IRIDIA Technical reports

The IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series is a series of reports published on the web by IRIDIA. The series is officially registered and has an ISSN number: 1781-3794.

What is a suitable technical report

You should consider registering as a technical report any scientific or technical document that you wish to share with other researchers at IRIDIA or elsewhere. Good examples are:

1. a scientific paper that you have submitted for publication in a journal or in the proceedings of a conference.
2. a scientific work that you have published somewhere. Please notice that there might be some copyright issues!!! In any case, you should be aware that the copyright notice of the technical report goes like this:

             The authors take full responsibility for any copyright
    	  breaches that may result from publication of this paper in
    	  the IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series.  IRIDIA is not
    	  responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing
    	  in this publication.
   

3. the dirty details of an algorithm that no scientific journal would ever wish to publish.
4. the whole set of results of an experimental analysis with all plots and all tables.
5. the manual of a computer program that you have written.

Please don't think that all articles that you have published on journals or conference proceedings MUST be also technical reports. By the same token, you should not assumed that only the works that are submitted and/or published can be registered as technical reports.

You should consider a report registered in the IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series as a publication in itself.

How to register a technical report

If you have a scientific or technical document that you think fits into the description given in the above section "What is a suitable technical report", you might consider registering it in the IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series. This is the procedure you should follow:

1. Double check that your document is indeed suitable for being registered in the IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series! If you are a Ph.D. student, check with your supervisor.
2. Typeset the document using the latex IridiaTrCover.sty package.
3. Give Muriel the title of the document and the list of the authors. She will give you a technical report number and a date. The date will be something like "MONTH YEAR" where MONTH and YEAR are respectively the month and the year in which the technical report number is assigned to your document.
4. Include number and date in your document. See the documentation of the IridiaTrCover package to learn how to do this.
5. Give Muriel a printed copy of the technical report and send the PDF file to the email address <techrep@iridia.ulb.ac.be>.

Muriel will then announce the new technical report on the internal mailing list of iridia, and the report will be published on the web.

IMPORTANT: Steps 3 and 5 should be performed with no delay in between!

• DO NOT ask for a technical report date and number unless the document you want to register is already written, well formatted and ready to be distributed.
• DO NOT ask to register your technical report with a date that is not the one in which you indeed register it.

Where to find the latex IridiaTrCover package

The most recent version of the latex IridiaTrCover package is available here!

What if you are not able to use latex

If you are not able to use latex, you can produce the technical report in pdf format and ask Prasanna to generate the cover page and to preappending it to your file.

Apart from this element, please follow the other steps described above for registering your technical report.

How to submit a revised version of a technical report

Whenever you feel like submitting a revised version of a technical report of yours, just give a printed copy of the new version to Muriel and send the PDF file to the email address <techrep@iridia.ulb.ac.be>. The new revision will be published on the web.

A revised version must contain a "revision history" on the copyright page. Please read on to understand what a revision history is. You should also have a look at the documentation of the IridiaTrCover.sty latex package.

Understanding the numbering of the IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series

The number of a technical report is composed by the string "TR/IRIDIA/" followed by the year (4 digits), a hyphen and then a progressive number (3 digits, possibly left-padded with zeros). The first technical report of year XXXX gets the number TR/IRIDIA/XXXX-001, the second TR/IRIDIA/XXXX-002, and so on.

This is the number that appears on the cover of a technical report together with the date.

A technical report might be "revised". The first version of a technical report is revision number 001. Revision numbers are made of 3 digits, possibly left-padded with zeros.

If you wish to refer to revision ZZZ of technical report YYY registered in year XXXX, the number you should use is "TR/IRIDIA/XXXX-YYY.ZZZ". Remember the zero-padding!!!

In general, TR/IRIDIA/XXXX-YYY refers to the most recent revision available. When you cite a technical report, do not include the revision number. The revision number should be included only if you wish to refer to a specific revision or if you wish to point out differences between revisions---e.g., "revision TR/IRIDIA/XXXX-YYY.002 contained a stupid mistake that has been corrected in following revisions".

In any case, the cover does not report the revision number, and the date is always the one of the first revision, i.e., the version originally submitted.

The revision history appears on the copyright page. A technical report that is a revision of a previously submitted one must always feature the revision history on the copyright page.

A technical report is uniquely identified by its number. So a new revision can have a different title and also different authors---e.g., different order, one author added, one removed, etc.

Anyway, if the title and/or the author list changes and/or if the technical report undergoes really MAJOR-MAJOR-MAJOR modifications, please submit a new technical report.

Please notice that the numbering conventions adopted for the IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series let us register 999 revisions of the same technical report and let us write 999 new technical reports per year till Dec 31, 9999. After that day some new set of conventions should be designed. I suggest the trivial extension: writing the year with 5 digits. If you have a better idea, please let me know by dropping a line to <mbiro@ulb.ac.be>. Anyway, I don't think that discussing the conventions to be adopted starting from Jan 1, 10000 should be a priority, at least for the next couple of months. :)

Understanding the file name conventions

The PDF file of a technical report should have a name that matches the following pattern: IridiaTrXXXX-YYYrZZZ.pdf where XXXX is the year, YYY is the number, and ZZZ is the revision. Remember zero-padding number and revision!

Also the very first revision---i.e., the text originally submitted---should contain the revision number 001 in its name.

Let me repeat: If you submit a technical report (very first version) and Muriel gave you number TR/IRIDIA/XXXX-YYY, you should send to the email address <techrep@iridia.ulb.ac.be> a PDF file called IridiaTrXXXX-YYYr001.pdf (include the revision number!). If you revise the report, the PDF of the revised version will be called IridiaTrXXXX-YYYr002.pdf and so on.

How to use the IridiaTrCover.sty for latex

Just read the documentation that comes with the IridiaTrCover package. The package contains the source file of the technical report TR/IRIDIA/2005-006. By the way, the title of that technical report is:

  The IridiaTrCover package for LaTeX: 
  How to typeset documents for the IRIDIA -- Technical Report Series

It could be a useful reading if you plan to submit a technical report at IRIDIA. :)

--Mbiro 14:41, 10 January 2006 (CET)