Publications in computer sciences: use arXiv!

Posted Jul 27, 2010 8:36 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Publications in computer sciences: use arXiv! by danielpf
Parent article: Realtime Linux: academia v. reality

I agree. Meanwhile, in biology the "open access" movement is gaining fast, and several funding agencies (NIH, Wellcome Trust and others) require work to be freely accessible on PubMed no later than 6 (WT) or 12 (NIH) months after publication. (This can be the final author version of the manuscript, not necessarily the published version.)

The pressure needs to come from the scientists. In the case of arXiv, high-energy physicists went ahead and set it up, and developed the culture of depositing preprints there before even submitting to a journal (let alone publication). The journals basically had to go along with it. In the case of biology, scientists actively campaigned for it, to the extent of setting up an entire new open-access publisher (PLoS) that is now very highly regarded. Computer scientists, it seems, are content to leave their preprints on their homepages and let Google do the indexing.

Publications in computer sciences: use arXiv!

Posted Jul 27, 2010 10:05 UTC (Tue) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link] (1 responses)

Same Here! I was going to write something very close to your response. I was previously in mathematics/computer science, which used to be almost entirely pay-walled. Likely/apparently this is still the case. I'm now in bioinformatics, and the change in attitude is very refreshing. Research should as a matter of principle be available to all - as well as the underlying data, acknowledging that there will always be context specific considerations.

Publications in computer sciences: use arXiv!

Posted Jul 27, 2010 13:51 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

The biggest problem in Computer Science was the fact that people care about the technology. The physicists did not care whether the system they were using supported the concept of transclusions, or whether it used a self-describing metadata format, or even if it could be proven to scale across a distributed system. They were pragmatic about it, because they're physicists not computer scientists and so the computers were just a tool.

Whereas for a Computer Scientist the open access technology itself is a potential research topic. So you get crazy stuff like a project to figure out how to perform searches across potentially hundreds of OA repositories in a distributed system, all of them with separate policies and metadata formats - instead of one working repository.

On the other hand, once things started to take off, this turned into an advantage. Can't get administrative funds for the much needed performance optimisations in your archive containing 25 years of data structures papers? Make it a research project and get a grant. This seems to have worked out OK for e.g. Southampton.