[open-science] Publication of In-Depth Content

Tue Jan 20 12:49:20 UTC 2015

Important question, thanks. I have strong, possibly arbitrary views.

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 12:33 PM, Florian Meier <florian.meier at koalo.de>
wrote:

> 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

Yes, unfortunately,

> for good reasons (e.g. concise presentation of the
> content and preventing long gibberish).
>

There are very few good reasons and many bad ones. If the material is being
printed, *and* if any human actually reads the paper version, then this is
a reason. But there are good reasons for trying to scrap it.

>
> 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.
>

Bad publication means that 85% of science is wasted (The Lancet).
Condensing the account is now an act of destroying science.

> 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).
>

There are differences between conferences and other publications, because
conferences sometimes create actual paper. IMO there is no valid reason why
the full account should not be available.

> Secondly, publishing an extended version of the same paper is difficult
> with regard to copyrights, self-plagiarism

I don't understand this "self-plagiarism" unless it is deliberately meant
to increase your metrics.

> and last but not least
> confusing the reader who reads nearly the same paper twice.
>

If it's clearly signposted it shouldn't confuse anyone.

>
> 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?

Yes.

> ResearchGate?
>

Absolutely not - it's a walled garden without any Openness.

> Technical report at the library of the own university?
>

Yes

Is this already a widespread approach?

No

> Should it be used more widely?
>

Yes

The main problem is that the rules are arbitrary and increasingly driven by
publisher agendas and marketing, not scientists. We have to change this.

>
> Greetings,
> Florian
>

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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