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Posts Tagged ‘Publication’

Public Paper Writing Discussions

June 28th, 2011 by Martin 5 Comments

After I explained the Public Paper Writing Process to my colleagues, I got some interesting feedback. Mostly comments on the additional overhead (transforming the paper into a blog format) which is generated by writing paper openly in the public. Also, the concern of getting too much comments on the public paper was risen and the question how to handle this was asked.
And, as writing a scientific paper is by no means a linear process, it might be difficult for readers to follow, because lots of updates happen when the paper deadline approaches.

The question of too much additional overhead is not difficult to address, because in this case, it simply boils down to the general question of how to collaborate online. In our case, the actual process is simple: we use subversion, tell the other co-authors what part of the paper is going to be edited by sending an eMail, update the paper, and commit the changes for the other co-authors to see. This works for us, because we use ASCII text files which contain the content, which include the Latex markup.

Now, if we decide to publish the content during the writing phase, we need to decide when to do this and to copy/paste the ASCII text (without the Latex markup) into a textbox in wordpress. Obviously, there is some editing necessary, but this can be helped with Latex to HTML tools and there are plugins (for blog systems like wordpress) that can handle Latex code.

The more difficult question, is however, to decide WHEN to publish WHAT. As already said, writing a scientific paper is meandering process with occasional dead ends and continuous updates of the paper content. One approach is to have a weekly schedule for publication, similar to weekly magazines. Every week there is either an update to an already published section of the paper or a new section. This schedule can be adapted, if necessary: longer intervals for times when experiments run or shorter intervals, if the deadline approaches.

However, the question of structuring and retrieving the current version of the paper (different versions, no linear sequence of paper sections, restructuring of the paper) is still open. We haven’t figured out a way to do this: one of our colleagues suggested to follow a Wiki approach and to have Wiki entries for each paper section.

We believe the best way to find out how this actually works is to do it. We are going to start the process next week with a paper for the 27th Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC). We are already writing the introduction and hope to have it ready for publication on the blog next week.

your ikangai science team

PS: We hope for lots of comments on our approach to write a scientific paper. The more the better .

Public Paper Writing Process Details

June 25th, 2011 by Martin 2 Comments

We are about to start with the Public Paper Writing Process. There are some open issues that we hope to address during the process itself. The most important issue is what to actually publish? Do we publish complete chapters or settle for a digest version? Another important question is in what order to publish? Do we start with an introduction of the paper? What do we do if there is no order in which the chapters appear? Do we provide a short summary of previous posts in each chapter? What about related work? How do we efficiently publish this? What about revised versions of chapters?

As you see, this journey is full of open questions to which (at least to some of which) we will hopefully find answers. In fact, we already have some ideas how to answer these questions, in particular the question of what to publish and in what order. We propose to publish both, completed and incomplete chapters in any order. The linearity of blogs – each entry has a unique time stamp – require that we have a kind of map that connects these unordered chapters to give an overview on the work that has happened so far. This map is also subject to modifications over time. For our current paper on “Mobile ad-hoc Service Composition” we start with the following structure:

Introduction

Motivating Example

Background on Tweetflows

Approach

Prototype

Discussion

Related Works

Conclusion and Outlook

We will link each of the chapters with the corresponding blog entries as soon as they are available. Let’s see what we will find out in the course of the next months.

your ikangai science team

Tracing the Scientific Paper Writing Process

June 22nd, 2011 by Martin No Comments

As discussed in our last post, we plan to write our next scientific paper publicly by posting the content directly on the blog. Making this process public has some interesting consequences. First of all, you break a fundamental rule: you tell the world about your ideas and concepts which are not yet carved in stone, i. .e, published in a peer-reviewed journal or in conference proceedings.
Publications in the latter can be easily counted and the more you have (in “good” journals, conferences) the better for you. And even better, if your work is actually cited by others, then your work has some measurable impact, because only good papers are cited. However, if for some reason, your work is rejected, then you are in trouble. In academia, your status is measured by the number of publications and citations. If you fail to get your work published, then you fail in academia (this kind of failure has been known to happened to famous computer scientists as well). Your work is simply invisible, because there is no public trace of it.

Making your work and the process of writing it public can help with this problem. If you publish each step of your work, for example, by blogging each chapter or parts of your paper, you produce a public trail of your work. Thus, your work is not invisible, even if your paper is rejected. This also helps with the alleged idea transfer phenomena between paper authors and paper reviewers: unless your work is visible as a publication, some reviewers might be overly inspired by your work and not be able to refer to you as originator.

An open publication production process is of particular interest, when put into the context of public funding. Universities get their money (for the most part?) from the public hand. Consequently, there is an interest by the public, to know what actually happens with the public money. The control of spending is easy when hardware material is bought – just go to the University Lab and check if there are really such expensive new computers. The assessment of the output of intellectual work is a different story. You cannot visit universities and measure this directly. This requires different mechanisms. But, what happens? Of course, publications are counted. This is easy and everyone understands it. The higher the numbers, the better. All very clear and simple. One of the obvious consequences is that failure to publish is very severe: you have no trace of your work and thus your intellectual output is zero.

Again, if you make your work transparent and publish your unfinished work on a blog, you produce a public trail. Something that is visible and can be counted if necessary; a proof of the existence of your scientific work, if you will, even if your work is unfinished or gets rejected in the end.

I believe that an open, traceable process can be of benefit for all involved. Authors of scientific papers can get early and direct feedback for their work and do not depend on a sometimes lengthy review process. Authors are inclined to write higher quality papers, because their work can be read by anyone – no more “speculative” paper submissions, where the author hopes for a “nice and kind” (unexperienced ?) reviewer. “Memetic” idea transfer from the author’s head to some reviewer’s head becomes more difficult: authors have proof for their work. And last but not least, the public hand has a right to know what has been done with their money.

your idealistic ikangai science team

Public Paper Writing

June 20th, 2011 by Martin 2 Comments

The process of writing a scientific paper is typically invisible to the outside world – authors typically submit their work to a conference or a journal after completing it. After the reviewing process is finished – and if the result is positive – the work is published. The time span from starting the work until it is publicly available varies: it can be a matter of weeks, months or sometimes even years. This also depends on the venue: some conferences have a longer (two-staged) review process which leads to longer waiting times.
Waiting for reviews can be frustrating and especially after a long wait rejections are difficult for the authors to cope with. After rejections, papers are rewritten and submitted to different conferences or journals (to be rejected again – as malicious tongues might say). This goes on and on, but eventually some reviewers have pity and accept the paper.
As discussed on numerous occasions, the peer review process itself is very important, but also has its (design?) problems. One of them has been discussed in the previous two paragraphs: review waiting time.
I propose to have an open and transparent process for writing a scientific paper: simply publish all material already during the writing process on a blog and make it available to everyone. Optimally, you get early feedback on your work, aside from feedback from your colleagues. It also helps you to think of your work in a more profound manner: by iteratively publishing parts you need to have something that readers can follow. Consequently, it helps to structure your work, and external opinions can be help to reshape your ideas – without having to wait for reviewer comments.
I am aware that there are objections like “what happens if somebody steals my ideas and publishes them earlier?” or “this all sounds very nice but it appears too idealistic, nobody would read your blog and comment on this”. The answer to the former is that “You can never be sure that a reviewer doesn’t steal your idea. But if you publish your idea/concept on your blog, then at least you have proof that it was your idea.” The second answer is simply “I will try this with my next paper. And besides: I’m being paid to be idealistic ”.

your ikangai science team