Monthly Archives: July 2011

IEEE only allows preprints

Early this year, IEEE has changed its policy with respect to making your publications available online. Now you are only allowed to put a (final) preprint on your personal web page (or your institution’s), mentioning the copyright and final referencing data. This holds for all papers published after January 1st, 2011. Before, you were also allowed to make the published paper itself available online.

While I do understand that this protects (some of the) additional work done by IEEE to make that final publication look nice, and thus should encourage people to subscribe, I am not happy with this measure. Maybe this is just aligning the IEEE policy with what most publishers do already, but still.

Why do I prefer the published one? First of all, this makes sure only a single version of a paper circulates on the web. I personally find it very annoying to see a paper, start reading it because it looks different from what you’ve seen before, and notice that it is actually the same, but in different typesetting. Even more so if the two would have differences. The final published one would be the most correct one, I assume. Secondly, it also increases the chances that a paper is cited correctly. Because, let’s face it, not everyone will nicely add the “full citation to the original IEEE publication and a link to the article in the IEEE Xplore digital library“.

Correctly citing a paper may become even more difficult…

Elsevier Executable Paper Grand Challenge

At two recent occasions, I heard about Elsevier’s Executable Paper contest. The intention was to show concepts for the next generation of publications. Or as Elsevier put it:

Executable Paper Grand Challenge is a contest created to improve the way scientific information is communicated and used.

It asks:

  • How can we develop a model for executable files that is compatible with the user’s operating system and architecture and adaptable to future systems?
  • How do we manage very large file sizes?
  • How do we validate data and code, and decrease the reviewer’s workload?
  • How to support registering and tracking of actions taken on the ‘executable paper?’

By now, the contest is over, and the winners have been announced:

First Prize: The Collage Authoring Environment by Nowakowski et al.
Second Prize: SHARE: a web portal for creating and sharing executable research papers by Van Gorp and Mazanek.
Third Prize: A Universal Identifier for Computational Results by Gavish and Donoho.

Congratulations to all! At the AMP Workshop where I am now, we were lucky to have a presentation about the work by Gavish and Donoho, which sounds very cool! I also know the work by Van Gorp and Mazanek, using virtual machines to allow others to reproduce results. Still need to look into the winner’s work…

If any of this sounds interesting to you, and I believe it should, please take a look at the Grand Challenge website, and also check out some of the other participants’ contributions!

Here at the workshop, we also had an interesting related presentation yesterday by James Quirk about all that can be done with a PDF. Quite impressive! For examples, see his Amrita work and webpage.

AMP Workshop on Reproducible Research

I am currently attending the AMP Workshop on Reproducible Research: Tools and Strategies for Scientific Computing, organized by Ian Mitchell, Randy Leveque and Victoria Stodden. This workshop is organized as one of the satellite workshops around ICIAM, the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics. It’s been a very interesting workshop already, with nice talks and tutorials about tools and policies. Some more about it probably later on this blog. I definitely already have some new input for the links pages on the rest of this website… The talks and presentations will also be posted online on the workshop website.

At the end of this workshop, there will also be a community forum discussion, to which I also really look forward.