SSRC Tech Report Guidelines
Contents
Tech report policies
There are a few important policies for published tech reports. First and foremost, you should be aware that a technical report is a form of publication. It doesn't preclude other (refereed) publication of similar (or even identical) material, but it is still a publication and must be regarded as such. You must follow these policies for SSRC technical reports:
- Technical reports receive a number and publication date when they are submitted (currently, this involves checking them into the CVS paper repository as described below). The technical report must have a listing and downloadable PDF on the SSRC web site within a day of submission.
- Technical reports must be dated with the submission date; they may not be backdated or dated in the future.
- Technical reports may not be withdrawn or modified under any circumstances. If you want to change your tech report, submit a new tech report (with a new number and publication date) that supersedes the original or withdraws it. There is one minor exception: if you notice a trivial error in the cover page (title, author list, or date), you may fix it within a week of publishing the tech report.
If you're not sure your paper is ready for external publication, please don't publish it as a tech report. It's acceptable to cite papers as "unpublished", "class project" or "under submission"; please do so unless you're ready for the world to see your paper.
On the other hand, tech reports can be a great way to make your research available to others without the delay of publication. In addition, tech reports are often a great publication mechanism for things like documentation for software you've written: such reports are unlikely to be published in a refereed conference or journal, but are a great (and citable!) reference for others who are using your software.
Tech reports are not limited in length, so they're an excellent way to make your MS project, MS thesis, or PhD thesis available to the world. Your thesis is publicly available from UCSC once you file it (though it can be difficult to get); publishing it as a tech report can make it much more visible and available, and doesn't stop you from publishing individual parts in refereed conferences and journals. SSRC students are strongly encouraged to make their MS project reports and MS and PhD theses available as tech reports.
Publishing a tech report
Please follow this procedure to get a tech report published:
Check in the PDF file you want to publish. This must be your first step. Your file should be checked into CVS under the directory website/www/media/papers, and should be called ssrctr-XX-YY.pdf, where XX is the two digit year and YY is the next available number, based on the files in the CVS directory (numbering restarts each year). You should add your file using cvs add -kb ssrctr-XX-YY.pdf to ensure that it's checked in and out in "binary" mode and then check it in immediately afterwards using cvs commit ssrctr-XX-YY.pdf.
Create a cover page for your tech report using the template available from CVS in templates/latex/ssrctrcover.tex. The cover should have the current date (month and year), title, and authors' names and email addresses. Generate the cover in PDF using latex and dvipdf.
Combine the cover page and the rest of your tech report. You can use Acrobat or any other PDF merging tool, including pdfmerge4unix, which is written in Perl and freely downloadable from sourceforge.net.
Rename the resulting file to ssrctr-XX-YY.pdf, as above, and commit the new version to the CVS repository.
Your tech report will be available as http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/ssrctr-XX-YY.pdf within half an hour. After you've verified that it's available, please do the following:
Edit the SSRC web site to include your tech report (add a Paper with the appropriate information). The howpublished field must include the words "Technical Report UCSC-SSRC-XX-YY"—the words "Technical Report" are used to identify tech reports and list them separately. The publication date for the paper is the date that you uploaded the paper in step 1.
- Verify that your tech report listing shows up in the list of publications and list of tech reports.