Hakola Antti, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Dr Antti Hakola works as a principal scientist and project manager at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. He has several years of experience in fusion physics and technology, mainly on plasma wall interactions and material migration in the edge plasmas of fusion reactors. He is also active within the EUROfusion Consortium, being one of the deputy Task Force Leaders of its Tokamak Exploitation Task Force. His article Gross and net erosion balance of plasma-facing materials in full-W tokamaks was published in Nuclear Fusion, under the transformative agreement with the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

“My employer VTT has chosen open access (OA) as the default option for publishing scientific articles.  Also the main funding body of my research, the EUROfusion Consortium, requires all research outcomes to be disseminated as openly – and publicly – as possible. With this in mind, I did not even think about any other way than OA for getting the above-mentioned article out.

The piece of work has been a useful and appreciated reference for many follow-up studies, not only by myself but also by several of my colleagues working in the field worldwide. I would claim that the results reported therein have increased our collaboration opportunities, for example as invites to contribute to even more extensive summary papers and giving talks in various conferences. Indeed: the process has born fruit now after all these years when the article has been available for the community!

The process of publishing the article went smoothly despite the many Covid-related restrictions that we were facing at the time and was comparable to previous positive experiences with IOPP. I would warmly welcome OA to anyone who has an important set of results to be communicated and who is constantly looking forward to expanding their R&D network.”