Communications of the ACM

editor’s letter
IN JANUAR Y 2007, I undertook the task of revitalizing Communica- tions of the ACM. In the 1970s, Communications was one of the premier publications in com-
puting, publishing seminal articles
such as Codd’s “A Relational Model
of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”
(June 1970) and Rivest, Shamir, and
Adleman’s “A Method for Obtaining
Digital Signature and Public-Key Cryp-
tosystems” (February 1978). By the

1990s, however, Communications’ content had evolved to be strongly slanted toward Management Information Systems. Over time, a significant segment of the ACM membership had lost interest in the publication. When David Patterson became ACM President in

2005, he argued that this state of affairs was unacceptable. The revitalized

Communications was launched in July

2008, and by March 2009 I was able to conclude “Yes, it can be done” (see https://goo.gl/0ySCMj). Now, after 10

years at the helm of Communications, it is time for me to move on and for the magazine to get new leadership. Expect a formal announcement on this in the very near future!

My 10 years with Communications

has been an incredible learning experience. I would like to share one of the most important lessons I learned. To turn Communications around, it was important to understand first what went wrong. How has Communications

evolved from a premier publication in
computing to one that was of interest
only to a narrow segment of the com-
puting community? The answer, in one
word, is emergence, the phenomenon
whereby a systemwide behavior arises
through numerous interactions among
system components. An example of
emergence is gentrification, which is
a process of renovation of deteriorated
urban neighborhoods by means of the
influx of more affluent residents. The
reverse trend is usually called urban de-
cline. Gentrification and urban decline
are the result of numerous individual
decisions of residents moving into and
moving out of the neighborhood. With
no central direction, a neighborhood
can completely change its character
over a couple of decades.

The standard scholarly editorial model is that of filtration: authors submit articles, and editors filter them, with the help of reviewers, based on scope and quality. While the editorial process plays a critical role in shaping the face of a publication, the dominant factor is the nature of the submitted articles, which is determined solely by the submitting authors. Authors make submission decisions to a large measure based on articles already published. Thus, just as a neighborhood can change its character over a couple of decades, a publication can see its character change in just a few years.

This is how Communications changed
in the 1990s from a magazine repre-
senting all of computing to essentially
“MIS Monthly.”
The key to the turnaround of Com-
munications was to change the edito-
rial model from one mostly based on
filtration to one mostly based on cura-
tion. The word “curation” comes from
the verb “to care” It is typically used in
the context of museums, where a cu-
rator selects items for exhibits. It also
refers more broadly to the process of
gathering and selecting content. While

Communications is open to submis-
sions, the lion’s share of its published
content is curated. Certain sections,
and Practice, are purely curated, with
an editorial-board section in charge
of the curation. Other sections, com-
bine curation and filtration. Take
Contributed Articles, for example.

During 2016, we received 202 submissions. Most of these articles were unsolicited, but a significant fraction of the submitted articles were solicited, which means that an editor encouraged a specific author to submit an article on a specific topic. Both solicited and unsolicited articles are subject to the same rigorous peer review, but the selection of topics and authors of solicited articles results in a higher probability of a positive editorial outcome.

Curation ensures Communications

continues to be a publication that is broadly representative of computing. But curation requires an editorial board that is not merely reactive, but is strongly proactive, continually seeking topics and authors for high-quality articles. Communications’ Editorial Board consists of approximately 100

committed volunteers. The quality and commitment of the Editorial Board is the real key to the success of the revitalized Communications. For all of Communications’ success these past years, it will continue to remain a work in progress that will need the dedicated involvement of members of the community to keep it current and relevant for the fast-changing field of computing. Both ACM and the community will need to continue investing in Communications