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,