tion “Would you accept this paper if it
was entirely up to you?” toward a more
constructive role of characterizing—
and indeed, profiling—the paper under
submission. Put differently, besides
suggestions for improvement to the authors, the reviewers attempt to collect
metadata about the paper that is used
further down the pipeline to decide
the most suitable publication venue. In
principle, this would make it feasible to
decouple the reviewing process from individual venues, something that would
also enable better load balancing and
scaling.
46 In such a system, authors and
reviewers would be members of some
central organization, which has the authority to assign papers to multiple publication venues—a futuristic scenario,
perhaps, but it is worth thinking about
the peculiar constraints that our current
conference- and journal-driven system
imposes, and which clearly leads to a
sub-optimal situation in many respects.
The computational methods we described in this article have been used
to support other academic processes
outside of peer review, including a
personalized conference planner app
for delegates,g an organizational profiler36 and a personalized course recommender for students based on their
academic profile.
41 The accompanying
table presented a few other possible
future directions for computation support of academic peer review itself. We
hope that they, along with this article,
stimulate our readers to think about
ways in which the academic peer review process—this strange dance in
which we all participate in one way or
another—can be future-proofed in a
sustainable and scalable way.
g http://www.subsift.com/ecmlpkdd2012/attend-
ing/apps//
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Simon Price ( simon.price@bristol.ac.uk) is a Visiting
Fellow in the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Bristol, U.K., and a data scientist
at Capgemini.
Peter A. Flach ( peter.flach@bristol.ac.uk) is a professor
of artificial intelligence in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Bristol, U.K. and editor-in-chief
of the Machine Learning journal.
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