ICST Membership Overview

ICST is launching a unique drive to embrace its community. Capturing the essence of the latest in Web technologies ICST is introducing innovative platforms empowering its members to build and guide society activities,  to enhance their research productivity and recognition and promote the development of human society though positive impact of ICT sciences and engineering.

At ICST, all interaction occurs in an open market-place of ideas, seeking to generate response from all sectors of the ICT society at a grass-roots level, to directly influence the development of scientific activities and technology directions, while providing an opportunity for participants to accelerate their professional growth.

No more restrictions! No more blocks! Its wide open to you and the best ideas. The most frequent participation will be publicly recognized and rewarded. What is the catch? None. And as with all successful WEB initiatives, unlike any other society, MEMBERSHIP IS FREE.

There is something you will have to do however, and that is to get involved. ICST needs your input and your ideas to build your community and recognize your contribution in the widest circles.

Read on and see how ICST can help accelerate your career through:

• Open platforms, such as EAI’s AGORA, which embraces participative membership, objectivity of evaluation, transparency of recognition and accelerated quality through participation.In addition, AGORA provides a platform for implementing the principles of direct democratic providing representation of all ICST members in the society’s activities and decisions, without committees and intermediaries. AGORA provides a way to assess the quality of member participation based on results not seniority. AGORA is an unfiltered, way of actively involving the community, ensuring that content, value and quality are created by the membership in a bottom-up way, rather than top-down as is now the case with all other major Societies;
• EAI’s WEB based Reputation Index – UCount, which is determined in part by using AGORA’s participative concept. EAI provides direct unbiased recognition of your accomplishments and transparent, community objectivity;
• An extensive portfolio of unique Events, covering the entire spectrum of ICT and its impact on society, coupled with revolutionary Web 2.0 publication mechanisms, and EAI’s e-Scripts, making the community the publisher and supporting quality review processes leading to a drastically reduced publication cycle.

And start interacting with the community of your peers, towards putting the power of the web in the service of your career and your profession!

Individual Membership Benefits

1. Participation and Dissemination Opportunities 

ICST Events

ICST has sponsored over a hundred and fifty annual international scientific conferences, summits, workshops and symposia. The events cover a wide array of topics related to Information and Communication Technology and are held on all five continents. Members can take advantage of significant registration discounts.

ICST Publications

The ICST’s publication portfolio consists of books series, over 30 journals, an on-line magazine and conference proceedings. The state-of-the-art ICST publication model drastically shortens the publication cycle, triggers innovation and provides inherent incentives for quality. Members can purchase publications at discounted affiliate rates.

ICaST

ICaST is the Society’s on-line magazine, freely accessible to ICST members. Members can submit work-in-progress articles for peer review, exchange ideas through interactive forums, identify partners for research consortia, learn about upcoming Society events and activities and acquire information on project and funding opportunities offered by the European Commission.

EUDL

 The European Union Digital Library (EUDL) is the central repository of all scientific content published under ICST copyright, including conference proceedings, journal papers, book chapters and magazine articles. Members have free access to browse the articles on an OPEN ACCESS basis.

2. Society and Career Building Tools and Forums

AGORA

 The ICST AGORA is both a marketplace of ideas and an open forum that enables members to collectively shape and form the Society and its wide range of scientific activities in a direct and active manner. This unfiltered, non-mediated way of proposing new conference and publication related ideas, voting on suggested activities and volunteer for participation opportunities ensures that content and value are both co-created by the global membership in a bottom-up way.

Participation in the EAI

ICST, as a member of the European Alliance for Innovation (EAI), offers participation options in this unique pan-European umbrella organization that gathers numerous players (research, education, government, venture capital and standardisation) in the field of Innovation. Members will have access to the Alliance’s on-line community portal, and involvement opportunities in the Science for Innovation, Business and Technology Councils (SIBs) that cover a range of ICT-related areas.

SIB Councils

EAI is organized into Science for Innovation, Business and Technology (SIB) Councils to cover the wide scope of relevance of the Information and Communication Technology field.  Each SIB is a meeting place, both on-line and in person, for members representing academic and financial institutions, research centres, corporations and government bodies joining forces to advance science and technology by sharing ideas and jointly opening doors to innovation.

3. Submission and Collaborative Tools

e-SCRIPTS

e-SCRIPTS is ICST’s revolutionary, peer reviewed, multidisciplinary journal publication system that facilitates the paper upload and review processes. Members can upload papers or bid for reviewing using this Web 2.0 inspired mechanism.

ASSYST

ICST offers a sophisticated software application, the Article Submission System (ASSYST), to facilitate the paper submission and review processes of ICST sponsored conferences. Throughout the organizational process of a technical conference, ASSYST is used by multiple members of the Organizing Committee as well as by all the authors submitting papers to the conference.

MyBOARD

MyBOARD is the gate to ICST services, activities, benefits, updates and current news. It is a personalized single user page for ICST members, set according to the individual member’s area of interest and preferences.

4. Objective Reward Mechanism

Science Rewards Program

Members’ contribution is measured objectively through the Science Rewards Program (SRP). SRP is ICST’s incentive program, designed to inherently promote excellence, encourage participation, boost scientific information exchange and reward member contribution with Science Reward Points, which are redeemable for ICST products and services.

Awards Program

The ICST Awards program provides an opportunity for individual experts to be objectively evaluated by the ICST community regardless of their age, personal or institutional connections or country of origin.  The objective of the awards program is to redefine meritocracy as currently measured and democratize it by moving decisions from a closed and controlled committee environment to an open and transparent community level.

ICST Fellows Program and Awards Offered

Nominations to the ICST Fellows Program are determined through ICST’s Reputation Index - UCount. UCount provides an objective evaluation of scientific influence based on public recognition and transparent publication and citation records.

The combination of both participative and bibliometric excellence mentioned above defines a ‘Reputation Index,’ which is a comprehensive scientific effort indicator that puts together a measurement of the active participation in the society’s activities and scientific influence based on publication/citation records.

In order to ensure the validity of results the ICST Awards Council oversees the management of the Reputation Index system as it is applied to ICST Awards. Another responsibility of the ICST Awards Council is to create nominating committees for recognising outstanding contributions and achievements by the professional community and individuals in related areas.

The following are Awards are being considered, or have been offered, by ICST:

1) Best Paper Award (Research, Student, Practical); Presented annually and voted on by the community of expert reviewers using eSCRIPTS.  It represents community recognition of the best papers reporting original work published in ICST Transactions for each of the categories. Nominations are by ICST Transactions editors or through Agora.

 Please visit ICST Transactions for more information.

2) ICST Outstanding Contribution Award; Awarded annually for distinguished service to the development, viability, advancement and support of the technical and community objectives of the ICST.

Please visit About ICST for more on its objectives.

3) ICST/European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) European Innovator Award; Presented annually in support and encouragement of Innovation and determined by the EAI Science for Innovation, Business and Technology (SIB) community to recognize the person/team who created the most interesting European product or private/public service

Please visit the EAI Community for more information on EAI and its objectives.

4) Social Impact Award; Provides recognition for the most significant contribution to society in the past calendar year.

Please visit About ICST for more.

5) Best Product Award. Presented as part of the EAI Summits and its Product Review Track, to showcase the best product and services released for the year.

Please visit EAI Summits for more.

Request more information about the nomination process or participate in the Awards Council activities.

UCount: community-based approach for measuring scientific reputation

ICST, in collaboration with EAI is offering its Society the opportunity to define a new way of measuring scientific reputation and effort for the research community. With the UCount approach, both participative/representative measures and bibliometric excellence are combined into a single ‘Reputation Metric’ that incorporates opinions from the community. The UCount approach has been developed to promote a clear, tangible indication of scientific contributions to society activities (i.e., Reputation) while at the same time recognising individual excellence and scientific impact through bibliographic measures (i.e., Metric).

As the Reputation Metric is monitored and calculated by the community it represents, it will ensure accuracy and offer members “accepted, transparent, recognition” of their efforts. In addition, we are conducting research aimed at understanding what the meaning of scientific reputation is and at understanding what are the factors contributing to it. If you want to contribute to this important research and can spare two minutes of your time, please go to http://icst.org/UCount-Survey and participate in the evaluation of the members of your community.

UCount is provided in collaboration with the LiquidPub project and powered by their Reseval technology. Communities and Researchers defining their Reputation Metric will be able to:

1) Use the novel approach for reverse engineering of scientific reputation in order to define Reputation Metric formula that matches the reputation as “perceived” by the Community in the best way.

2) Re-define Reputation Metric for their Community as it grows or its values change.

3) Include UCount metrics of researchers in their homepages and show on the ICST and EAI websites.

4) Define and calculate their own alternative to Community Reputation Metric, based on predefined, traditional, bibliographic measures such as h-index, g-index, etc.

5) In the future, define and control their bibliographic data used for the calculation of the Metric, based on the information gathered from sources such as Microsoft Academic Search, DBLP, Google Scholar, and others;

6) With the above Community or custom-defined Reputation Metric, define and compare research groups, such as departments, institutions, scientific communities, or arbitrary group of individuals.

7) In the future, go beyond citation-based metrics and beyond metrics that only consider the “paper” as the unit of scientific dissemination. Examples are reputation metrics that take into account how often a paper is shared with/recommended to colleagues, or metrics on datasets, experiments, or specific aspects of a paper. A promising approach aimed at developing such metrics is altmetrics.

Moreover, we are planning to use UCount in ICST Transactions, which are being launched in 2011. The idea is that after each review all authors of the reviewed paper will evaluate the reviewer on several criteria and such information will be used in the future to help editors to select better reviewers.

The UCount approach is now being presented to the Research Community for feedback and discussion in so that it truly can be considered a metric developed by researchers, for researchers and for the benefit of the scientific community it represents and those that interact with it, focusing on science advancement, rather than number advancement. Please visit UCount blog at http://ucountblog.wordpress.com/.

An organisational Committee is in place to help define and coordinate the process of collecting and aggregating input from the society and ensure that the ICST’s Reputation Metric defined with UCount approach becomes a meaningful, reliable measure of scientific standing, which is defined by its members and accepted by the research Society.

To be a part of this opportunity and provide Your input, to ensure that You get a chance to Count and define Your own metric and that Your effort Counts in the Society, evaluate your community at http://icst.org/UCount-Survey and make sure that UCount.