{"id":6847,"date":"2021-01-11T05:00:56","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T05:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/?p=6847"},"modified":"2021-01-11T05:00:56","modified_gmt":"2021-01-11T05:00:56","slug":"and-finally-from-the-editor-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/?p=6847","title":{"rendered":"And finally from the Editor&#8230;."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The dramatic growth in scientific publishing during 2020 has lead to a number of discussions about open access publishing and open access to research services. A recent paper in <a href=\"https:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/371\/6524\/16\">Science<\/a> provides a good introduction to the topic of open access if you are not entirely familiar with it. In my view there is a barrier to publication that is not discussed at all, and that is the requirement to submit a manuscript in a standard format for eventual publication in the proceedings of the conference or in a research journal.\u00a0 The guidance provided by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.springer.com\/gp\/computer-science\/lncs\/conference-proceedings-guidelines\">Springer<\/a> (just as an example) runs to 10 pages and there is a strong (though not compulsory) requirement to use LaTeX2e, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latex-project.org\/help\/documentation\/usrguide.pdf\">handbook<\/a> [download] for which is 30 pages long.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>If you are in academic research then I have no doubt you become familiar with this format early in your career but for a practitioner (i.e. search, rather than IIR) I sense it may be a major barrier to contributing a paper that presents practitioner issues and solutions in a less formal (and certainly less detailed) manner than a research paper. Last August I presented a paper at a Microsoft conference on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/event\/new-future-of-work\/\">New Future of Work<\/a> because all they wanted was basically a tidy paper and in particular did not care if it was single column or double column.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to citations then there are at least <a href=\"https:\/\/www.guide2research.com\/research\/how-to-cite-a-research-paper\">four frameworks<\/a>, APA, MLA, Chicago\/Turabian, and the IEEE style. Whether the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/authors\/reference-formatting\">ACM style<\/a> (predominant in the IR sector) is the same or different is beyond my comprehension. What I do know is that ACM Communications does not use the ACM style, and when I raised that with the Editor-in-Chief I did not get a reply. Microsoft did ask for Chicago if possible.<\/p>\n<p>I then decided to write a paper for Business Information Review which took a different slant on my Microsoft contribution but Sage, the publishers of BIR, have their own style!\u00a0 It took me most of a morning to convert 40 of the 60 references in the Microsoft paper into Sage speak. I can absolutely understand the requirements for non-ambiguous citations but again for a practitioner it is a substantial amount of work that needs a significant amount of experience and an acute eye for detail.<\/p>\n<p>I constantly hear conference organisers and journal editors bemoan the lack of papers from practitioners. Perhaps we need a Practitioner Format, along the lines of a Short Communication, which has a far less pedantic view on structure, format and citation style?<\/p>\n<p>Martin White<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The dramatic growth in scientific publishing during 2020 has lead to a number of discussions about open access publishing and open access to research services. A recent paper in Science provides a good introduction to the topic of open access if you are not entirely familiar with it. In my view there is a barrier&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/?p=6847\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">And finally from the Editor&#8230;.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-winter-2021","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}