceedings?

Thanks,
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