Vviewpoints
doi:10.1145/2001269.2001283
Viewpoint
rebooting the cs
publication process
A proposal for a new cost-free open-access
publication model for computer science papers.

Many computer science academics have written lately about problems with how our publica- tion procedures have failed to scale as the field has grown (for example, see 2–4,8,9). While others have focused on trying to shift CS from conferences back to journals, it is worthwhile to understand exactly which problems we are trying to solve.

Acceptance Rates. The top conferences, where publication can make or break a career, may publish 10% of the submitted papers.a Submission rates have grown in the past decade with acceptance rates either flat or dropping, despite an increasing absolute number of papers accepted. What happens to the rejects? Realistically, there are three categories. First, there are the “bubble” papers. If, for whatever reason, the conference were to double its acceptance rate, these would be published, but they were rejected either because they were seen as too narrow or uninteresting, or they were considered to have significant flaws. Next are “second tier” papers that could well be publishable at area-specific workshops or less competitive conferences. Also in the “second tier” category would be “least publishable unit” (LPU) papers, where an author advances their own

work by the smallest possible amount and the program committee wants more. Finally, there are “ noncompetitive” papers, where the paper would have no chance at publication in any respectable venue.

Overloaded Reviewers. As submission rates have gone up, program committees must decide between huge workloads per reviewer, or adding PC members to the point where most members are completely disconnected from most papers’ discussions. This appears to increase the degree of randomness in whether a paper gets in or is rejected.

try to coordinate their accept/reject announcement dates with subsequent conferences’ submission dates, but these can still be quite tight. (For example, there was only one week, in early 2010, between IEEE Security & Privacy’s notification date and the USENIX Security Symposium’s submission date.) Consequently, similar content is reviewed again and again.

 

a Networking conference statistics are tracked by Kevin Almeroth ( http://www.cs.ucsb. edu/~almeroth/conf/stats/), who links to statistics for other disciplines as well.

Resubmission. What happens with all these rejections? Many are inevitably resubmitted. Major conferences

Journal Latencies. In many other fields, conferences only take short papers and the “real” work is submitted to journals. Journals offer the benefit of having the same set of reviewers through each phase of a paper’s life cycle. The reviewers can insist on improvements and can then agree that the