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Teaching-Oriented Faculty at Research Universities

And the latest news on
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effect, additional metadata links that are endorsed by the institution that invited Alice to give a talk, and which will improve Alice’s ranking. (In CSPub, a university’s colloquium series could be represented much like a journal, linking to existing papers.)

Problem Solving. With CSPub, the top papers will still get in, as always. “Bubble” papers will, at the very least, get the proper priority date of their initial submission and will start getting citations. Conferences might introduce “accepted without presentation” distinctions, allowing more papers to be recognized and to avoid the need for subsequent resubmission. Today, authors of rejected papers must choose whether to edit and resubmit to a top conference, resubmit to a lower-ranked conference, or abandon a paper. With CSPub, these decisions can be delayed. If the paper turns out to be popular and starts gaining citations, then its authors will be motivated to update it and resubmit it. If the paper turns out to be poorly received, its authors can rationally abandon it and move on. By reducing resubmission rates, conference program committees will have fewer papers to consider and can do a better job.

When a paper is rejected, and the author receives feedback from the rejecting conference, that feedback would also be in CSPub, presumably (but not necessarily) private to the author. This creates an opportunity for the author to choose to give this feedback to a subsequent program committee, along with a statement about how the previous committees’ comments were addressed. This moves the treatment of the manuscript closer to the consistent handling available through the jour-

if all of academic
computer science
scholarship were
available in csPub,
a variety of new
features would
become feasible.

nal process, yet with the speed of the conference process. An anonymous reviewer suggested that rejected papers might be indelibly tagged as such, in public, as a disincentive to authors submitting poor work to conferences. The idea of “negative” metadata, permanently associated with one’s name and reputation, would be seen as offensive by many researchers. Certainly, CSPub could support such features if they were desired.

CSPub can also enable new models for how conferences operate. “ Unpublished” papers would be easy for program committees to discover on their own and “pull” into a conference. One-time workshops might be built purely around thematically linked, previously unpublished papers.

Journals. In CSPub, a journal is nothing more than an organization that adds metadata notations to papers in the system. As such, anybody can start their own journal for almost no cost. Some journals would have calls for papers, as conferences do, and authors would indicate a submission in their metadata when posting a manuscript. Other “journals” would be nothing more than collections of thematically related papers, perhaps put together by graduate students as part of their related work search. Of course, if a senior academic puts together a collection with a catchy title (“Alice’s List of Seminal Papers in Blah-Blah Theory”), and Alice is a highly ranked professor, the collection would help increase the included manuscripts’ rankings, both directly, due to Alice’s strong personal ranking, and indirectly, by leading more academics to read and cite the papers on Alice’s list.

CSPub offers a number of improvements to the journal latency problem. It allows early drafts to be seen and cited, while simultaneously being under review, and it completely eliminates printing latencies. Accepted papers “appear” immediately. CSPub also trivially supports new models, such as the hybrid journal/conference approach being taken by VLDB. 7

Rollout

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge of CSPub is getting the ball rolling. Computer science scholarship is pub-