Re: Publication of scientific research

Daniel Schwabe <dschwabe@inf.puc-rio.br> writes:
> On Apr 27, 2013, at 12:25  - 27/04/13, Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:
>> How about not caring how long the article is? I mean why not have guidelines
>> like "papers should be about 6 pages/3000 words, but do what you want. If
>> it's long-winded, expect to get screwed at review".
>> 
>> I just spent an hour this week removing "last-accessed: 01-01-2012" data
>> from my reference list, so I could get inside a page limit. Why? The data is
>> (slightly) valuable, so why remove it? Page limit is a tree-ware hangover. I
>> blame the conference organisers.
>
> Surprisingly, this is actually not true. In a couple of conferences where I
> was the PC Chair (including ISWC), I suggested precisely this, and the
> OVERWHELMING reaction was that people preferred page limits (and not too big
> either). The rationale was that it would then become "unfair" because some
> people would submit shorter papers than others, and possibly be at a
> disadvantage. It would eventually lead to a "race" with people submitting
> longer and longer papers, in the hopes of maximizing their chances of
> acceptance, and put an impossible burden on reviewers.

This is a clear worry; although, and let's all be honest here, how many
times have you padded a paper because, even though you had said all you
needed to, it wasn't the correct length?

The issue of longer and longer papers gets addressed simply when
reviewers realise that "TL;DR" is, infact, a perfectly valid review. Of
course, this is not to say that long papers would be ruled out; if they
were clearly written, and needed the space then reviewers wouldn't mind.
I mean no one complains that Harry Potter goes on for too long -- well,
okay, maybe number 5 did drag a bit.


>> As for CEUR, well, try asking them. I mean, an archive site, on the web,
>> can't cope with HTML? If that fails, let's put our papers on archive.org
>> which will archive this sort of stuff.
>> Or arxiv which will take HTML.
>> 
> I have nothing against being able to read a paper as HTML. However, to be
> frank, the vast majority of papers is written linearly, and do not exploit the
> hypertext nature of the Web. Of course, there are many advantages in being
> able to add meta-data, but to me this is a separate issue.


I don't really care about hypertext, per se. HTML is a good format
because the viewers are much more widely used and the formats are just
better, because they are mass media, commodity tools. Reading two column
PDFs on small screens is difficult, I think. I still print out most of
my papers, as you do. But I only do this with academic papers;
everything else I read on the web. 

The ability to start to add additional structured data to the papers is
also a good justification, although you can do this with PDF; even if no
body does.



> The most useful feature I've found when reading on a tablet is being
> able to zoom in and out, and eventually being able to follow a link.

Like on the web.

Phil

Received on Monday, 29 April 2013 10:20:28 UTC