You might have noticed that posts have been thin on the ground for the last few weeks. Along with completing the revisions for my PhD thesis (which is now submitted), I’ve also completed a journal paper that has also gone for submission.

This will be the second journal paper that I’ve submitted for peer review, though I have had 3 papers published in conference proceedings. If you are interested in seeing the type of structural modelling work that I was doing at university, my first journal paper: “Finite element buckling analysis of stiffened plates with filleted junctions” is published in Thin-Walled Structures.

Unfortunately, the arrangements for journal publication at the moment mean that you have to have a subscription or buy access to read it. While this might help if you are at a university that has library access to the journal, it means much of the contents of academic journals are kept away from public view.

If you just want a read the abstract or look at the pictures, that’s all visible in the linked extract.

Researchers, authors and editors of academic papers are not paid by the publishers of a journal, so there has been some movement towards Open Access (OA), where content is available publicly for free, though this currently means that authors have to pay-to-publish for many journals. Where there is a mix of pay-to-publish open-access and free-to-publish subscription-articles in the same journals, many authors are currently sticking with free-to-publish so they are not paying from their research budgets for journal access that their university library is already paying for.

As my article is not currently available without paying for access, I’ll be looking into the options for providing duplicate access to the same information that doesn’t violate Elsevier’s copyright on the published paper.