Can I put my accepted-but-not-yet-on-IEEEXplore paper online?

Question

I am currently hunting for research internships and going to apply for several positions. To make the admission officers accessible to my stories and experiences in further detail, I have created a personal Google Site showing those details and added the link into my CV.

Now it comes to my research part. I have one paper that is just informed to be accepted by a conference. However, since the conference is not held yet, the paper isn't available online.

I wish to make the paper accessible to the admission committee. How should I do that without harming my and my co-authors' interest?

Can I upload it to arXiv? Can I upload it to my own Google Site? Should I inform my co-authors of this? Does it really matter to them?

Answer 1

I would not urge as much caution as the other answer/comment. Of course, checking with your co-authors and publishing agreement won't do any harm but ...

... I would strongly urge you to put the pre-print of the paper online and add a link in the CV since the folks handling your application may want to see the paper but may not be bothered to email you for it ... they will have a long list of CVs to get through, esp. in the initial phases where a confirmed publication could really make you stand out.

I emphasise this because I've seen lots of CVs for research internships and they often try to conncoct publications, mentioning "paper communicated to XYZ", or mentioning internal technical reports, etc. Having a link to a full-text will show them that it is not a vapour-paper and will let them get an idea of the quality of the work. Better still if you can add a link to the list of accepted papers for the conference with your paper in it.

As for contravening a publishing agreement ... any decent CS/EE publisher will, at the very least, allow you to put the pre-print -- the version you submit to them -- online on a personal homepage. If for some reason they don't, you shouldn't publish your work with them. Putting papers on homepages is a common practice that should be strongly encouraged.

If the publisher is IEEE themselves, then it's for sure no problem.

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Risk of putting your paper online on your personal page: a 0.000001% chance of getting a cease and desist letter from your publisher asking you to take it offline, in which case you take the paper offline and never submit to that publisher ever again.

Risk of not putting your paper online on your personal page: a small but significantly greater than 0.000001% chance of the folks handling your application not taking the publication into account and you not getting a job offer as a result.

Answer 2

As the comment from Nate Eldredge said: read your copyright agreement and ask co-authors.

You can definitely list the paper in your publications if you mark it as "accepted for...". If the admission committee is interested in reading it (often it is just interested in the title, unless this is the summary of your previous work), they can ask for it.

Answer 3

From my own submissions at IEEE conferences and journals, I remember the following points:

• you are allowed to put a pre-print online if it is mandatory in your institution. I believe the sentence did also mention that it should happen on your institution pre-print server, so the extension of this notion to Arxiv needs to be worked out (though it is common practice, as far as I have seen);
• you are not allowed to publish online the final version of a paper. The final version is the one with the manuscript number, journal issue and so on;
• be careful when it comes to anonymous submissions (like some IEEE conferences). You have to wait until the official publication of the acceptance list.