Where to publish helpful, but informal papers?

Question

I have written an informal article 9 pages long, that covers some general, lightly technical material. I wrote it because this material is not covered elsewhere, and I am knowledgeable in the field. The material is light in the sense that it is not highly innovative, or even highly useful, but it is "good to know". The subject matter is information security, with respect to radio systems.

I have posted the article on my personal webpage. Should I bother to submit it somewhere for 'proper' publication? It is not technical or innovative enough for IEEE or ACM journals (or even letters). Or should I just keep it on my page for people with search engine inquiries related to the subject matter to possibly stumble across?

Answer 1

If you don't know where to publish something, but nonetheless it is of an appropriate standard and you consider it worth sharing, why not posting it to arXiv? You won't get prestige just for submitting, but:

• people can find it,
• you can easily point to it,
• it is timestamped.

Answer 2

Submit it to a conference that publishes a proceeding. Check the ACM SIGs. There are at least a couple that might work.

Answer 3

Some options: trade journal (not an academic journal), LinkedIn article, blog post.

Answer 4

An answer in a comment by alarge, who is from life sciences background:

Might you consider some protocol or method journals (e.g. SpringerProtocols, Methods, EPJ Plus)? Quite often the content of these types of publications are useful to some people, especially those new to the field, but do not really present any new results (and the methods have been described somewhere else, but usually just not in full detail). Alternatively, some pedagogical journals (in the style of Am. J. Phys.). I do not know about the submission process of the journals I mentioned. Finally, the omnijournal PLoS One in principle should accept everything that is technically correct.

Adipro in the comments suggested https://royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos

Answer 5

You may try https://www.researchgate.net/

But I am not sure what their policies are.

Since I wrote this information, two people downvoted the answer, not saying why.

But this answer is factually correct. You can make scientific papers available through Researchgate, and probably some that are not too scientific. I have done so, though I would not choose Researchgate as my primary publication medium (all of my papers there were first published on some other venue).

Some people do get my papers through Researchgate, so it does fulfill the dissemination purpose to some extent. I am also told by researchgate about citations of my papers, so that I can see what people make of them, and I can get some of the citing papers through Researchgate. I do not really use Researchgate professionally: I am retired. But then, the question was also for informal availability on the web.

I know that some people do not like Researchgate for various reasons, and possibly for opposite reasons. Mainly, they seem to lack resources and many of their weaknesses do not get corrected. But they do not ask for money as does Academia.edu. So I use them for what they have to give, and try to be tolerant with their failings.

One of the major problems is, as remarked in other places, that they do not manage well authors that have the same name. I am particularly aware of that because my name is somewhat common. But then Researchgate is not a reference medium.

So my advice is to be very precise on the paper itself about your name, affiliation, and any other public information that will identify you as a single person (using your social security number might work, but is not advised). If the paper appeared somewhere else, try to also give that information. And remember to be careful with copyright, and to preferably know what you are doing in this respect (even when you choose to disagree with some publisher).

Last remark for downvoters. My information is factually correct. So you are really criticizing the operation of Researchgate, even though all the user want is to make his papers accessible. It would be better and more useful to explicitly state, however tersely in a comment, what your objections are.

Answer 6

I wouldn't bother with further publication. You've pretty much nailed the issue: search engines work quite well to "winnow the chaff" (to quote Rivest) when the right questioner comes along, and good security through the Petabytes of obscurity when they don't.