[Coin-discuss] COIN-OR Technical Reports?

[Matthew Saltzman]

Some thoughts off the top of my head:

There are several possible ways to take this idea, depending on what we 
really want to achieve:

(1) A place for people to post things like user guides, tutorials, 
narratives of user experiences, etc. that benefit the COIN-OR community 
but are not obviously suited for publication elsewhere.

(2) A tech report/preprint archive, with levels of peer review ranging 
from none through cursory maybe to (anonymous?) public reviews.

(3) A real peer-reviewd e-journal.

Of these, (1) is certainly easy enough to do.  Options include a Wiki, 
discussion board, page of archived PDF or HTML docs, etc.  Peer review 
would be minimal--just enough to verify that the document has some 
relevance to COIN-OR--and the documents could even be "open source", 
maintained in a Wiki or Subversion repository and evolving in response to 
user contributions.  It would be nice to have these kinds of documents, 
but academic contributors generally won't receive much credit for them.

(2) duplicates efforts like Arxiv and Optimization Online.  Publishing 
tech reports with us would offer less visibility than the others (our 
audience is naturally smaller), maybe more than individual university 
repositories, but has the advantage of reaching the COIN-OR community more 
directly.  Again, academic credit depends on peer review, so there 
wouldn't be much for contributors.  If papers were published elsewhere, 
they'd probably have to be taken down and replaced with links.  Paper 
contributed to other repos could certainly be linked from our site anyway.

(3) is a challenge.  It would have to be done in a way that would earn and 
maintain a reputation for quality that would provide authors with credit 
similar to publishing in some of the other journals in our field.  It 
needs a peer review infrastructure and provide timely turnaround. 
Running a journal is not a simple matter.  Good models here are INFORMS 
Transactions on Education (ite.pubs.informs.org) and Electronic Journal of 
Combinatorics (http://www.combinatorics.org/).

Comments?

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs