I’m an EE. Over the course of my professional career I’ve written a handful technical papers that could probably best be described as “tutorials.” Examples include:
Temperature coefficient of resistance
Skin effect
Mass resistivity
Some of the papers are in MS Word format, while others are in MS PowerPoint.
It’s not groundbreaking stuff. Again, they’re basically tutorials. So I doubt they can be published in a peer-reviewed technical journal. Still, I’d like to share these papers with others. Ideally, when someone googles “mass resistivity,” I’d like a link to my paper to show up within the first four or five pages.
What’s the best way of doing this? Is there a website I can upload them to that has some web presence?
many websites “own” the information uploaded … it’s in their eula or whatever … so it’s no longer yours.
if you do publish your work to a website … make sure the website allows free viewing for all … quora.com refuses to allow netizens to read their pages unless ad-blockers are disabled.
if you want your own website … most of the free websites have restrictions … such as no “google hits” and no email and no guest-book … etc.
some of the above may not be relevant in your case.
Huh? I just looked at Quora with adblock on, no issues.
There are journals that focus on methods, or many big journals have different sections or categories for articles, for example comments on other papers, brief reviews of relevant technologies, etc. I don’t know enough about engineering to recommend any.
Maybe something like arXiv? Might not be in scope, but maybe there’s something similar?
I don’t know how wide arXiv is, but I would check them out first. All papers I know of on arXiv are in Latex, but I don’t think that’s a requirement. Authors retain all rights, except anyone can download from there.
This website is one such. See the [terms of use / privacy policy] link near the bottom of this page.
Strictly speaking, you’re not giving SD ownership of your work. You’re giving them a cost free perpetual worldwide license to use it and distribute it and re-distribute it and resell it as they choose. You have exactly zero rights to influence their actions.
Which meets at least my laymen’s working definition of [own in scare quotes] as albino_manatee wrote.
Strictly speaking, you’re not giving SD ownership of your work.
You should have ended it there. Your work remains yours. You own the copyright on it. You can use it in any way you choose. You can make money off of it.
Saying that “many websites “own” the information uploaded … it’s in their eula or whatever … so it’s no longer yours.” is wrong, in layman’s language or any other. It’s ridiculously misleading to refer to the Dope in this way.
The issue about “ownership” is that you typically have to give the website a right to use, otherwise they are in somewhat difficult and uncharted waters simply serving your work out via their web front end. You don’t sign over ownership. But these sites are considered publishers, and they need some protection from random copyright difficulties. Some sites are more absurdly rapacious. Facebook being the obvious example.
What SD and other similar site don’t want is a copyright takedown notice if you decide you don’t like something you posted remaining on a forum. There may be a fuzzy area if say SD decided to publish a compendium of best threads or similar. The Internet Joke books come to mind as an early example.
Over the past few years, StackExchange has risen in the Google rankings for a lot of technical topics, to the extent that they’re often on the first page of results when you google something like “[technical field] [terms related to problem]”. StackExchange also explicitly encourages users to share their own expertise by posting & answering questions. So if your papers could be fit into that format, then this would be an excellent way to get them out there.
The main issue with this idea is that you can’t just post the paper wholesale; you’d have to edit it so that it fit into the format of question & answer. You’d also have to do a lot of reformatting, as the entry mechanism is a simple text entry box with MathJax for equations. Still, in terms of immediate web visibility, it probably can’t be beat.
My father published a plethora of scientific papers years ago, and I wonder if he retained any copyright in them; or would he have had to cede copyright to the journals that published them.
To clarify a bit on the SDMB issue: The Straight Dope or whatever its current parent company is does have the right to do a lot of things with your work. But every single thing they have the right to do, you have the right to do, too. If they want to collect posts into a book, for instance (which they did indeed do in part of one of the Straight Dope books), they can do that. But if you want to collect your own posts into a book, you can do that, too.
But on the other hand, you can also do some things with your posts that the Straight Dope can’t. For instance, if you find someone else using your posts without permission, you can go after them in court, but the Straight Dope can’t.
Given that you can still do everything that the Straight Dope can, but they can’t do everything you can, it’s absurd to claim that they in any way have a greater degree of ownership than you.
But presumably the Dope has some right to go after anyone who scrapes and uses the full content of many threads from here?
I do a lot of searches for technical fixes to computer problems, and I tend to run across a LOT of sites where the same help thread is reproduced verbatim from a totally different site. There must be some restraint on this should a site bother to exercise it, Shirley?
I agree I overstated the use of the word “ownership”, even surrounded by scare quotes. But from my decidedly amateur POV it looks about as follows. I’m not discussing the SD’s ToS specifically; that’s simply a fairly typical example of the breed.
ISTM *the * fundamental *practical *indicia of ownership is the right to charge money for the use of your work.
Once you choose to release your work through some channel (e.g. the SD) and that channel has the right to further distribute your work for free, your *legal *ability to charge for use of your work is utterly unaffected. As several posters have said.
But your *practical *ability to charge for it has been significantly, probably fatally, reduced. Because folks can just go get it from SD for free.
Speaking just to myself as an author, I have no intention of ever trying to monetize my works published here. So the practical loss of my ability to charge for them via some other distribution channel is immaterial. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Journals shouldn’t take copyright any more than a magazine takes copyright or a book publisher takes copyright. You’re giving a license to use material you own. Whether that license is permanent or exclusive is a matter of contract. I’ve published in magazines that won’t allow me to put the material on my website for six months and in magazines that allow me to do so right away. My copyright is unaffected.
You might think about using your narration, some video clips and illustrations and turning them into short youtube videos then give a link to where the paper is hosted. This would give you your largest popular audience. A decent web mike, camera and a video processing program are not that expensive.
Open publication is gaining momentum all the time. Many people feel very strongly that the old style pay for access model of publication is a significant brake on research, and in many cases is little more than a way of making money on the back of research funded by someone else. But there remain many publications that still adhere to the old model. And many of these are the journal of professional societies. Some research funding agencies are now flatly requiring that any research work they fund must be published in open access publications. But there is a long way to go.
Who doesn’t get a sinkng feeling when trying to research a topic and the prime references you need all point to Elsevier’s various sites?
Open publication usually puts the cost of publishing on the author, though. And if you go that route, you need to sort out the legitimate sites (e.g. PLOS ONE) from the scams.
I had to sign away the rights to all my papers, both journal and conference papers. I just checked the web site of the publisher of my most heavily cited paper. $40 a pop to download the PDF. I get zip of that.
Note that arXiv has an endorsement system. For a newbie you have to be “endorsed” by someone in the suitable field of academics to be allowed to upload something to it. This keeps out the Amazing New Proof That Gravity Doesn’t Exist! people a bit.