Myth: “CS Researchers Don't Publish Code or Data”
jxyzabc.blogspot.com
jxyzabc.blogspot.com
I spent some time in industry and then I went back to get my Masters in CS which dropped me into the world reading and writing papers - something I wasn't exposed to as an undergrad. I couldn't believe the amount of (good) stuff out there. As programmer, you're used to reading blog posts, forums and watching talks about some aspect of programming, but the academic world is completely opaque to the professional developer even though there's a lot of relevant research that would benefit non-academics.
Academia is very tuned to latest developments in private industry - CS graduates, post-docs and professors follow and read the same sources coming out of professional programmers and they get excited about the same stuff. On the other hand, research done in academia is closed to working programmers - and it's a shame for both sides.
As a working programmer I get access to all the papers I want.
One just needs to care for the field.
Many authors provide their papers, or at least the drafts on their web sites.
Also many do gladly send copies if asked about them.
What I do agree, is that the majority of the working programmers I know couldn't care less, they don't even read blogs, books or follow sites like HN. Only when management says so.
> Many authors provide their papers, or at least the drafts on their web sites.
Many authors provide their papers/drafts on their websites, but many don't--not out of malice, but because it's hard to be a serious researcher and a serious website maintainer at the same time.
> Also many do gladly send copies if asked about them.
Many authors gladly send copies of things if asked about them, but many don't--again because a busy researcher can't spend all their time answering emails from strangers.
And neither publishing the data on a bunch of disparate websites nor responding to emails solves the problem of being able to search through papers for the one you need. I've definitely gone through the effort of following a bibliography reference, contacting the author, getting the paper two days later, and discovering from the abstract that the paper is solving a different problem than I thought.
Neither publishing the data on a bunch of disparate websites nor responding to emails solves the problem of researchers dying and all of that disappearing. I've run into this too: after trying to contact a researcher a few times to no avail, I learned he had died in a car accident. That's one paper I may never read.
> What I do agree, is that the majority of the working programmers I know couldn't care less, they don't even read blogs, books or follow sites like HN. Only when management says so.
That's not what the comment you're responding to said.
And even if it were true, you have to admit that there are still some industry programmers who want to read more papers: I'm one, and if you've read HN the last few days, you'd have found quite a few other industry programmers complaining about the lack of access. So I have to conclude:
> As a working programmer I get access to all the papers I want.
Either this is simply a lie, or you do not have as much access as you think you do.
ACM, Google, Yahoo, Bing.
I'm actually skeptical that you're using those things on any sort of regular basis: if you were, you'd surely have come across their limitations by now.
I'll bite. Where?
>Also many do gladly send copies if asked about them.
I have no doubt, but that's not very scalable.
However, almost every paper I ever look for (published since 2000, say) is available for free on the web, usually on the author's web site. Searching google scholar will find just about everything. So I disagree that "research done in academia is closed to working programmers". If that was the case, then something like Papers We Love would never have even started.
[Full disclosure: I co-authored the original blog post with Jean.]