What “Open Access” Means to Us
At I3E TPAMI, we are proud to support Open Access publishing in the same way that a landlord supports affordable housing: with enthusiasm in principle and firm resistance in practice.
Our Open Access model is called TPAMI-OA Gold™, which means that for a modest Article Processing Charge (APC) of $12,000 USD — a figure we arrived at by asking “what is the maximum amount a desperate postdoc’s grant can cover?” — your article will be made freely available to anyone who navigates our website, solves the CAPTCHA, creates an account, verifies their institutional affiliation, and clicks the correct button, which we relocate quarterly to prevent habituation.
What Is Freely Visible
The following portions of every article are accessible without payment or login:
- The title
- The first name of the first author (the last name requires login)
- An abstract truncated at 150 characters, ending mid-sentence
- A JPEG thumbnail of Figure 1, rendered at 72 DPI
We consider this sufficient for readers to “get the gist,” which is honestly all most people want anyway.
The Preprint Loophole
Authors are technically permitted to post preprints to arXiv or similar repositories. However, we note that the preprint will not include the typeset formatting, copy-editing corrections, or the important editorial additions we make (primarily: reformatting the references into our proprietary citation style and adding a header with our logo). Readers who wish to experience the article in its full, formatted glory must pay the access fee. The preprint is the rough draft. The published version is the work of art. We charge accordingly.
Green Open Access
Our Green Open Access route allows authors to self-archive their accepted manuscript — not the published PDF, which is ours — in an institutional repository after an embargo period of 24 months. This ensures that by the time the work is freely available, it has been superseded by three newer papers, possibly by the same authors, also paywalled.
We support Green OA because it costs us nothing and allows us to claim OA compliance in accreditation documents.
Open Data
We encourage authors to make their data available upon reasonable request. We define “reasonable request” as: a formal email to the corresponding author, who has since changed institutions; a data sharing agreement signed by both parties’ legal teams; and confirmation that the requester is not a competitor. Data may be shared within 6–24 months of request, subject to the corresponding author’s response rate, which we track and do not share.
Why This Model Works
Open Access publishing requires significant resources: peer review coordination, server maintenance, PDF generation, and the salaries of the people who send automated rejection emails. These costs are real. We simply pass them to the author, then again to the reader, in a sustainable double-dipping model that has served publishers well for decades.
We remain committed to the principle that knowledge should be free — eventually, approximately, conditionally, and after all parties involved have been adequately compensated.