Communications - February 2011

Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1897816.1897834
Viewpoint
Technology, Conferences,
and Community

Considering the impact and implications of changes in scholarly communication.

In 2009 and 2010, over a dozen Com- munications Editor’s Letters, Viewpoints, blog entries, reader letters, and articles addressed our conference and journal publication culture. The discussion covered the shift from a traditional emphasis on journals to the current focus on conferences, and the challenges of conference reviewing, but at its heart is our sense of community. 2 One commentary spoke of a “death spiral” of diminishing participation. 1 Several of the contributors joined a plenary panel on peer review at the 2010 Computing Research Association Conference at Snowbird. 4

In a nutshell, the commentaries note that a focus on conference publication has led to deadline-driven short-term research at the expense of journal publication, a reviewing burden that can drive off prominent researchers, and high rejection rates that favor cautious incremental results over innovative work. Some commentators identify novel approaches to addressing these or other problems, but the dominant view is that we should return to our past practice of regarding journal publication as the locus of quality, which remains the norm in other sciences.

To understand whether this is pos-
sible, and I doubt it is, we must under-
stand why computer science in the U.S.
shifted to conference publication in
the first place. As commentators have
noted, it was not simply that computer
science requires quick dissemination
of results: Conferences did not become
focused on quality in Europe or Asia, or
in other competitive, quickly evolving
fields such as neuroscience or physics. It
is not that U.S. computer science could
not expand journal page counts: com-
puter science journals abroad expand-
ed, passing the costs on to libraries. This
Viewpoint considers other factors and
outlines their implications.

technology and a Professional organization Drove the shift to conference Publication By the early 1980s, the availability of text editing or word processing among computer scientists enabled the relatively inexpensive production of decent-looking proceedings prior to a conference. This was something new. Anticipating that libraries might shelve proceedings, ACM printed many more copies than conferences needed, at a low incremental cost.

ACM also made them available by mail order after a conference at a very low price. Papers in ACM conferences were thus widely distributed and effectively archival. These are the two features that motivated the creation of journals centuries earlier.

Proceedings in Europe and Asia rarely had after-conference distribution, so to be archived, work there had to progress to journal publication. The shift to a conference focus did not occur. In 2004, a prominent U.K. researcher wrote about the CHI conference: “HCI’s love of conferences is a fluke of history. We all know this. CS in general has suffered from it, but is steadily moving away. CHI however digs in, with more and more death rattles such as CHI Letters. Being conference centered is bad for any field: bad for its archival material, bad for its conferences,