Computing Research Repository for Computer Science

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Researchers have made their papers available by putting them on personal webpages, departmental pages, and on various {\em ad hoc\/} sites known only to cognoscenti. Until now, there has been no way to integrate these efforts and make available to the Computing community a uniform source of papers covering the whole field. This is about to change. Through a partnership of ACM http://www.acm.org, the Los Alamos e-Print archive http://xxx.lanl.gov, and NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library — http://xxx.lanl.gov, an online Computing Research Repository (CoRR) is being established. The Repository has been integrated into the collection of computer science technical reports and other material available through NCSTRL and will be linked with the ACM Digital Library. Most importantly, CoRR will be available to all members of the community at no charge.

We encourage you to test the service http://xxx.lanl.gov/cs/intro.html right away. It gains in value as more researchers use it. Submitting your research articles to the Repository will be the surest way to have your work reach a wide audience. You can already browse and search the Repository and subscribe to get notification of new articles of interest to you.

In the rest of this article, we briefly describe how the Repository has been set up and answer some frequently asked questions.

Some background

In May 1997, a group was formed under the auspices of the ACM Publications Board to consider how an electronic repository for computing research should be set up. (Appendix A gives the membership of the committee, which consisted mainly of people active in digital libraries and electronic publishing.) We discussed three options for the design of the Repository.

The first option was to become part of the LANL repository. LANL started as a repository for high-energy physics eprints in 1991. It now covers most of physics and has expanded to include repositories for nonlinear sciences, mathematics, and computation and language. LANL had many attractive features. The most important was that it clearly worked and worked well. It now has over 75,000 eprints, is growing at the rate of about 25,000/year, handles over 70,000 transactions/day, and has over 35,000 users. Thanks to funding from the DOE and NSF, it also has a full-time staff. It is mirrored in 16 countries, has reasonable search facilities, and offers services such as email notification of new submissions of interest.

We decided against this option primarily because the LANL interface was not open in the sense that it did not provide an interface to which other repositories could link.

The second option was to become a node in the NCSTRL system. The most important feature of NCSTRL from our point of view was that it was explicitly designed with an open interface and it was a computer science effort. On the other hand, NCSTRL did not have all the software necessary for running a repository.

The third option was to build a new system from scratch. This had the obvious advantage that we could do it right and the obvious disadvantage that it would take time.

We settled on a hybrid approach that combines the best features of LANL and NCSTRL, and secured the cooperation of the two groups. We will be able to use the well-tested LANL software for submission, notification, and searching. The NCSTRL architecture will make it easy to build new gateways from which to access the files, with a more user-friendly interface and new features. (In fact, LANL will now be a node on NCSTRL.) We anticipate that our use of an open protocol will encourage other scholarly archives to join in this framework. The result could be a global multi-disciplinary research collection that could have substantial impact on the nature of scholarly publishing.

CoRR FAQ

How is the Repository organized?

Authors submitting a paper will classify their papers in two ways: the first is by choosing a subject area from a list of subject areas and the second is by choosing a primary classification from among the roughly 100 third-level headings in the 1998 ACM Computing Classification System (see http://www.acm.org/class/1998/overview.html). The ACM classification scheme provides us with a relatively stable scheme that covers all research in computing. The subject areas are not mutually exclusive, nor do they (yet) provide complete coverage of the field. On the other hand, we hope that they better reflect the active areas of research in CS. The initial list of subject areas is given in Appendix B.

We expect to add more subject areas and subdivide current subject areas depending on demand. Note that Computation and Language is one of the subject areas. The Computation and Language archive, which has been run from LANL since 1994, will be merged with CoRR; papers from that archive will be merged into the Computation and Language subarea.

Are submissions refereed?

Submissions are not refereed. They will be checked only for relatedness to the topic area, but not quality or novelty. Papers passing this simple check will appear in the Repository within 24 hours.

What facilities are provided

You can submit papers through the LANL interface. Through both LANL and NCSTRL, you can view recent submissions or all submissions. You can also request to be notified of new submissions in a given area (where an area is determined by a second-level heading in the Classification System). (Note that the user interface is quite different at LANL and NCSTRL.)

What about copyright?

Submission to the Repository does not require a transfer of copyright. Authors will continue to retain copyright when they submit (although they may have to transfer rights if they wish to publish in certain journals).

How long will papers stay on the Repository?

The intention is to have the Repository be permanent (but see also the next question). Authors have 24 hours to withdraw or revise a paper. Updated versions of a paper can be posted at any time, but versions not removed or changed within 24 hours of submission will remain on the Repository. The version of the paper accessed will be the most recent version, but there will be pointers to the earlier versions.

How will this affect journal publication?

Submitting a paper to the Repository should not affect your ability to publish it in a journal. There are fields (such as medicine) for which publishers will not publish papers that have appeared on the web (even on an author's personal web site). This does not appear likely to happen in computer science. Some journals may require authors to remove a paper from the Repository once it appears. If this is the case, we will remove a paper at an author's request. ACM has committed to allowing e-prints to remain on the Repository after publication in ACM journals; it will also be possible to link to the definitive version on the ACM DL. We will work to convince other publishers to adopt a similar policy.

What submission formats are acceptable?

You can submit using Tex/Latex/AMSTex, HTML+GIF, PDF, or Postscript. Note, however, if you have Postscript generated from some variant of Tex, it will be rejected in favor of the Tex file (see http://xxx.lanl.gov/help/faq/whytex for the reasons that Tex is so strongly preferred).

What happens when electronic formats change?

While this is clearly a serious concern, we expect that software will be written to automatically convert the files in the Repository to whatever platform is current, just as there is now software to convert Postscript to PDF.

How does ACM view the Repository?

ACM strongly supports the development of the Repository. Users of the ACM Digital Library will be able to include CoRR in their searches. ACM expects to develop policies to make it easy to submit papers on CoRR to an ACM journal.

What is planned for the future?

Some plans currently being discussed include:

1. constructing a gateway on the ACM web site and improving the interface at NCSTRL.
2. adding a comment facility
3. adding facilities to allow automatic forward pointers to relevant papers that were not referenced in the original submission (such as papers that appeared after the submission).
4. expanding the scope of the Repository so that it includes conference proceedings and perhaps more ephemeral information like job postings and conference listings
5. using the Repository as a testbed for building better information retrieval facilities.

This Repository is meant to be a service to the community. It will succeed only with your participation and that of your colleagues. Feedback and suggestions are more than welcome; send them to cs-admin\@xxx.lanl.gov.

Appendix A: Committee Composition

Ron Boisvert, NIST
James Cohoon, Virginia
Peter Denning (ex officio} — chair of the ACM Publications Board)
Jon Doyle, MIT
Ed Fox, Virginia Tech
Jim Gray, Microsoft
Joe Halpern, Cornell (chair)
Carl Lagoze, Cornell
Bernard Lang, INRIA
Mike Lesk, Bellcore
Steve Minton, ISI
Hermann Maurer, Graz, Austria
Andrew Odlyzko, ATT
Michael O'Donnell, U. Chicago
Bernard Rous, ACM
Jerry Saltzer, MIT
Erik Sandewall, Linkoping, Sweden
Stuart Shieber, Harvard
Jeff Ullman, Stanford
Rebecca Wesley, Stanford
Ian Witten, Waikato, New Zealand

Appendix B: Subject Areas and Moderators

Architecture - William Waite (waite@cs.colorado.edu)
Artificial Intelligence - Erik Sandewall (ejs@ida.liu.se)
Computation and Language - Stuart Shieber (shieber@eecs.harvard.edu)
Computational Science, Engineering, and Finance - Ron Boisvert (boisvert@cam.nist.gov)
Computational Complexity - Lane Hemaspaandra (coco@cs.rochester.edu)
Computational Geometry - Joe O'Rourke (orourke@cs.smith.edu)
Computers and Society - Lorrie Cranor (lorrie@research.att.com)
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Gio Wiederhold and Oscar Firschein (acmgo@db.stanford.edu)
Cryptography and Security - Mihir Bellare (mihir@cs.ucsd.edu)
Databases - Jim Gray (gray@microsoft.com)
Data Structures and Algorithms - David Karger (karger@theory.lcs.mit.edu)
Digital Libraries - Jim Gray (gray@microsoft.com)
Discrete Mathematics - Joe O'Rourke (orourke@cs.smith.edu)
Distributed Computing - Tushar Chandra (tushar@watson.ibm.com)
General Literature - Joe Halpern (halpern@cs.cornell.edu)
Graphics
Human-Computer Interaction - Terry Winograd (winograd@cs.stanford.edu)
Information Retrieval - Bruce Croft (croft@cs.umass.edu)
Learning - Tom Dieterrich (tgd@cs.orst.edu)
Logic in Computer Science - Gopalan Nadathur (gopalan@cs.uchicago.edu)
Mathematical Software - Ron Boisvert (boisvert@cam.nist.gov)
Multimedia - Richard Muntz (muntz@cs.ucla.edu)
Networking and Internet Architecture - Scott Shenker (shenker@parc.xerox.com)
Neural and Evolutionary Computing - Jordan Pollack (pollack@cs.brandeis.edu)
Numerical Analysis - Ron Boisvert (boisvert@cam.nist.gov)
Operating Systems - William Waite (waite@cs.colorado.edu)
Performance - Richard Muntz (muntz@cs.ucla.edu)
Programming Languages - Nadathur Gopalan (gopalan@cs.uchicago.edu)
Robotics - Bruce Donald (brd@cs.dartmouth.edu)
Software Engineering - Peter Wegner (pw@cs.brown.edu)
Symbolic Computation - Rich Zippel (rz@idc.ac.il)
Other - Joe Halpern (halpern@cs.cornell.edu)