Re: Cost and access (Was Re: [ESWC 2015] First Call for Paper)

On 7 Oct 2014, at 15:31, Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk<mailto:phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>>
 wrote:

"Gray, Alasdair" <A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk<mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>> writes:
This is true. So, if the reason that ESWC and ISWC only accept papers in
PDF is because we need LNCS for tenure and that they will only take PDF,
it would be good to have a public statement about this.

I think PDF is only at the submission stage. For camera ready the source file
(s) - latex or word - are required.

Again, I'd like to know for sure.

For ISWC this year, it was certainly the case that I needed to submit the latex for the camera ready version.

This presumably is for Springer/conference organisers to be able to get all the appropriate metadata that they add for indexing.


Also in this brave new world, how would the length of a submission be determined?

There are lots of alternative measures. Word limits would work.

Page based limits are pretty daft anyway. I am sure that you, like I,
have do some strange \baselineskip fiddling or shrunk a figure to 99,
then 98, then 97% until it finally fits, although it isn't entirely
visible any more. Word-limits avoid this.

For myself, I would drop word limits as well, and specify a reading time
of around 30 minutes. I have certainly gone through papers in the past
and made them less readable so that they fit within the page limit. Ever
removed all your adjectives? What about replacing conjunctions with
punctuation? If the reviewers get bored ploughing through an overly long
paper, they just send a review with tl;dr.


We should certainly be doing what we can to make the message of our papers more accessible for future researchers. Remember that reviewers are no different from other researchers, although they do have the task of witnessing that the contribution of the paper is accurate. To this end, we should be making use of technology that enables the papers to be read in the readers preferred format, without losing the meaning intended by the author.

Grappling around with page limits is a complete waste of time, particularly with all the tricks that authors use to trick they system.

Alasdair

One of the interesting thing about innovating with the publication
process is that it helps to find out what about a scientific paper we
actually care about and what are just hang overs from our past.

Phil



Alasdair J G Gray
Lecturer in Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, UK.
Email: A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk<mailto:A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk>
Web: http://www.alasdairjggray.co.uk
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-4872
Telephone: +44 131 451 3429
Twitter: @gray_alasdair








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