Where to publish?

Research documents that are submitted by their authors may be uploaded to various platforms (on-line or in print) as conference proceedings. The conference proceedings is an integral part of the responsibility of the conference organizers whenever the agreement between the speaker and the conference is that the materials that will be uploaded to the platform of the organizer’s choice. Possible platforms:

• Conference organizing websites – commercial companies, professional organizations, faculty websites etc.
  • Advantages – there is no need to ensure a peer review process, quick publication.
  • Disadvantages – after time, much of the material does not remain available to the public and are considered less prestigious academically.
    
    
• Conference depositories such as Web of conferences or the Technion community in Zendo:
  • Advantages – good visibility, usually open access, in many cases a DOI is given that will provide stability to the availability of the material for long-term.
  • Disadvantages – considered less prestigious due to the lack of peer review policy
    
    
• Publishers – journals, books, the official digital libraries of the publishers (ACM digital library, IEEEXplore)
  • Advantages – choice between traditional publishing or OA, materials on  Publishers’ platforms have high visibility, there’s indexing and abstracting (high visibility on databases). Sometimes there are plagiarism checks and language editorial services as well.
  • Disadvantages – frequently, OA is contingent on payment, and one must meet their entrance requirements.

Each publisher has its own conditions for producing conference proceedings, and here are some of the conditions of various publishers:

• Costs – One can publish the conference either by traditional publishing (for no cost, in cases such as Springer lecture notes) or by open access for every conference, or only selected publications (hybrid)
•  Peer review – is the responsibility of the conference organizers, but there are publishers (IOP and others) that require the conference organizers to manage the peer review on the publisher’s platforms. In some instances, the organizers are required to give a formal declaration that the peer review is performed according to the publisher’s conditions.

Persistent identifiers are stable, long-term references to the various resources, especially digital resources.  In the academic and research environment, many examples can be found of these identifiers, including ORCID identifiers for researchers, identifiers ISBN and ISSN for books and serials, and DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

DOI is a unique identifier that is given to different web pages, so that even if your address (location) changes, you can be traced easily.

Use of DOI ensure stable access to materials over time, and therefore use them whenever possible. The string of a DOI is obtained through the various suppliers, some for pay, but others are free (such as Zenodo)

When publicizing through a publisher, the materials should receive a DOI string (verify this with the  publisher)
When publishing independently, be sure to obtain these in advance, and afterwards, and to manage the meta-data of these pages regularly, including  the new page location  each time it changes.

Being that we are in the electronic era and information exists in the form of computer files, it is vital to ascertain at the time of publication, which steps the publisher takes to preserve the material, and even if the main web site “falls “, is hacked, is “kidnapped” , or closed, there will still be access to the materials. There are publishers that choice to work with external archives, such as LOCKSS or PORTICO, but other publishers use in-house services
This is the difference between policy of Oxford publisher (which discloses where the files are back upped) and another publisher will does not reveal where the long term storage occurs)