As I hope many members of the theoretical computer science community know, LIPIcs, Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, is a series of high-quality conference proceedings covering the whole spectrum of research in informatics, which has been run since 2008 in cooperation with Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics.
The founders of LIPIcs wanted to offer high-quality conferences in Computer Science a venue for publishing their proceedings open access in an affordable way. To date, LIPIcs has published 262 volumes (see DBLP and the LIPIcs web portal) that are free to read for everyone and whose publication costs are kept as low as possible (currently 60 € per paper) and are subsidised by the participants in the relevant conferences. By way of comparison, readers might want to peruse the cost of publishing open access in Springer conference proceedings (at least 30 € per page) or in an Elsevier journal. By way of example, publishing an open access article in Theoretical Computer Science costs 2,370 €, according to the price list dated 19 June 2023 that is available from the Elsevier site. The price for an open-access article in Information and Computation is 2,400 €. Information on the ACM open access pricing is here. If at least one of the authors is a member of the ACM or of one of its SIGs, the cost of publishing an article open access is 1000 USD for ACM journals and 700 USD for conference proceedings.
Conferences that publish their proceedings with LIPIcs include CONCUR, CSL, DISC, ECOOP, ESA, FSTTCS, ICALP, ICDT, IPEC, ITCS, MFCS, SoCG, STACS and many other events readers of this blog will recognise. Conferences such as FORC, ITC, SAT and Advances in Financial Technologies were recent additions to the LIPIcs portfolio. To the best of my knowledge, so far none of the conferences that have started publishing their proceedings with LIPIcs have left the series. I take this fact to mean that those conferences are happy with the service and visibility that LIPIcs provides.
To give you an idea of the growth of LIPIcs, as well as of Dagstuhl Publishing as a whole, I will limit myself to mentioning that, in 2016, the LIPIcs conference proceedings series had 27 annual and biennial conferences in its portfolio and published 16 conference proceedings volumes with a total of 555 articles. By 2022, the LIPIcs portfolio had grown to 40 conferences, 36 volumes and 1444 published articles. In addition, Dagstuhl Publishing (and LIPIcs) have become increasingly involved in open science and, amongst other initiatives, have developed a cooperation with the Software Heritage project to make sure that research-related software artifacts are archived and cited appropriately.
The Dagstuhl Publishing team has done sterling work on developing specialized software, which has improved the automatic metadata extraction from documents or supporting the manual typesetting. It has also developed a new submission server that has been praised by authors and editors alike.
In my admittedly biased opinion, LIPIcs and Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics are doing a great job for the computer science community. I strongly encourage high-quality conferences in any field of computer science to consider joining the LIPIcs family and to publish their proceedings in open-access form.
Feel free to drop me a line if you are interested in applying. See here for information on how to apply and on the selection process.
