[FOM] Pre-publication and publication.

[Peter Cholak]

To the Computability Theory Community:

As we know there are an increasing number of meetings in 
computability theory where a conference proceedings is created. These 
meetings and proceedings have been created in the model of many CS 
meetings.  The articles that appear in these proceedings are refereed 
but they may not be refereed to the standard of a good journal. Most 
of these proceeding papers appear in MathSciNet, most are available 
online, and most are in a series bought by our libraries.  Hence 
papers in a conference proceeding count as a published article.  In 
CS some of papers from a conference proceeding are extended and later 
published in a journal. Recently the JSL guidelines were revised with 
this in mind:

"Full versions of important papers that have previously been 
published in conference proceedings are eligible for publication, 
provided that the submitted paper extends the pre-publication in a 
significant way. In such cases, when authors submit a paper for 
publication in the JSL they are requested to provide a precise 
reference to the pre-publication and to explain the extent to which 
the submission differs from the conference version."

There is also the issue of how to cite the pre-publication and 
publication.  Unless there is a good reason the pre-publication and 
publication count as one. I suggest they be listed as follows:

Martin Grohe, Yuri Gurevich, Dirk Leinders, Nicole Schweikardt, Jerzy 
Tyszkiewicz, and Jan Van den Bussche. Theory of Computing Systems, 
44:533-560, 2009. Conference version in Proceedings of the 11th 
International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT'07), 
<http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html>Lecture Notes in 
Computer Science 4353, pp.284-298, 2007.

<http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~grohe/pub/groherschwe09.pdf>Martin 
Grohe, Andre Hernich and Nicole Schweikardt, Lower bounds for 
processing data with few random accesses to external memory, Journal 
of the ACM, 56(3), 2009. Full version of PODS'05 and PODS'06 papers.

Of course, sometimes there are reasons to list the conference article 
and final publication separately.  But then the final publication 
should clearly explain why these count as two publications.

I am writing this because as an editor I have been involved in far 
too many submissions where pre-publication is not cited or 
discussed.  I consider this an ethical lapse.  I am no longer a JSL 
editor, but contiune to follow the new ASL guidelines in case of 
potential violation of publication ethics. See

<http://www.aslonline.org/PublicationEthicsPolicy.html>http://www.aslonline.org/PublicationEthicsPolicy.html

Best,

-Peter Cholak