Author Satisfaction Feedback

In the extension of the survey done in November 2011, authors were asked to explain why they were satisfied in their IPOL experience.

They cited the benefit of IPOL as a complete archive of all the materials related to an algorithm.

• “Being forced to wrap-up implementation in a usable and documented way is useful as a future self-reference (not forgetting what you made yourself), for teaching, for reference to other colleagues, and as a way to obtain feedback.”
• “It is a very convenient way to demonstrate my work without having to remember where my program is, its arguments, find appropriate images, etc. Associating a complete description with a fixed version of the algorithm avoids forgetting ‘what are the features and limitations of this version of the code?’.”
• “For the first time I have been able to show to my colleagues what I do, and exactly how I do it."

The web demonstration tools are useful to get a better understanding of the algorithms, for the authors and for the readers.

• “It’s easy to prove that the author’s algorithm works using the online demo. The online demo allows the public to understand better the algorithms.”
• “IPOL allows to make a lot of experiments and better understand the models.”
• "I have learned a lot from the archive of my article.”

The publication of the implementation is appreciated as an motivation to produce a better program.

• “It is an opportunity to write a complete and debugged code and this work is valued.”
• “Exposing the code to everybody makes me work harder to have source code I could be satisfied with and not stop at the ‘it works’ point.”
• “It drove me to change the way I will code for future publications.”

And by publishing in IPOL, the authors re-evaluate the importance and usefulness of academic papers.

• “It made me re-think the way results are shown, particularly from the visualization point of view. In addition, it made me also re-think what are the important contributions of a scientific publication, i.e. the value of re-publishing a previously published paper for instance.”
• “My work is more useful for the academic community than a normal paper.”