As 2020 comes to a close and we begin to evaluate what was and continues to be a particularly difficult year for everyone, we see one thing stand out far above the rest – total dedication to the community, to the work, and to research.
So before wishing everyone a peaceful and safe holiday season, we would like to take this opportunity to highlight the extraordinary work our members, our volunteers and our staff have done in this turbulent year – all while working from home almost the entire time.
The largest conference audience ever
First of all, we could not be more proud of the volunteering organizing committee members and of our conference management staff who put in many extra hours to successfully pull off all but one EAI conferences that were planned for 2020.
After quickly pivoting to a live online format in March, several dozen fully-fledged conferences with hundreds of attendees happened without skipping a beat, continuing to serve our community across six continents.
Despite initial logistical setbacks but possibly thanks to the convenience of online access, EAI conferences managed an impressive feat of growing the total number of submitted papers by 24% compared to last year. This allowed us to open these online events for free public viewing, helping our presenting authors reach an audience larger than ever before. This year’s EAI conferences continue to be uploaded to Youtube with full timestamps for free unlimited viewing for everyone.
We are especially proud of everyone whose ambition and hard work built the recent EAI SmartCity360° International Convention in its original ambitious format. as a large multi-conference with a full Keynote Day – jam-packed three days of smart city-related talks, discussion and networking.
Major indexing successes
Secondly, our Publications team made tremendous progress in collaboration with the editorial teams of EAI Endorsed Transactions, our publishing partners at Springer, as well as bolstering our own publishing efforts in EAI CORE and EAI CCER proceedings series.
EAI Endorsed Transactions (ET), our series of online only, free-to-publish Open Access journals, made crucial steps forward in indexing. Every paper published in any of the ETs are now automatically and almost instantly indexed in Google Scholar. Furthermore, ET on Scalable Information Systems has been welcomed in Web of Science with eight more journals currently under evaluation. We are very happy to see it join the ranks of ET on Energy Web and ET on Pervasive Health and Technology, both indexed in Scopus. We are hopeful that in 2021, we will be able to share news regarding indexing in Ei Compendex, as 6 ETs are currently being evaluated.
In other positive news, the EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing book series was successfully indexed in Scopus as well as Ei Compendex earlier this year and as a result, the number of book proposals that we received more than doubled this year compared to 2019. As we crunch through this spike in interest, we are looking forward to seeing many of the newly completed books published starting in January 2021.
A totally global community
In this year’s community-related news, we were incredibly grateful to see our membership grow by the biggest margin since 2016, bringing our total user base over the 140.000 line. With membership presence in 170 countries we are honored to serve researchers in every region of the world while keeping this community completely open and free to join.
We also saw an increase in the adoption of our online community services that are quickly becoming an integral part for our submitting authors, members of program committees, as well as editorial teams.
EAI Community Review, first launched in early 2019, brought more than triple the amount of Review Bids in 2020, while maintaining an average author opt-in rate of more than 80%, even reaching 100% in some conferences. We were very excited to see the positive effect this service had on the speed of the review process particularly in EAI Endorsed Transactions, which needed to contend with a significant increase in workload.
We were also thrilled to announce the 2020 class of Senior Members, Distinguished Members, and Fellows who were for the first time ever nominated on the basis of their EAI Index accrued during the year 2019. This was a significant milestone in advancing EAI’s mission for a research world that is fair, and that provides everyone with an equal opportunity to compete and succeed. We are already looking forward to tallying the results for the year 2020, while making further improvements to the transparency of the entire process.
Looking ahead
Speaking of improvements, our software engineers have been hard at work not only smoothing out the edges in our current infrastructure, but also developing new services that will help enhance the research career and experience of every active EAI member.
Authors participating in 2021 conferences can look forward to new opportunities for research idea development via early abstract submission options with powerful online collaboration tools, as well as a new version of EAI Compass with multiple added social features that will make for a more productive and enriching conference experience. We cannot wait to share the details with you early next year and to see what you think.
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Thank you again for your dedication and support this year. In spite of the many wrenches that this year threw into everyone’s plans, we continue to be energized by your enthusiasm. From everyone at EAI, we wish you a restful holiday and successful 2021.
