[open-science] Publication of In-Depth Content

[Florian Meier]

Hi,
as a supplement to our discussion in January, I would like to share my 
experiences about how in-depth material could be published.

The main paper describing our research was presented at the 
International Conference on the Design of Reliable Communication 
Networks in March and published as
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/DRCN.2015.7149011
This paper was limited by the conference to 6 pages. We have used them 
for motivation, a concise presentation of the model and the results.

Secondly, a document was uploaded to arXiv, at
http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.07594
On 11 pages an in-depth presentation and derivation of the model is 
given. Last but not least, the implementation is published at GitHub
https://github.com/koalo/AnalyticalMultiHop

While I think this is a decent compromise, several things are not very 
convenient:

- The documents require mutual reference. Indeed, it is difficult to 
reference unpublished work, but on the other hand it is not possible to 
modify the reference after publication. I have chosen the following 
process, but it is not optimal:
   1. Submitting the main paper to the conference review process without
      reference to the supplementary material (this is especially
      important for double-blind review processes, however this was
      not the case here)
   2. After a positive review, publishing the supplementary material
      including a reference to the future publication
   3. Adding a reference in final version of the main paper

- The reviewer has no access to the supplementary material unless the 
conference provides a possibility to submit supplementary material for 
the reviewer.

- While the arXiv document is marked as supplementary material, certain 
overlaps between the documents are inevitable. The legal consequences of 
this fact are not definite.

Do you have any comments on my approach?
What could be improved given today's publication practice?

Greetings,
Florian

On 20.01.2015 13:33, 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
>