Citable and Preserved AGILE Short Papers

AGILE short papers from 2003 to 2019 from are published as published as bronze Open Access. “Bronze” menas they lack a clearly identifyable license. Following an initiative by AGILE conference Reproducibility Chair Daniel Nüst, the AGILE council has decided to update the proceedings website with a statement giving authors the permission to deposit, or “self-archive”, their AGILE short papers of past conferences in an institutional or independent repository, such as a preprint server. In these repositories the papers are properly preserved and receive a DOI for use in refences and citations. The statement clarifies the copyright to comply with the checks of preprint servers, such as EarthArXiv.

This is a great step towards preserving the scientific contributions by the AGILE community in form of AGILE short papers!

I am an AGILE short paper author - what should I do?

Please self-archive your AGILE short papers!

1. Go to the AGILE website and see if your AGILE short paper is available for download.

2. Download the file and add a statement to the first page clearly documenting the paper’s origin. This cover page should include name, time and place of the conference, the URL to the conference website, and a statement that the short paper is peer reviewed.

   This online application can help you with the cover page: The online application for stamping your PDF is not available anymore, but you can run it from source at (source code).

   

3. Submit the PDF to a preprint server of your choice (if you’re unsure, try EarthArXiv) and include a link to the permission statement in the submission notes to ensure a smooth process. If possible add the tags or keywords AGILE short paper and AGILEGIS, and configure the recommended citation to include year and name of the conference.
4. Update your reference lists: add the DOI to the recommended citation of the paper.

Background

At the AGILE general assembly 2019, the AGILE council announced their plans to move all AGILE publications to an Open Access publishing model. This is a great step towards better accessibility of research outputs from the AGILE community, and reflects the huge amount of work that community members put into reviewing and compiling both full paper and short paper proceedings. So, the full papers, in the past published with a commercial publisher needing a subscription for digital access, are published with Copernicus Publications starting 2020. This was also planned for the short papers, but the COVID-19 crisis and the cancellation of the conference in 2020 lead to a stop of the short paper review before it even started.

While the scientific contribution of short papers at AGILE might be smaller than of full papers, they are peer reviewed scientific works that often introduce new ideas. Also, especially for early career researchers, AGILE short papers are often the first publication of a career or a project. Publishing AGILE short papers as postprints enables future authors to properly cite them and to acknowledge and record provenance of ideas.

Fo future short papers (after 2020), this problem is like to be solved by collaboration with an academic publisher.

Why EarthArXiv?

EarthArXiv is a recommended preprint server for GIScience because it is community-mainted and independent, i.e., managed and controlled by scientists for scientists. You can browse the AGILE short papers on EarthArXiv with this link. Find out more about EarthArXiv at https://eartharxiv.github.io/.

Questions?

Contact Daniel Nüst at daniel.nuest@uni-muenster.de.