One of the most useful changes to the ICSE International Conference on Software Engineering this year, was that the program website contained links to preprints of many of the papers presented.

As ICSE is a large event (over 1600 people attended in 2013), it is worth taking a look at what happened. What is preprint linking? How many authors actually provided a preprint link? What about other conferences? What are the wider implications for open access publishing in software engineering?

Self-Archiving

Preprint linking is based on the idea that authors, who do all the work in both writing and formating the paper, have the right to self-archive the paper they created themselves (also called green open access). Authors can do this on their personal home page, in institutional repositories of, e.g., the universities where they work or in public preprint repositories such as arxiv.

Sharing preprints has been around in science since decades (if not ages): As an example, my ‘alma mater’ CWI was founded in 1947, and has a technical report series dating back to that year. These technical reports were exchanged (without costs) with other mathematical research institutes. First by plain old mail, then by email, later via ftp, and now through http.

While commercial publishers may dislike the idea that a free preprint is available for papers they publish in their journals or conference proceedings, 69% of the publishers do in fact allow (some form of) self-archiving. For example, ACM, IEEE, Springer, and Elsevier (the publishers I work most with) explicitly permit it, albeit always under specific conditions. These conditions can usually be met, and include such requirements as providing a note that the paper has been accepted for publication, a pointer to the URL where the published article can be found, and a copyright notice indicating the publisher now owns the copyright.

Preprint links as shown on ICSE site.

Preprint Linking

All preprint linking does, is ask authors of accepted conference papers, whether they happen to have a link to a preprint available. If so, the conference web site will include a link to this preprint in its progam as listed on its web site.

For ICSE, doing full preprint linking at the conference site was proposed and conducted by Dirk Beyer, after an earlier set of preprint links was collected on a separate github gist by Adrian Kuhn.

Dirk Beyer runs Conference Publishing Consulting, the organization hired by ICSE to collect all material to be published, and get it ready for inclusion in the ACM/IEEE Digital Libraries. As part of this collection process, ICSE asked the authors to provide a link to a preprint, which, if provided, was included in the ICSE on line program.

The ICSE 2013 proceedings were published by IEEE. In their recently updated policy, they indicate that “IEEE will make available to each author a preprint version of that person’s article that includes the Digital Object Identifier, IEEE’s copyright notice, and a notice showing the article has been accepted for publication.” Thus, for ICSE, authors were provided with a possibility to download this version, which they then could self-archive.

Preprints @ ICSE 2013

With a preprint mechanism setup at ICSE, the next question is how many researchers actually made use of it. Below are some statistics I collected from the ICSE conference site:

In other words, a little over half of the authors (53%) provided a preprint link. And, almost half of the authors decided not to.

I hope and expect that for upcoming ICSE conferences, more authors will submit their preprint links. As a comparison, at the recent FORTE conference, 75% of the authors submitted a preprint link.

For ICSE, this year was the first time preprint linking was available. Authors may have not been familiar with the phenomenon, may not have realized in advance how wonderful a program with links to freely available papers is, may have missed the deadline for submitting the link, or may have missed the email asking for a link altogether as it ended up in their spam folder. And, in all honesty, even I managed to miss the opportunity to send in my link in time for some of my MSR 2013 papers. But that won’t happen again.

Preprint Link Sustainability

An issue of some concern is the “sustainability” of the preprint links — what happens, for example, to homepages with preprints once the author changes jobs (once the PhD student finishes)?

The natural solution is to publish preprints not just on individual home pages, but to submit them to repositories that are likely to have a longer lifetime, such as arxiv, or your own technical report series.

An interesting route is taken by ICPC, which instead of preprint links simply provides a dedicated preprint search on Google Scholar, with authors and title already filled in. If a preprint has been published somewhere, and the author/title combination is sufficiently unique, this works remarkably well. MSR uses a mixture of both appraoches, by providing a search link for presentations for which no preprint link was provided.

Implications

Open access, and hence preprint publishing, is of utmost importance for software engineering.

Software engineering research is unique in that it has a potentially large target audience of developers and software engineering practitioners that is on line continually. Software engineering research cannot afford to dismiss this audience by hiding research results behind paywalls.

For this reason, it is inevitable that on the long run, software engineering researchers will transform their professional organizations (ACM and IEEE) so that their digital libraries will make all software engineering results available via open access.

Irrespective of this long term development, the software engineering research community must hold on to the new preprint linking approach to leverage green open access.

Thus:

1. As an author, self-archive your paper as a preprint or technical report. Consider your paper unpublished if the preprint is not available.
2. If you are a professor leading a research group, inspire your students and group members to make all of their publications available as preprint.
3. If you are a reviewer for a conference, insist that your chairs ensure that preprint links are collected and made available on the conference web site.
4. If you are a conference organizer or program chair, convince all authors to publish preprints, and make these links permanently available on the conference web site.
5. If you are on a hiring committee for new university staff members, demand that candidates have their publications available as preprints.

Much of this has been possible for years. Maybe one of the reasons these practices have not been adopted in full so far, is that they cost some time and effort — from authors, professors, and conference organizers alike — time that cannot be used for creative work, and effort that does not immediately contribute to tenure or promotion. But it is time well spent, as it helps to disseminate our research to a wider audience.

Thanks to the ICSE move, there now may be a momentum to make a full swing transition to green open access in the software eningeering community. I look forward to 2014, when all software engineering conferences will have adopted preprint linking, and 100% of the authors will have submitted their preprint links. Let us not miss this unique opportunity.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dirk Beyer, for setting up preprint linking at ICSE, and for providing feedback on this post.

Update (Summer 2013)

• ESEC FSE 2013 adopted preprint linking, and shows another good use of it: Prior to the conference every day one or two preprint links were tweeted through the conference’s @esecfse Twitter account.
• For 2013, SPLASH / OOPSLA has included preprint links in its program as well.