Internal reports and on-line articles in the
Department of Computer and Information Science

The internal publication system at IDA changed with the beginning of 1997. The following is a summary of both the old and the new publication system.

Since we became aware of the various problems that may be associated with this kind of distribution, involving both copyright issues and the protection of priority of results, a new system is now being created.

Starting in 1997, the use of departmental technical reports was replaced by the following three, complementary arrangements:

• A Linköping University Electronic Press which puts electronic articles on-line in a persistent way (they can not change or disappear from the net).

• The use of an FTP directory where each researcher can post her or his articles on-line, and refer to them from her WWW homepage. There is no guarantee for persistence: the author is technically free to change or to remove posted articles.

• The use of an online publication register which lists all articles published or co-published by researchers in the department. The publication register attempts to include links to on-line copies of the article, which may be both in the E-Press, in the author's FTP directory, or a URL with a publisher outside the university.

Note that the traditional departmental report served all of these purposes, but in fuzzy ways. Between the Electronic Press and the use of the FTP directory, the E-Press says explicitly that it publishes its works, although it is a question of unrefereed publishing - the refereeing is supposed to occur after the E-Press publication. Posting an article in an FTP directory, on the other hand, is definitely not publishing, since the posted work is not persistent. The traditional departmental report was in the greyzone between "published" and "not published".

Simmilarly, the publication register captures a third role of our traditional departmental reports: the list of dep't reports was by and large also a list of articles that had been published during the year. Now, we make it the explicit and only function of the publication register to list all the articles that have been published by IDA researchers, including E-Press articles, but excluding FTP posted articles.

The department does not attempt to organize the contents of the personal FTP directories; this is up to each author. The only role of the department is (1) to maintain the server; (2) to attempt to assure that files are not posted there in violation of existing copyright agreements. With respect to changes of articles after posting, the department strongly recommends that posted articles shall carry a date of most recent update, but it makes no attempt to enforce this rule.

The Linköping University Electronic Press does electronic publication - articles published by the E-Press are put on line and are guaranteed to stay on-line without change during at least 25 years. Articles published by researchers at IDA usually go into its series of Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science. Articles in this series should fall into one of the following five categories:

• First publication by E-Press for scientific articles
• Prepublication by E-Press ("preprints")
• Republication by E-Press
• Articles for a general audience
• Scientific background materials

The difference between the first and second category is as follows. Works in the prepublication category are (or will be) submitted to a periodical for review, revision, and publication, and it is expected:

• that a revised version of the article, with non-trivial changes, is likely to appear;
• that the copyright of the article, or the revised version of the article, is likely later to be transferred to elsewhere.

• that the present version of the article will survive as worthwhile reading;
• that the author will retain the copyright of the article.

The copyright status may influence the right of making copies e.g. for classroom use. As usual, the making of single copies for individual nonprofit use is always permitted. In all of the above cases there are some copyright restrictions.

The category of "articles for a general audience" contains research overviews both for professionals outside academia, and for the general public in the sense of "not computer science professionals".

The category of "scientific background materials" contains materials which has usually not been published at all in the pre-electronic age: measurement data and other records from experiments, documentation of programs, very long and tedious proofs, etc. - all kinds of materials which serve as validation for the results that are presented in the scientific articles.

The use of the publication register in the publication process is described in the
IDA standard publication procedure.