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.