How to make my papers accessible to other researchers?

Question

I have published some papers in some conferences, but the problem is that the people in charge put them in bibliographic repositories, such as DBLP, and they take too much time to do that.

I would like to know how I can allow more people access to my publications, so they would be able to review them, use them if they want, maybe bring more ideas or even suggest that I correct something.

Initially, I was putting them in a personal webpage that I have created, but I took them off because I also got some papers accepted by ACM and IEEE and they require a payment to see them. In this last case, if I upload them for free (on my personal webpage) could I be charged with something by these institutions?

Answer 1

From the context of your question, I assume you are a computer scientist graduate student. (Computer scientist because you mention DBLP, and graduate student because you're worried about people finding your research quickly.) My answer is specific to computer science, especially the first two points.

• Just post your papers on your web page already. Among other things, posting your own papers will allow Google Scholar to find and index them after only a few days. Despite scary legal language to the contrary, neither ACM nor IEEE (or SIAM, or AMS, or Springer, or Elsevier, or...) has any interest in suing individual researchers for providing copies of their own papers.

• Post preprints of your work to the ArXiv and/or your institutional preprint server. Again, despite scary language to the contrary, granting a license to the ArXiv to publish your papers does not deprive ACM or IEEE (or SIAM, or AMS, or Springer, or Elsevier, or even ACS) the right to later publish peer-reviewed version of your papers later. Many publishers explicitly allow you to publish post-reviewed but pre-copy-edited preprints on the ArXiv and similar servers. Posting camera-ready versions is technically illegal, but neither ACM nor IEEE has any interest in suing individual users for such violations.

• Post publication announcements on Facebook/Google+/Twitter/your blog. Yes, this works. Really.

• Give lots of talks. At a minimum, you should give talks about your results in an appropriate local seminar. But especially for really strong results, you (or your advisor) should also arrange to have yourself invited to a few other institutions to give a talk.

• Send copies of your work directly to a few colleagues. Just send them email with a link to your web page. (Don't blindly send papers as attachments; remember that some people read email over the phone and pay by the byte.) But don't just spam the whole world. Limit your email to the small handful of influential people that you are sure will be interested — other researchers working on the same problem, people whose results you directly improve or extend, your advisor, and—if you're nearing a point like graduation or tenure where you need letters—a few potential letter-writers.

• Take the long view. It really is not important that see your results RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE ZOMG NOW NOW NOW !!!!111¡¡¡CXI. Relax. Yes, DBLP and other indexing services operate with a delay of several months. (Although my impression is DBLP has gotten faster, thanks to some outside funding that allowed them to hire more than one human being.) And yeah, that's frustrating. But in the long run, those few months of publication delay are not going to make a bit of difference.

Answer 2

You need to check with the specific rules of the journals to which you submit to determine what is or is not allowed. For instance, journals published by the American Institute of Physics allow you to publish preprints that are not created by the journal on servers like arXiv without having to pay any fees and without other major limitations. By contrast, American Chemical Society journals do not allow you to post preprints, even on your own homepage. You can link to their site, and after twelve months, the link becomes effectively "free."

But, beyond that, if you want to advertise your work, you will have to do it yourself. You can mention in it in presentations, and cite it in abstracts that you submit to other conferences. You can email colleagues or use social media (sites like academia.edu, LinkedIn or even Facebook to announce your paper. If you have specific colleagues you think would be interested in the paper, you can send it directly to them as well!

Answer 3

You should read the copyright transfer contract that you have signed.

In general, the major publishers tend to be fairly permissive nowadays as regards to online posting.

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With ACM conference publications, you can (and should) do all of the following:

• Before you submit the paper, post it to arXiv.org.

• After your paper has been accepted, post your own version of the paper (with an appropriate copyright notice) on:

  1. your own personal web page, and
  2. your university's open access repository.

• Later you can prepare a journal version ("major revision"), and you can do with it whatever you want — for example, submit it to an open access journal, post it online, etc.

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With IEEE conference publications, the main idea is similar: you can post your work to arXiv.org before submission and to your own home page and a university-wide open access repository after revision.

However, some details are a bit different. My reading of the policies is that with ACM you cannot update arXiv.org with a revised version, while IEEE requires that you update arXiv.org with the accepted version of the paper.

However, don't take my word, read the copyright transfer form (and additional explanations available on the publishers' web pages).

Answer 4

You should check the conditions of your journal using the SHERPA/RoMEO list. Most journals allow to publish your final draft (designed and typeset by yourself) on your institutes server right after publication and on open-access servers like arXiv.org 12 month after publication. Your institutes open-access server will also be found by e.g. Google Scholar.
Many journals will also send you an authors copy of your article which you can share with colleagues (e.g. via email) but you should not publish that one on the internet.