letters to the editor
DOI: 10.1145/1592761.1592764

Pay for editorial independence

Though Moshe Y. Vardi’s Editor’s Letter “Open, Closed, or Clo- pen Access?” (July 2009) ad- dressed the question of who pays the bills, we must also

address the price of quality.

By 1424, Cambridge University library had only 122 books; the number today is more than seven million. At the beginning of the 15th century, any of those 122 books would have cost as much as a farm. Following the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, the price of books decreased dramatically due to the reduced cost of manufacturing. With the arrival of the Internet in the late 20th century, the dissemination of information reached unprecedented low cost through the elimination of paper and shipping. So, despite accessing information online at almost no cost, why do we still pay for scientific articles? The answer is we pay for high-quality articles. Ensuring their publication is never free, and the price must account for copy editing, reviewing, and indexing, as well as for something more important, editorial independence.

What differentiates regular journals from excellent journals is their editors’ ability to know when to reject mediocre submissions and accept only those that are very good or groundbreaking. Editors must be fully independent to make decisions based on quality, not on financial considerations alone. Readers paying for high-quality articles means editors are free to decide without prohibitive financial pressure.

Answering who pays the bills is important, but determining how much to pay for quality regardless of publishing model is the overriding issue. I hope the market struggle between open and closed publishing models will put prices in their rightful place.

agusti solanas, Catalonia, spain

abolish conference Proceedings

As program chair of an ACM confer-

ence (Hypertext 2009 http://informat-

ics.indiana.edu/fil), I agree with both

Lance Fortnow’s Viewpoint “Time for Computer Science to Grow Up” (Aug. 2009) and Moshe Vardi’s Editor’s Letter “Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research” (May 2009). Moreover, as an interdisciplinary researcher, I experience firsthand how conference-driven publication practices hurt CS in terms of potential interdisciplinary collaboration, reach, and visibility.

That’s why I propose the abolition of conference proceedings altogether. Submissions should instead go to journals, which would receive more and better ones, with refereeing resources shifting naturally from conferences to journals. As a result, journals would improve their quality and speed up their processes. With the CS community’s full attention, the review process would be more rigorous and timely. Deadlines would no longer be so concentrated, and scientists would submit better work, revise as needed, and profit immediately from reviewer feedback; the same referee would judge improvements to a particular submission.

In many cases where conferences and journals are aligned, presentations could be invited from among the best papers published in the previous year. For newer areas and groundbreaking work, a conference or workshop could still accept submissions but would not publish proceedings. Publishing would be the job of journals.

ACM should shepherd such a transition as publisher of both the proceedings of most top computing conferences and of many top computing journals.

filippo menczer, bloomington, in

 

As a young researcher, I was intrigued by Lance Fortnow’s explanation (Aug. 2009) of why the CS community is dominated by conference proceedings. However, I was less excited by his proposed solution, that “…leaders of major conferences must make the first move, holding their conferences less frequently and accepting every reasonable paper for presentation without proceedings.” I fear such a move would

not have the intended effect of a more journal-focused community.

Fortnow only touched on the reason he thinks it wouldn’t work, that CS journals have a reputation for slow turnaround, with most taking at least a year to make a publish/reject decision and some taking much longer before publishing. These end-to-end times are unheard of in other fields where journal editors make decisions in weeks, sometimes days.

Combine this with the trend toward fewer post-doc positions to begin with and young researchers trying to launch their careers by proving their ability to publish their research. Conference publications provide the quick turnaround they need, whereas journals can sometimes represent too great a risk early in a career.

For CS to grow up, CS journals must grow up first.

Jano van hemert, edinburgh, u.K.

inspire cs Passion in all

If someone were to ask me to name the top-four “formidable challenges” facing computer science, I would not have come up with the ones listed by Bob Violino in his news story “Time to Reboot” (Apr. 2009):

Declining enrollment in degree ˲ programs since 2001;

Underrepresentation of women ˲ and minorities;

Negative perception of CS among ˲ K– 12 students; and

Reports saying the rate of innova- ˲ tion in the field has decreased.

With the possible exception of the last one, all are “soft” issues that have little to do with science. Encouraging students to pursue a career, or at least an interest, in CS is worthwhile and part of the ambassadorial role everyone in the field should play anyway. It also makes sense for some in the field to focus on these areas. However, it should in no way crowd out its core scientific pursuits. Emphasize instead challenges in parallel programming, image processing, language develop-