[open-science] Publication of In-Depth Content

Tue Jan 20 12:33:51 UTC 2015

Hi everyone,
it seems to me that it is quite challenging to publish in-depth
material. I came across this problem while trying to publish
mathematical content in an applied context (an analytical model for
wireless networks). Most conferences and journals (open or not) have
strict page limits for good reasons (e.g. concise presentation of the
content and preventing long gibberish).

Though, this often leads to quite imprecise presentation of the
mathematical content, so that if you want to reproduce the results, it
might take weeks or months to work out the details, especially if you
are interested in proving the results. In my opinion this time is
superfluous, because this work was already done by someone, but not
published because of page limits.

What are your ideas? How should content be published so that it does not
bore readers in the first place, but allows for easy reproduction for
interested researches?

Some thoughts from my side:
Often you can find some conference paper and an extended version at
arXiv or elsewhere, but many of these are more initial versions of a
paper with a few pages more than the final conference paper. So, though
they provide some more details, they are already written to be suitable
for submission (i.e. they leave out details and long proofs).
Secondly, publishing an extended version of the same paper is difficult
with regard to copyrights, self-plagiarism and last but not least
confusing the reader who reads nearly the same paper twice.

An alternative might be to publish a (short) paper with the ideas, a
brief summary of the mathematical content, related work and evaluation
at a conference and publishing the actual groundwork (and only the
groundwork) including all details elsewhere, preferably as open as
possible. What would be most suitable for this? arXiv? ResearchGate?
Technical report at the library of the own university?
Is this already a widespread approach? Should it be used more widely?

Greetings,
Florian