[open-science] Publication of In-Depth Content

[Florian Meier]

Hi Stephanie and Mike,
I have never heard about Supplementary Information in Computer Science, 
but that does not mean anything. The concept as explained by you seems 
to be exactly what I was thinking about (though, I have to imitate it 
somehow).

In my opinion this approach is still advantageous, even without page 
limits. Yes, a perfect researcher would be able to structure a single 
paper well enough, but in reality the probability is high that very 
specific implementation details are scattered throughout the text.
A similar problem can be seen with standard documents (ISO, DIN, 
IEEE...). The nature of being a standard requires of course very 
specific details, but it is quite difficult to get the overall picture.
Either way, the author should provide a clear distinction between 
content for "curious readers" and content only needed to actually 
implement it. If he puts the latter into a separate section, the 
appendix or the SI should not matter a lot.

In my opinion, publishing material on a personal webpage should only be 
the last resort. The probability of loosing the content is far too high 
and there are so many good alternatives.

Greetings,
Florian

On 01/20/2015 05:15 PM, Mike Taylor wrote:
> For what it's worth: I think that Supplementary Information is stupid
> in an online paper. The only reason for it is when it's too big to
> print, but when length limits become irrelevant, so does the
> distinction between the "main paper" and the SI.
>
> The paper should contain all of the paper.
>
> (Obvious exception: supplementary files that are in specific data
> formats, such as phylogenetic trees, character matrices, gene
> sequences, etc.)
>
> -- Mike.
>
>
>
> On 20 January 2015 at 16:11, Stephanie Hyland <steph.hyland at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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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