Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/2398356.2398371
Viewpoint
Conference-Journal hybrids
NuMeRous PRoPosALs AnD ex- periments have addressed the stresses resulting from computer science’s shift from a journal to a conference publication focus, discussed in
over two dozen commentaries in
Communications, three panels at CRA Snowbird conferences, the Workshop on
Organizing Workshops, Conferences
and Symposia for Computer Systems
(WOWCS’08), and a recent Dagstuhl
workshop.a We focus here on recent efforts to blend features of conferences
and journals, highlighting a conference that incorporated a revision cycle
without increasing the overall reviewer
workload. We also survey a range of approaches to improving conference reviewing and management.
Proposals fall into three principal
categories:
1. Return to the journal orientation
that has long served the sciences and
engineering well.
2. Develop hybrid approaches that
combine features of journals and conferences.
3. Improve conference reviewing
and management in other ways.
1. Return to the traditional journal
focus of the sciences. Rolling back the
clock is attractive but probably not feasible. It would require a unified effort
in a famously decentralized discipline.
It would be resisted by established researchers who built their careers on
conference publication. It would have
a Links to Communications commentaries,
Snowbird panels, WOWCS’08 notes, and the
Dagstuhl workshop are at http://research.mi-crosoft.com/~jgrudin/CACMviews.pdf.
to overcome the forces that motivated
the shift to conference publication in
the first place. 4
2. Combine journal and conference
elements. Conference proceedings
have usurped two key journal functions:
They are now archived and widely available. The boundary is blurred further
when conferences increase reviewing
rigor and journals reduce reviewing
time. Article lengths are converging as
reduced production costs let conferences relax or drop length limits and
as demands on reader attention push
journals to decrease article length.b The
most significant remaining distinctions
are: journals encourage more revision
and are less deadline driven; conferences promote informal interaction and
other community-building activities.
Most calls for change are related
to these two distinctions. Conference
program committees evaluate papers
on different dimensions (originality,
technical rigor, audience engagement,
and so forth) and make binary, in-or-out quality determinations under time
pressure on first drafts. Conferences
struggle to foster a sense of community
when rejecting the great majority of submissions. Authors perceive injustice,
feel their careers could be affected, and
are driven to attend or form other conferences. Table 1 lists approaches that
seek a middle ground to deliver benefits
of both conferences and journals.
b Haslam, N. Bite-size science: Relative impact
of short article formats. Perspectives on Psychological Science 5, 3 (2010), 263–264; http://
pps.sagepub.com/content/5/3/263.abstract.
SIGGRAPH dropped submission length limits
in the 1990s, follo wed by UIST and CSCW more
recently. Few papers exceed 10 or 12 pages.
Journal acceptance precedes conference presentation. Articles submitted
to the online monthly journal
Proceedings of the Very Large Data Bases Endowment (PVLDB) are limited to 12 pages
and receive three rapid reviews. Those
that have been accepted a couple
months prior to the annual fall VLDB
conference are eligible for presentation. Longer versions of PVLDB articles
can be published in the independently managed VLDB Journal. The same
process is used by the Conference on
High-Performance and Embedded Architectures and Compilers (HiPEAC),
which presents papers that have been
accepted by the ACM Transactions on
Code Optimization (TACO). Although
these journals stress rapid reviewing,
this undercuts the hypothesis that rate
of innovation was tied to the shift to a
conference focus in computer science
in the U.S.
VLDB and HiPEAC no longer have
separate submission and review processes. Alternatively, partial overlaps
are being explored. Submissions to
a special issue of the journal Theory
and Practice of Logic Programming are
also submissions to The International
Conference on Logic Programming
(ICLP), and granted one revision cycle
if necessary, as is common to journal
special issues. This approach retains
much of the conference deadline and
program committee structure. We will
describe this approach in detail as
used for conferences unaffiliated with
a journal.
Similarly, the European Conference
on Machine Learning and Principles
and Practice of Knowledge Discovery
in Databases (ECML/PKDD) now will
