Open access to Construction IT research articles – developments over the past 25 years

Bo-Christer Björk

doi:10.36680/j.itcon.2021.002

Abstract

The Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon), was founded in 1996, using the new innovative open access business model enabled by the World wide web. A quarter century later Open Access (OA) journals have established themselves in all fields of science, in particular in biomedicine, so that around a fifth of all high quality peer reviewed articles are currently published in OA journals. In building and construction there are half a dozen active full OA journals, although ITcon remains the only one dedicated specifically to construction IT research. The development of OA has been slower than anticipated in the early years. An analysis using Michael Porter’s five forces model of the competitive environment of scholarly publishing helps to highlight the reasons for this. Particularly important as a barrier to change is the strong emphasis in academic evaluations on impact factors, which favors old established journals. Despite such hurdles OA continuously grows in importance and pioneering journals like ITcon have helped to pave the way.

Highlights

In the 1980s and 1990s the use of IT in construction was rapidly evolving and a research community of young researchers interested in topics like computer-aided design, product modelling, expert systems, etc. had emerged
When we started in Construction (ITcon), we optimistically expected the Open Access business model to become the norm for publishing scholarly journals in a relatively short time frame of five to ten years
Open Access (OA) is rapidly getting a stronghold in biomedical publishing construction research is a laggard in the adoption of this model

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the 1980s and 1990s the use of IT in construction was rapidly evolving and a research community of young researchers interested in topics like computer-aided design, product modelling (later renamed BIM), expert systems, etc. had emerged. Email had already been around for a while when in 1993 the world wide web emerged and very rapidly started to revolutionize many business fields. The World Wide Web was in particular designed to help scientists like those working at CERN communicate (Berners-Lee and Cailliau, 1990) and its potential for the dissemination of scientific publications was rapidly noticed (Harnad, 1999). The developments of the first ten years have been described in a previous article and will not be described in detail here (Björk, Turk and Holmström, 2005 or Björk and Turk, 2006) Key developments after those articles were written have been to utilise the open source Open Journals System as publishing platform and the labelling of all content with the Creative Commons license as well digital object describers (DOIs). This article in-stead focuses on changes in the general environment of scholarly publishing during the quarter century that ITcon has been published, and in particular the situation for construction IT research

GENERAL DEVELOPMENT OF OA

CURRENT CONSTRUCTION OA JOURNALS

Findings

CONCLUSIONS