peared. The CHI conference gets more submissions, but attendance peaked years ago. When a small, relatively polished subset of work is accepted, what is there to confer about?

High rejection rates undermine community in several ways. People don’t retain quite the same warm feeling when their work is rejected. Without a paper to give, some do not receive funding to attend. Rejected work is revised and submitted to other conferences, feed-ing conference proliferation, diverting travel funding, and dispersing volunteer efforts in conference management and reviewing. In addition, high selectivity makes it difficult for people in related fields to break in—especially researchers from journal-oriented fields or countries who are not used to polishing conference submissions to our level.

A further consequence is that computer scientists do not develop the skills needed to navigate large, community-building conferences. At our conferences, paper quality is relatively uniform and the number of parallel sessions small, so we can quickly choose what to attend. In contrast, randomly sampling sessions at a huge conference with 80% acceptance leads us to conclude that it is a junk conference. Yet with a couple hours of preparation, combing the many parallel sessions for topics of particular interest, speakers of recognized esteem, and best paper nominations, and then planning meetings during some sessions, one can easily have as good an experience as at a selective conference. But it took me a few tries to discover this.

Courtesy of Moore’s Law, our field enjoys a constant flow of novelty. If existing venues do not rapidly shift to accommodate new directions, other outlets will appear. Discontinuities can be abrupt. Our premier conference for many years, the National Computer Conference, collapsed suddenly two decades ago, bringing down the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS), then the parent organization of ACM and IEEE. Over half of all ACM A.M. Turing Award winners published in the AFIPS conferences. Most of those published single-authored papers. Yet the AFIPS conference proceedings disappeared, until they were recently added to the ACM Digital Library. The field moved on—renewal is part of our heritage. But perhaps we can smooth the process.

Possible Directions

Having turned our conferences into journals, we must find new ways to strengthen community. Rolling back the clock to the good old heyday of journals, ignoring changes wrought by technology and time, seems unlikely to happen. For one thing, it would undermine careers built on conference publication. More to the point, computer science in the U.S. responded first to technologies that enable broad dissemination and archiving. Other countries are now following; other disciplines will also adapt, one way or another. Instead of looking back, we can develop new processes and technologies to address challenges that emerged from exploiting the technologies of the 1980s.

With storage costs evaporating, we could separate quality determination from participation by accepting most conference submissions for presentation and online access, while distinguishing ~25% as “Best Paper Nominations.” Making a major conference more inclusive could pull participation back from spin-off conferences.

A more radical possibility is inspired by the revision history and discussion pages of Wikipedia articles. Authors could maintain the history of a project as it progresses through workshop, conference, and journal or other high-er-level accreditation processes. Challenges would have to be overcome, but such an approach might ameliorate reviewer load and multiple publication burdens—or might not.

We are probably not approaching the bottom of a “death spiral.” But when AFIPS and the National Computer Conference collapsed, the transition from profitable success to catastrophe was remarkably rapid. Let’s continue this discussion and keep history from repeating.

 

References

1. Birman, K. and Schneider, F. B. Program committee overload in systems. Commun. ACM 52, 5 (May 2009), 34–37.

2. Fortnow, L. Time for computer science to grow up. Commun. ACM 52, 8 (Aug. 2009), 33–35.

3. McGrath, J.E. Time, interaction, and performance (TIP): A theory of groups. Small Group Research 22, 2 (1991), 147–174.

4. Peer review in computing research. CRA Conference at Snowbird, July 19, 2010; http://www.cra.org/ events/snowbird-2010/.

Jonathan Grudin ( [e-mail]) is a member
of the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at
Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA.
Copyright held by author.

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