Dear Eurographics Member,
as we have entered 2011, chairmanship of the Eurographics Association has passed from Roberto Scopigno to me and it is my pleasure to thank Roberto on behalf of the association for being an excellent chairman for the last two years! He clearly left a mark in the history of the association by moving forward with many strategic and organizational issues while at the same time representing Eurographics as an always charming and integrative colleague and friend!
New Eurographics Web Pages
One of Roberto’s initiatives during the last year was a new web presence for Eurographics and I encourage you to visit our new web pages at www.eg.org! As one of the results of our membership survey performed in 2010, the Eurographics Executive Committee had decided to improve the web presence of the Association. Instead of incremental changes to the existing pages we moved to a new content management system which should allow more flexible updates and improved access. The new web pages are the result of an enormous effort of many volunteers and we all hope that you appreciate the extended content and the new style. Special thanks go to Francisco Javier Melero for initially setting up the Joomla system, to Marcus Magnor and his online board team, and to the Graz support team hosting the system and being instrumental in the transition.
Changes to the Executive Committee and Officers of the Association
The result and the details of the Executive Committee election ballot for 2011 were reported on the EG web pages by our Secretary David Duce on 31st December 2011. We congratulate the elected candidates Sabine Coquillart , David Duke, Markus Gross, Wolfgang Heidrich, Roberto Scopigno, Hans-Peter Seidel and Anders Ynnerman. With the change in chairmanship, Roberto Scopigno became a Vice Chairman ex officio for a period of one year. Werner Purgathofer continues as Vice Chairman and is now joined by Anders Ynnerman.
Future Eurographics Conferences
EG 2011 in Llandudno, Wales (11- 15 April 2011) is only a few weeks away and I hope to meet many of you there. Don’t miss the excellent scientific program in a very attractive environment. Registration is still open!
EG 2012 will be in Cagliari, Sardinia (13-18 May 2012). Preparations are underway and we are looking forward to a great event in Italy.
EG 2013 will be held in Girona, Spain, and EG 2014 in Strasbourg, France, the exact dates are not finalized, yet.
Computer Graphics Forum Goes Electronic-only
Computer Graphics Forum (CGF), the computer graphics journal jointly owned by the Eurographics Association and Wiley/Blackwell, has moved to an electronic-only publication model starting with the first issue of 2011. Like many other academic journals in our field, CGF has to deal with the fact that while the published pages have become significantly more over the last years, fewer personal subscribers are willing to pay for the increasing cost of printing and shipping. More and more readers specifically search for articles and access them through digital libraries. Eurographics members will have access to CGF through the Eurographics Digital Library (EGDL) as part of their personal or organizational membership. During their membership renewal personal EG members can opt for extra printed copies of all or selected issues of CGF and workshop proceedings printed by EG Publications. Organizational members will continue to receive one hard copy of all material printed by EG Publications. Readers who are personal or institutional subscribers of CGF from Wiley/Blackwell will have access through the Wiley/Blackwell Digital Library.
Personal Copies of Material Published by EG
Eurographics has managed to negotiate with its publication partner copyright rules consistent to the ones used by ACM and IEEE. Effective as of 2011 authors are entitled to make appropriately marked copies of articles which are published by Eurographics publically available on personal web servers. This will help authors to freely disseminate their research results early without violating the Right-to-Use granted to Eurographics/Wiley/Blackwell after acceptance for publication. We require that the personal copy of an article is explicitly marked as such and contains the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned by EG and a link for accessing this article through the EGDL. In order to simplify this process, EG will provide an appropriately augmented PDF version of the article shortly after DOI assignment for personal use by the authors. Such a marked PDF can also be retrieved from the EGDL for older material. We ask and encourage authors to replace unmarked copies of their articles on personal web servers with those PDFs. This new rule applies to all material published in EGDL including articles in Computer Graphics Forum and it replaces the previous six-months lock-up period.
New Financial Policy for Eurographics Events
In order to support the operation of the Eurographics Association, Eurographics events (conferences, symposia and workshops) deliver some part of their income (usually from registration fees) to the association. The amount was previously based on the non-membership differential, basically the difference in registration fees between Eurographics members and non-members. Although successful for many years, this mechanism remained hard to explain to event organizers and became difficult to adapt to the increasing number of events in cooperation with other organizations. Therefore, the Eurographics Executive Committee has decided to move to a simpler model based on a flat fee per event attendee starting for all events in 2011. This will make budget planning easier for event organizers and allow for more flexibility in collaborations with other professional societies. Details will be published shortly on our new web pages.
I hope that all Eurographics members will appreciate the new developments and will continue to support the association as subscribers, authors, and volunteers. I am looking forward to your involvement and to your suggestions on how to further improve the offering to our members.
Best regards
Thomas Ertl
EG Chairman 2011-2012
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