authors satisfied their requirements. In computer science, much work is never submitted to journals, and, at least in my experience, journals often receive a large volume of noncompetitive submissions, consuming reviewers’ time. Furthermore, a latency of one year from submission to publication is entirely normal, and it can be far longer.

Short Incremental Work. Our cur-
rent system of promotion and tenure
strongly incentivizes authors to col-
lect as many publications as possible,
resulting in many different papers
for any one given idea. Many current
academics bemoan the good old days
when you could have a group working
on an involved, complex project, and
have only one or a small number of
groundbreaking papers. Given all these
ferent mechanisms for disseminating
technical reports: their own personal
or laboratory home pages on the Web,
their departmental “official” technical
report services, or centralized services
like arXiv. Efficient publication and
dissemination is the first and most
fundamental service that we would
have in CSPub. Ultimately, every paper
published in our field can and should
be available via this one mechanism,
regardless of whether it is a “technical
report,” a “preprint,” a “conference”
paper, or a “journal” paper. Further-
more, when a paper is submitted to a
conference or journal, the mechanism
should be that the paper is submitted
to CSPub, for all the world to see, and
it should be flagged for the target con-
ference or journal. CSPub could easily

Given all these
disparate concerns,
can we evolve or
redesign our way to
a better structure for
academic processes?

disparate concerns, can we evolve or redesign our way to a better structure for our academic processes?

a clean-slate solution

Here, I describe the high-level design of a clean-slate solution, called CSPub (clean-slate publication, or perhaps, ambitiously, computer science publication). CSPub is, at its core, a mashup of conference submission and review management software with technical report archiving services like arXiv and with bibliographic management and tracking and search services like DBLP and Google Scholar.

Technical Reports on Steroids. To-
day, computer scientists have three dif-
support a variety of submission mech-
anisms, including double-blind manu-
scripts for a conference linked to an
optional public copy with the authors’
full affiliation.