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Computing Research Repository (CoRR)Computing research relies heavily on the rapid dissemination of results. As a result, the formal process of submitting papers to journals has been augmented by other, more rapid, dissemination methods. Originally these involved printed documents, such as technical reports and conference papers. Then researchers started taking advantage of the Internet, putting papers on ftp sites and later on various web sites. But these resources were fragmented. There was no single repository to which researchers from the whole field of computing could submit reports, no single place to search for research results, and no guarantee that information would be archived at the end of a research project. This changed in September 1998. Through a partnership of ACM, the arXiv.org e-print archive (originally at Los Alamos, now based at Cornell), and NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library), an online Computing Research Repository (CoRR) has been established. The CoRR is available to all members of the community at no charge.We encourage you to use the service right away. It gains in value as more researchers use it. Submitting your research articles to the repository will be the surest way to have your work reach a wide audience. From here you can
BackgroundACM, like many other publishers, has started to provide its journals in both electronic and print versions. Feedback from ACM members has welcomed this transition, but the members have made it clear that they anticipate much more fundamental changes in scientific communication than simply converting traditional journals to a different medium. In May 1997, a committee was formed under the auspices of the ACM Publications Board to consider one such change: setting up an online repository for computing research. (The committee members were mainly of people active in digital libraries and electronic publishing.) The committee discussed three options for the design of the repository.The first option was to become part of the LANL repository. LANL started as a repository for high-energy physics eprints in 1991. It now covers most of physics, and has expanded to include repositories for nonlinear sciences, mathematics and computation and language. LANL had many attractive features. The most important was that it clearly worked and worked well. It now has over 75,000 eprints, is growing at the rate of about 25,000/year, handles over 70,000 transactions/day, and has over 35,000 users. Thanks to funding from the DOE and NSF, it also has a full-time staff. It is mirrored in 16 countries, has reasonable search facilities, and offers services such as email notification of new submissions of interest. We decided against this option primarily because the LANL interface was not open in the sense that it did not provide an interface to which other repositories could link. The second option was to become a node in the NCSTRL system. NCSTRL is essentially a common interface to the technical report collections of its (currently over 100) member institutions. It has been funded by DARPA and the National Science Foundations, with most of the technical work recently being carried out at Cornell University. The most important feature of NCSTRL from our point of view was that it was explicitly designed with an open interface. Its user interface was also somewhat friendlier than that of LANL, and it was a computer science effort. On the other hand, NCSTRL did not have all the software necessary for running a repository. The third option was to build a new system from scratch. This had the obvious advantage that we could do it right and the obvious disadvantage that it would take time. We settled on a hybrid approach that combines the best features of LANL and NCSTRL, and secured the cooperation of the two groups.We will be able to use the well-tested LANL software for submission, notification, and searching. The NCSTRL architecture will make it easy to build new gateways from which to access the files, with a more user-friendly interface and new features. (In fact, LANL will now be a node on NCSTRL.) We anticipate that our use of an open protocol will encourage other scholarly archives to join in this framework. The result could be a global multi-disciplinary research collection that could have substantial impact on the nature of scholarly publishing.
CoRR FAQHow do authors submit documents?Authors send their documents to the LANL repository, by email, by ftp, or by using Web interface provided by LANL. The LANL philosophy is to automate the process as much as possible. Authors are expected to provide their paper in specified formats. They are required to provide an abstract and to classify their papers by subject area (see below). Programs at LANL automatically check submissions for completeness and send email to authors if there are any omissions. These procedures have been refined over many years. Fine tuning may be needed for the slightly different needs of computing, but no fundamental changes are anticipated. How is the Repository organized? Authors submitting a paper will classify their papers in two ways: the first is by choosing a subject area from a list of subject areas and the second is by choosing a primary classification from among the roughly 100 third-level headings in the 1998 ACM Computing Classification System. The ACM classification scheme provides us with a relatively stable scheme that covers all research in computing. The subject areas are not mutually exclusive, nor do they (yet) provide complete coverage of the field. On the other hand, we hope that they better reflect the active areas of research in CS. We expect to add more subject areas and subdivide current subject areas depending on demand. Note that Computation and Language is one of the subject areas. The Computation and Language archive, which has been run from LANL since 1994, will be merged with CoRR; papers from that archive will be merged into the Computation and Language subarea. Are submissions refereed? Submissions are not refereed. They will be checked only for relatedness to the topic area, but not quality or novelty. Papers passing this simple check will appear in the repository within 24 hours. What facilities are provided? You can submit papers through the LANL interface. Through both LANL and NCSTRL, you can view recent submissions or all submissions. You can also request to be notified of new submissions in a given area (where an area is determined by a second-level heading in the Classification System). (Note that the user interface is quite different at LANL and NCSTRL.) What about copyright? Submission to the repository does not require a transfer of copyright. Authors will continue to retain copyright when they submit (although they may have to transfer rights if they wish to publish in certain journals). How long will papers stay on the repository? The intention is to have the repository be permanent (but see also the next question). Authors have 24 hours to withdraw or revise a paper. Updated versions of a paper can be posted at any time, but versions not removed or changed within 24 hours of sumission will remain on the Repository. The version of the paper accessed will be the most recent version, but there will be pointers to the earlier versions. How will this affect journal publication? In the long term, well-managed repositories, such as CoRR, will clearly change the role of conventional journals. There are fields (such as medicine and chemistry) for which publishers will not publish papers that have appeared on the web (even on an author's personal web site). This has not been the case in computer science, and is unlikely to become so. Researchers have come to expect that they will be able to make their papers available rapidly at online sites, such as CoRR, while still submitting their papers to conventional journals. ACM's interim copyright policy explicitly encourages this model. The Association has committed to allowing documents to remain on the Repository after publication in ACM journals; it will also be possible to link to the definitive version on the ACM Digital Library. The ACM Publications Board will work to convince other publishers to adopt a similar policy. Submitting a paper to the Repository should not affect an author's ability to publish it in a journal. Some journals may require authors to remove a paper from the Repository once it appears. If this is the case, we will remove a paper at an author's request, but we hope that this will be the exception rather than the rule. What submission formats are acceptable? You can submit using TeX/LaTeX/AMSTeX, HTML+GIF, PDF, or Postscript. Note, however, if you have Postscript generated from some variant of Tex, it will be rejected in favor of the Tex file (see http://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex for the reasons that TeX is so strongly preferred). You can also get some help on submitting LaTeX source What happens when electronic formats change? While this is clearly a serious concern, we expect that software will be written to automatically convert the files in the repository to whatever platform is current, just as there is now software to convert Postscript to PDF. How does ACM view the Repository? ACM strongly supports the development of the Repository as part of a broad strategy of providing the services that its members require. However, ACM sees CoRR as a service to the whole computing community. Already there have been informal discussions with other societies about co-sponsoring the Repository or developing interlinked services. This interest comes from both the United States and Europe. Clearly, the community would be best served by the various societies collaborating, rather than having them develop competing strategies. For its own part, ACM is planning to link CoRR with other ACM activities. For example, users of the ACM Digital Library will be able to include CoRR in their searches. ACM expects to develop policies and procedures to make it easy to submit papers from CoRR to an ACM journal. However, there is certainly no expectation that all CoRR papers will be submitted to ACM journals. Authors are free to submit their papers to any journal of their choice. And some papers on CoRR may never be published at all in the conventional research literature. Who is funding the Repository? Currently, CoRR is riding on the coattails of funding provided to LANL and NCSTRL, and this should suffice for the foreseeable future. The long-run funding situation is not yet clear. The LANL archives have become so important to physics researchers that it is inconceivable that they would let the service be lost. If CoRR is equally successful, surely funds will be found to maintain it. Providing the basic repository services does not seem to be an expensive proposition. Of course, new development can be expensive, but we should be able to take advantage of work done by other projects, so it may not be not be necessary to do too much development in-house. At least for now, funding does not appear to be a critical issue. What is planned for the future? Some plans currently being discussed include:
colleagues. Feedback and suggestions are more than welcome; send them to cs-admin@arxiv.org.
Committee CompositionRon Boisvert, NISTJames Cohoon, Virginia Peter Denning (ex officio -- chair of the ACM Publications Board) Jon Doyle, MIT Ed Fox, Virginia Tech James Gray, Microsoft Joseph Halpern, Cornell (chair) Carl Lagoze, Cornell Bernard Lang, INRIA Michael Lesk, Bellcore Steve Minton, ISI Hermann Maurer, Graz, Austria Andrew Odlyzko, AT&T Michael O'Donnell, U. Chicago Bernard Rous, ACM Jerome Saltzer, MIT Erik Sandewall, Linkoping, Sweden Stuart Shieber, Harvard Jeff Ullman, Stanford Rebecca Wesley, Stanford Ian Witten, Waikato, New Zealand
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