[open-science] Publication of In-Depth Content

[Stephanie Hyland]

Hi Florian,

I am not sure how common this is outside life sciences, but some
publications allow for 'Supplementary Information'(SI) to be included
alongside the main paper, which (ideally) contains a lot more detail.

This format works relatively well - the main paper becomes something of
an extended abstract, while the SI provides important details for those
interested. I think this is a step in the right direction towards
openness and reproducibility in science, but there is room for
improvement. The scope and depth of information contained in a SI seems
semi-arbitrary most of the time.

Some researchers also provide additional information/code/data on their
personal/departmental webpages, which I consider a good temporary
solution, but ideally would become part of the standard publication process.

Cheers,
Stephanie

On 1/20/15 07:33, Florian Meier 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 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
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