[Coin-discuss] COIN-OR Technical Reports?

[kevin.c.furman at exxonmobil.com]

I came up with an idea at INFORMS and I wanted to start a discussion.  All
of the COIN members at the conference to whom I mentioned the idea seemed
positive about it.

During Brady Hunsaker's talk at INFORMS about solver parameter tuning he
mentioned that in the academic community there is essentially no credit for
tuning parameters every 6 months since one could not write a journal
article about that so often.  I am sure there are also many other things
related to software development that essentially would receive little or no
recognition / acknowledgement.

My idea is to create a system for COIN-OR Technical Reports.  In this way,
something that is useful for the community can be documented, while also
providing an extra line in the resume / CV.  Also, I think it would further
help in one area in which COIN is currently somewhat lax by providing
additional documentation related to the projects.

We could keep it simple by requiring only minimal refereeing via some kind
of "buddy system".   I think the start-up effort would be minimal and
limited to creating a few document templates for maintaining a consistent
format (LaTeX / Word / OpenOffice), defining a numbering system, and
creating a page on the website to maintain things as e-print.  In addition,
we could potentially also expand the idea to having other documents such as
tutorials and user and/or reference guides.  I also think we should start
archiving COIN-OR related conference presentations as well.

The only wrinkle may possibly be related to how we would want to handle the
copyrights for these reports.

Kevin Furman