Via Luca Aceto, news of a new effort to create an open access electronic proceedings. The idea is that you organize your conference/workshop, and apply for inclusion of your proceedings in the EPTCS: you handle the reviewing, they take the papers and manage the long term archiving (via the arxiv).
I'm imagining this will only be useful for small conferences/workshops, but it's a good way of making sure you don't have a dead-link problem a few years later when the person who hosted the website for the conference leaves their institution and forgets to hand over maintainence to someone else. Also, the arxiv imprimatur will make sure the papers will get more visibility than otherwise.
Thanks for posting the news, Suresh! I hope others will follow suit.
ReplyDeleteNote that DBLP will list EPTCS publications, and this will also add some further visibility to the papers published in EPTCS proceedings.
At least in the volume B community, there seems to be a feeling that the time is ripe for an initiative like EPTCS. We were very happy to see that all the workshops affiliated with CONCUR 2009, including some that have been running for over ten years, have decided to switch from Elsevier ENTCS to EPTCS.
Regarding the proceedings of large conferences in open-access outlets, you should expect to hear some news very soon. Much is happening on that front too.
Why do you think that this cannot work for large conferences? What is the difference? I think this is a great development and will let us get out various silly things like 12 page limits in LNCS format etc. Last year's FSTTCS used online proceedings following STACS. Unfortunately they still kept the page limit with small page sizes which didn't make sense to me.
ReplyDeleteok, so let me unpack my thoughts a bit. I viewed this as providing two main advantages: publicity (via arxiv/dblp) and archiving (via the arxiv).
ReplyDeleteMy comment about larger conferences was primarily related to publicity, because I didn't think archiving was a big problem. But I did forget the crazy formatting that LNCS imposes, so maybe you're right about that.
So if you already arxiv your papers, there will now be two of them on the arxiv? Or will this be a special section of the arxiv? (It sounded like it but I could not tell.)
ReplyDeleteI think it still makes total sense to keep page and formatting requirements. The conference proceedings is not meant to be a replacement for a refereed journal version, nor for a full preprint version. If page limits are eliminated, for example, then fewer papers will ever have journal versions, and these long, unrefereed articles that (unlike regular arxiv papers) cannot be revised would be very bad.
Interesting!
ReplyDelete