Thursday, February 18, 2016

Posting Papers

In the ancient days of the 80's, if someone wanted a paper from you, they would ask and you would mail via post. Sometimes I would get a self-addressed envelope asking for a certain paper. Departments would maintain collections of local technical reports. Someone could request a paper, an admin would make a copy, slap on a cover and send it out.

In the 90's, we started distributing papers by email, but then who you sent papers to started to matter. As soon as we had a browser in 1993, for fairness, though more because I got tired of responding to paper requests, I put together a page that had electronic copies of all my papers. Over the years those files have gone from postscript to pdf and the page started as html and later I used bib2html which I kept going on my old Chicago CS account that nobody bothered turning off. Bib2html failed to work for me last week, I asked the twitterverse for an alternative and they answered. I went with bibbase and now can reveal my new paper page. Pretty easy to tell from the page when I started as a department chair. I kept the old page active just in case but it will no longer be updated.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother and just let people use Google Scholar or DBLP to find my papers. I guess I'm just not ready to give up this record of my research life.

2 comments:

  1. One obvious reason to bother is that unless you post a copy of a (near) final manuscript, GS and other search tools will lead people to versions for which you have signed away copyright, which are not freely readable.

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  2. Only if you published your paper in venues which still make you give up your rights--a
    subset of publishers that is fast disappearing.
    Some journals (Theory of Computing: http://theoryofcomputing.org/ CJTCS: http://cjtcs.cs.uchicago.edu/ , etc.) were always open access, and many other places offer alternatives like one-time pay for open access, and allowing a copy of
    one's papers in one's home page.

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