Trying arXiv

We were pleased that our paper (n.d.a) was accepted in a special issue associated with the Extended Semantic Web Conference, as one of the best papers from the Workshops. Of course, it is lovely to be acknowledged in this way, and we’re very grateful to the organisers of Sepublica for this. However, it did place us in the difficult position. In the end, I decided to turn this offer down on the grounds that I did not want to publish with Springer if it meant that the article would become Toll Access.

Spurred on by this, therefore, I have finally got around to submitting a paper to arXiv. Pretty poor show on my behalf, I fear, as I should have done this years ago with most of my papers. I was put off by the possibility of extra work. As a result of which I have only a single paper in arXiv (n.d.b) and this was submitted by the first author. I have now also submitted “three steps” to arXiv and it is now available (n.d.c) In a sense, this is box ticking. After all the work is publically available anyway. However, submitting to arXiv probably has an advertising function, and I have been a scientist long enough to know that self-promotion is important. I am also honest enough to admit that arXiv’s skills in digital preservation and high availability are far in excess of mine (n.d.d)

I have to say that I am very impressed with this process. In turns of submitting LaTeX it is far easier than LaTeXtoWordpress (n.d.e) although as this is still alphaish software, I should not be surprised by this. Of course, the end result is the PDF on the web, rather than a web native format which is rather more straight-forward with LaTeX as this is what it is designed for. Regardless, the process took less than 10 minutes, most of which was reading of documentation and registering. It will take less time in future, I think.

It actually took less time to publish the paper with arXiv than accepting a license for another paper we have just had accepted at ECCB (this paper is first author by Michael Bell which is why it does not appear here yet). So, positive points for arXiv, negative for Oxford.