proposal: archival NIPS technical report series (Re: double blind review)

[Valentin Zhigulin]

You don't need to create an archive, it was put up long time ago by 
physics community at www.arxiv.org. At some point they even had a 
section on ANN, cognitive science, etc but it was removed, don't know 
the reason. Probably they can restore it easily if the number of 
interested people will be high

-Valentin


tbreuel at parc.com wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 20, 2002 at 06:51:08AM -0800, Christine Bolbirer wrote:
> 
>>If what the author is communicating in his or her paper is truly ground
>>breaking and worthy of recognition then with enough effort it will be
>>recognized (if not by the NIPS reviewers then the scientific community in
>>general).
>>
> 
> It may be recognized, but there is a good chance that the original author
> will not be getting the credit.
> 
> The reality is that most ideas, even ground breaking ones, are "in the
> air", and given a year or two, several people will come up with them.
> Each rejection introduces a publication delay of several months.
> And rejections are more likely the more ground breaking a new idea is.
> 
> If we have a system (and to some degree we do), where unknown researchers
> have to live with a couple of rejections for their papers describing
> new ideas while well-known researchers get their papers accepted right
> away on the strength of their reputation, you really stack the deck very
> strongly against unknown researchers being able to make a splash
> with something new.
> 
> And that's the key problem: a rejection not only deprives authors
> of the chance to add a publication to their resumes, more importantly,
> it deprives them of the opportunity to establish precedence for their
> ideas.  The latter is far worse than the former.
> 
> In practice, people try to get around this these days and establish
> precedence for their ideas by putting drafts or memos on their web sites,
> but that creates its own set of problems.  Those papers are not archival,
> they can't be referenced, and their publication dates are not verifiable.
> And if nobody cites them, even if such informal publications were to
> establish precedence, what would be the point?
> 
> The way to address this problem traditionally has been to create archival
> publications that do not require a review.  The National Academy of
> Sciences has something like that for its members.  And larger universities
> and research labs used to have archival technical report series, but many
> of them have become non-archival (an archival publication is one with
> a verifiable publication date and content, and expected to be available
> indefinitely, usually established by having printed copies archived at
> multiple libraries).
> 
> Since few people these days have the ability to publish in archival
> technical report series, maybe what we need is to establish a NIPS
> technical report series: something that is archival, searchable, and
> has verifiable publication dates but is not peer reviewed and would not
> preclude later publication in a peer reviewed conference or journal.
> 
> NIPS technical reports would replace informal and non-archival publication
> of drafts and memos.  They would establish precedence for good and novel
> ideas until reviewers are ready to accept them into a peer-reviewed
> publication.  And unlike "Joe's memo with an uncertain publication
> date on http://webhosting.com/~joe/memo.pdf", they would have a
> persistent and verifiable citation and publication date.
> 
> Here at PARC, we have built something like that for internal publications.
> We use cryptographic signatures to ensure the validty of publication
> dates and document contents.  Abstracts and signatures (and, if desired,
> content) are disseminated via an E-mail list so that many people will
> have a record of the publication and its signature.  I don't know whether
> it's completely tamper-proof, but it's probably no worse than the
> traditional paper-based systems.
> 
> Thomas.
> 
> .
> 
>