New ISPRS Services for Members and the ISPRS Community at Large

Since the last ISPRS Congress in Prague in 2016, the ISPRS Council has revised the services it offers to its members and the ISPRS community at large and has initiated a number of new opportunities to benefit from ISPRS membership. The most important ones are listed here, in the hope that as many members as possible will take advantage of these new opportunities.

The Key Note Speaker programme, commenced in 2019, offers financial support to Ordinary, Associate and Regional Members to invite international experts to one of their meetings. The general principle is that ISPRS covers travel costs, while the member covers local accommodation expenses. Three presentations have already been given in 2019, when ISPRS sent speakers to Bogota, Suva and Kathmandu.

Following requests from members, the ISPRS Archives series has been opened for proceedings of meetings organized by Ordinary, Associate and Regional Members. The first of these new publications will come from ASPRS in spring 2020. In a cooperation with the Technical Information Library Hannover, earlier versions of the Archives are continually being added to the ISPRS website with the aim of eventually having all Archive volumes available in digital form. In addition, for both the Archives and the Annals, an automatic plagiarism check will be introduced in 2020 to maintain the high quality of the two proceedings series. Additionally, ISPRS has formulated a strategy for how to deal with pre-prints submitted to public repositories.

As the scientific community turns towards open-access publications, and authors increasingly have to pay so-called author processing charges (APCs) to have their work published, ISPRS now supports authors who have an accepted paper in the International Journal of Geo-Information with a partial waiver of the APCs. In addition, as of 2020, the best paper in between two ISPRS Congresses will be awarded with the Jack Dangermond Award. We see this new award, which is generously supported by ESRI and the journal publisher MPDI, as an additional motivation to submit first-class papers to this journal to further increase its reputation.

ISPRS now also issues yearly calls for the ISPRS Scientific Initiative (in even years) and the ISPRS Educational and Capacity Building Initiative (in odd years). All Working Group Officers are eligible to submit proposals. These two initiatives provide seed money to successful applicants for projects which in raise the visibility of ISPRS in some way.

As of last year, ISPRS also supports organizers of ISPRS events by covering the costs of the meeting software ConfTool to manage paper submission and registration. In this way, we also hope to harmonize the way in which ISPRS events are being organized and facilitate the administration of these meetings for all sides.

The whole community can take advantage of the multi-lingual ISPRS flyer. While it had only been available in English for many years, we have now also produced versions in Arabic, Chinese and Russian, and following a particular effort to make ISPRS better known in South America, in Portuguese and Spanish.

We hope that these services, which have all been developed over the last four years, will further increase the popularity of our society and will add to the experience of being a member of the ISPRS community.