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The following comment refers to this/these guideline(s)

Guideline 15

Publication medium

Authors select the publication medium carefully, with due regard for its quality and visibility in the relevant field of discourse. Researchers who assume the role of editor carefully select where they will carry out this activity. The scientific/academic quality of a contribution does not depend on the medium in which it is published.

Explanations:

In addition to publication in books and journals, authors may also consider academic repositories, data and software repositories, and blogs. A new or unknown publication medium is evaluated to assess its seriousness.

A key criterion to selecting a publication medium is whether it has established guidelines on good research practice.

Publication media in engineering sciences

In the engineering sciences, publications appear in a broad and diverse range of publication media. In addition to the academic journals that have been increasingly used in recent years, other outlets are relevant including international conference proceedings – providing these are quality-assured – and patents. These three forms of publishing are considered to be of equal value in the engineering sciences. Work is also published in business-related journals, especially at the interface with industrial research.

In order not to jeopardise a patent application, a certain period of time is allowed to pass before publishing patent-related results. Open access publishing is not yet widely implemented since there are only a few open access journals in the field of engineering sciences that offer sufficient quality assurance. Manuscripts may be posted on publication repositories such as arXiv.org – sometimes prior to publication as a preprint, sometimes after publication with a waiting period of one year – so as to enable broader access to results.

The comment belongs to the following categories:

GL15 (Engineering/engineering sciences)

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