[Coin-discuss] COIN-OR Technical Reports?

[Tuomo Takkula]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:

> 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.

[snip analysis]

A fourth option (which probably has not been tried before in our field)
could be some kind of minimally formal reviewing process for user
guides, tutorials and technical documentation in general, reviewed to
whatever degree which seems adequate.

The formality should just serve to achieve a minimal level of
commonality, comprehensiveness, accessability and quality for the same
class of documents, and should give the whole repository a clearer
structure in terms of audience and purpose.

Of course, the amount of scientific credit one would obtain by
submitting, refereeing and editing such things would naturally depend on
the overall quality of the resulting documents and of the respository as
a whole.

The benefit would be some progress in one of the areas where COIN is
particularily lacking, namely in user documentation. It just too often
still boils down to "use the source, Luke".

Best regards
Tuomo Takkula