[Coin-discuss] Re: COIN-OR Technical Reports?

[kevin.c.furman at exxonmobil.com]

I think that some hybrid of (1), (2) and (4) are what I had in mind
originally.  The intent I had was for COIN-OR to provide a means to
document things that generally cannot be submitted for publication in a
journal, however still hold some technical merit, as well as providing
additional documentation related to the software.  The example of a study
on solver settings is a good one.  The computational results related to
determining default solver settings every few months would be useful to
users of the solver software, however it would not likely be acceptable for
publication in a journal (at least not every few months).

My suggestion would be to provide a page for archiving (PDF / HTML / Open
Office Document Format) technical reports / notes, tutorials and user's
guides and setting some minimal standards in terms of numbering and format
(templates for LaTeX / MS Word / Open Office) and limited peer review
requirements.

If there is a good response and COIN-OR members want to contribute journal
quality papers we can think about creating an online e-journal later on, or
perhaps organizing a COIN-OR cluster within an existing journal or
e-journal.

I would not expect there to be much "credit" for these reports, however
even epsilon is better than zero.  It would at least provide an outlet for
putting these documents out there in a structured and organized fashion
with at least some minimal acknowledgement of the effort while also
improving the level of documentation available for the COIN-OR projects.

Kevin C. Furman
Corporate Strategic Research
ExxonMobil Research & Engineering
kevin.c.furman at exxonmobil.com


>> 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