[open-science] Publication of In-Depth Content

Mon Jan 26 08:44:04 UTC 2015

>
> 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?

Not everyone shares your appetite for the detail! In biomedicine, we enjoy
the "drinking from the firehose" metaphor to describe the difficulty of
keeping abreast of medical advances: summary and synthesis are inevitable
and desirable. That you should be able to drill down to critique what you
suspect may be an oversimplification is also desirable, but traditional
publishing's  moneymaking has tended to get in the way of that.

No less a personages than Peter Suber reviewed the BMJ's efforts with
research summaries ("ELPS" = Electronic Long, Paper Short) here:

http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-09.htm

tl;dr: the BMJ is publishing "full papers" on line with a "pico" summary in
the paper journal designed to whet the appetite for the real thing. They
consider such summarising to be a valuable business proposition that busy
doctors would be willing to pay for.

Regards to all,

D.

2015-01-20 13:33 GMT+01:00 Florian Meier <florian.meier at koalo.de>:

> 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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