Postcard from south africa commenting
on the CsCW 2012 review process.
have a journal track comprising papers
accepted by the Machine Learning and
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
journals. An editorial board is created
to handle submissions for the journal
track of the conference that is distinct
from the journal editorial boards and
from the program committee that will
handle submissions to non-journal
conference tracks.c
POstCaRd IMaGE REPROduCEd COuRtEsy OF aRt PublIsHERs ltd., WWW.aRtPublIsHERs.CO.Za
These ensure the preeminence of a
journal. They do not provide the conference’s traditional role of building
community by providing authors with
feedback on less polished work that is
intended for subsequent journal submission: The adage that a computer
science conference is “a journal that
meets in a hotel” is literally true in this
case. Although best suited to a small
research community, the practice
has been embedded in larger conferences. The Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conferences’ 1,500– 2,000
submissions are more than a journal
review process could cope with, but
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human
Interaction articles comprise about 5%
of CHI presentations. Similarly, 23%
of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
2011 presentations were of papers
from ACM Transactions on Interactive
Intelligent Systems. The Association
c See http://www.acm.org/sigs/volunteer_re-sources/conference_manual/acm-policy-on-the-publication-of-conference-proceedings-in-acm-journals.
for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
also presents papers published in the
Transactions of the ACL.
Shepherded conference papers become journal articles. SIGGRAPH and
Infovis proceedings become issues of
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
and IEEE Transactions on Visualization
and Computer Graphics, respectively. IJ-CAI’ 13 will have a track in the Journal
of AI Research. Following a conditional
acceptance, a committee member may
Journals encourage
more revision and are
less deadline driven;
conferences promote
informal interaction
and other community-
building activities.
be assigned to check each revision. In
practice, the committee expressed an
inclination to accept and time is limited; acceptance is all but certain. Such
papers are rarely if ever rejected. Shepherding is not a journal-style revision
and re-review.
Concerned that this practice will
lower journal standards, ACM has a
new policy2 that forbids rechristening of conference papers as journal
articles (exempting SIGGRAPH, although many authors list SIGGRAPH
papers as peer-reviewed conference
papers rather than TOG journal articles on their CVs). ACM may be
fighting a tide that is eroding the
conference-journal distinction. Outside ACM, boundaries continue to
blur: the Journal of Machine Learning
Research publishes a volume of workshop and conference proceedings, a
useful collection of related work.
Conferences without a journal affiliation that incorporate a revision cycle. As-pect-Oriented Software Development
(AOSD) offers multiple submission
deadlines. For the March 2012 conference, authors could submit in April,