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Conference program committees must adapt their review and selection process dynamics in response to evolving research cultural changes and challenges.
MaJor ConFerenCes In the systems community—and increasingly in other areas of computer science—are overwhelmed by submissions. This could be a good sign, indicative of a large community of researchers exploring a rich space of exciting problems. We’re concerned that it is instead symptomatic of a dramatic shift in the behavior of researchers in the systems community, and this behavior will stunt the impact of our work and retard evolution of the scientific enterprise. This Viewpoint explains the reasoning behind our concern, discusses the trends, and sketches possible responses. However, some problems defy simple solutions, and we suspect this is one of them. So our primary goal is to initiate an informed debate and a community response.
papers are being rejected on the basis of low-quality reviews. And arguably it is the more innovative papers that suffer, because they are time consuming to read and understand, so they are the most likely to be either completely misunderstood or underappreciated by an increasingly error-prone process. These symptoms aren’t unique to systems, but our focus here is on the systems area because culture, traditions, and values differ across fields
even within computer science—we are wary of speculating about research communities with which we are unfamiliar.
The sheer volume of submissions to top systems conferences is in some ways a consequence of success: as the number of researchers increases, so does the amount of research getting done. To have impact—on the field or the author’s career—this work needs to be published. Yet the number of high-quality conferences cannot continue
the Growing crisis
The organizers of SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, SIGCOMM,a and other high-ranked systems conferences are struggling to review rapidly growing numbers of submissions. Program committee (PC) members are overwhelmed. Good
a ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), ACM-USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems, Design and Implementation (OSDI), ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI); the Annual Conference of the Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM). This is a partial list and includes at most half of the high-prestige conferences in our field.
Credit tK
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