ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

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JOCCH publishes papers of significant and lasting value in all areas relating to the use of IC T in support of Cultural Heritage, seeking to combine the best of computing science with real attention to any aspect of the cultural heritage sector.

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essarily consciously, helped set the agenda with areas that helped their faculty, students, and graduates. Over the years these biases became part of the system and unofficially accepted behavior in the community.

As CS grew the major conferences became even more selective and could not accept all the quality papers in any specialized area. Many new specialized conferences and workshops arose and grew to capture these papers. We currently have approximately a dozen U.S.-based conferences in theoretical computer science alone. The large number of conferences has splintered our communities. Because of limitations of money and time, very few conferences draw many attendees beyond the authors of accepted papers. Conferences now serve the journal role of other fields, leaving nothing to serve the proper role of conferences.

Other disciplines have started to recognize the basic importance of computation and we have seen strong connections between CS and physics, biology, economics, mathematics, education, medicine and many other fields. Having different publication procedures discourages proper collaboration between researchers in CS and other fields.

The current situation

Most CS researchers would balk at paying significant page charges for a journal but think nothing of committing well over $1,000 for travel and registration fees for a conference if their paper were accepted (not to mention the time to attend the conference). What does that monetary commitment buy the author? A not particularly fair review process.

With the tremendous almost continual growth in computer science over the past half-century combined with the desire of each conference to remain small and “competitive,” even with the increase in the number of conferences we simply have too many papers chasing too few conference slots. Each conference has a program committee that examines submissions and makes decisions on which papers will appear at a conference and which will not. The great papers almost always are accepted and the worst papers mostly get rejected. The

problem occurs for the vast majority of solid papers landing in the middle. Conferences cannot accept all of these papers and still maintain their high-quality reputations.

Even if the best decisions are made, several good papers will not make the cut. A variety of factors make the process imperfect at best:

Being on a program committee ˲ (PC) requires a large time commitment because of the number of papers involved. With the increase in conferences, many researchers, particularly senior scientists, cannot serve on many of these committees, leaving these important decisions mostly to those with less experience.

As our research areas continue ˲ to become more specialized a few to none of the PC members can properly judge the importance of most results.

These specialized areas have a ˲ small number of researchers, meaning the appropriate PC members know the authors involved and personal feelings can influence decision making.

PC members tend to favor papers ˲ in their own areas.

The most difficult decisions are ˲ made by consensus. This leads to an emphasis on safe papers ( incremental and technical) versus those that explore new models and research directions outside the established core areas of the conference.

No or limited discussions between ˲ authors and the PC means papers often get rejected for simple misunderstandings.

Various conferences have implemented a number of innovative and sometimes controversial ideas to try to make the process more fair (author information removed from papers, author responses to initial reviews, multi-level program committees, separate tracks for areas and quality, higher/ lower acceptance ratios) but none can truly avoid most of the problems I’ve outlined here.

In the extreme many of the best scientific papers slip through the cracks. For example, nearly half of the Gödel Prize winners (given to the best CS theory papers after they’ve appeared in journals) were initially rejected or didn’t appear at all in the top theoretical computer science conferences.

We end up living in a deadline-driv-