letters;to;the;editor
DOI: 10.1145/1735223.1735226
Roots of Publication Delay
Moshe Y. Vardi wrote in his Editor’s Letter “Revisit- ing the Publication Cul- ture in Computing Re- search”(Mar.2010)about
computer science being a field in which
conferences are the primary venue for
reporting research. Over the years, the
premier conferences have evolved to
where their acceptance rates are lower
than the corresponding journals and
their citation rates are higher. That is
why, in the university, the other fields in
the tenure councils accept the computer science argument that conference
publications deserve the main weight.
When I first got involved in the ACM
was no online venue. Researchers be-
gan to look to the SIG conferences as a
way to get their material into print soon-
er, much sooner. By the 1980s, some of
these conferences were petitioning the
Publication Board to designate them as
“refereed” instead of “reviewed.”
Studies by Bob Ashenhurst and John
Rice documented the editorial delays.
Even when editors were fastidious about
pushing the review cycle along, the authors often took a long time to submit
their revisions. Though individual reviews took a long time as well, the authors themselves contributed a lot of
delay. The studies also found (with much
less supporting data) that authors try
different journals and conferences until
they find a publisher, and that patient,
persistent authors eventually publish
over 90% of their papers. Rice calculated
an average paper needs four referees, so
authors “owe” their colleagues four reviews for every published paper.
A productive author publishing three
journal papers a year would thus owe the
field 12 reviews a year. Most researchers complain if they have to do half that
number. Rice’s conclusion, still valid today, was that as long as researchers do
not want to do all those (timely) reviews,
the editorial phase would not get significantly shorter and is simply the cost of
an all-volunteer system.
In 1983 at the start of the
Communications revitalization plan, we investigated
how Science magazine gets its submissions reviewed so much quicker. We visited the editors and learned they phoned
names from a reviewer database to ask
for two-week turnaround. After locating
three agreeable reviewers, the editors
would FedEx them the manuscript.
We wanted to do likewise, but the
ACM executive committee said it was
way too expensive. At the time, ACM
didn’t have enough money to cover even
the editors the Council had approved
and could not mount a quick review
process in Communications. Today’s online tools make it much easier and less
expensive to find reviewers, in which
case the bottleneck is again the willingness of reviewers to quickly review and
authors to quickly revise.
Peter J. Denning,
aCm Past President, 1980–1982,
monterey, Ca
A fundamental difference between the
journal and conference publication systems, as discussed by Moshe Y. Vardi
(Mar. 2010), is that conference leadership (chairs and program committees)
changes much more frequently than
(is practical) for journals. It is difficult
(though perhaps not impossible) for a
conference to consistently reflect the
personal biases and hidden agendas of
the same people over a long period of
time. The same cannot be said of journals, which have much slower turnover
of editors. Such stability allows journals
to be, at least in principle, more coherent and less prone to fads, and perhaps
less responsive to what the community
views as important.
angelos D. Keromytis, new york
multi-Departments to cover the
Whole computational Discipline
Bjarne Stroustrup’s Viewpoint “What
Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why?” (Jan. 2010) was excellent in its
call for curriculum reform but used the
wrong model—that a single department
is able to fulfill the needs of a mature
computing discipline. Other disciplines
recognize the need for a multi-depart-mental model with separate but interrelated departments to support both
theory and industrial applications.
Chemistry, physics, and biology
departments expand the boundaries of
knowledge and create new tools that are
then applied by chemical engineering,
civil engineering, and clinical medicine
departments in industrial settings. Computational (not computer) science departments must be centers of innovation,
advancing the general principles of the
discipline, while software engineering, IS,
and IT departments build on the computational principles from the CS departments
to prepare graduates needed by industry.
Undergraduates in chemistry and
chemical engineering all take the same
general-chemistry courses and labs as
freshman, learning general principles
with the help of test tubes and Bunsen
burners. They then work at the laboratory scale required for research, while
chemical-engineering students acquire
the skills and knowledge of “bucket”
chemistry required for industry.
Professionalism is an important goal,
associated, as Stroustrup said, with the
application side, not the theoretical side
of the discipline. Licensing is for engineers, physicians, and pharmacists in
the public domain, not for those working on theory. Coming to a consensus on
the appropriate curriculum for different
departments makes it easier to develop
professional licensure.
A single department is no longer all
things to all stakeholders. Needed instead is an ecosystem of interrelated
departments supporting the range of
theory and applications of the computational discipline.