Re: [Tccc] Different community, similar problems? (Henning Schulzrinne)

Definitely something we the community should give some thoughts on.
If the conference-centered publication practice is just an artifact of
how things have been done in our field and buys not much more,
then we should seriously think about morphing the practice to journals.

Some pluses about the conf-centered style.
- Workshops draw attention to a new rising field
and offers an opportunity for people to gather and discuss.
Creating a journal in a very agile manner would be hard.
- I can follow what's happening in the field by checking out
a few top conference proceedings.
A few minuses:
- Artificial constraint on when we publish
- No chance for a rebuttal, especially to a review that's unfair or
in some cases wrong or flawed
- Extra travel overhead for TPC meetings (not green!!)
- Much delay in publication, especially when authors target
premium conferences with low acceptance ratios.
- Those who can stay up the night before a deadline have advantage.
(Yeah you should not work only the night before, but we're all human
and there's always some last-minute improvement one can do.
Particularly challenging as we grow old.)

How to morph to journals? One idea is for conferences to find a journal
to align with and then become a special issue. The review process
should be negotiated. Then do we still hold the conference?
Get rid of the conference itself? Merge a few to a big one?
We'll need much discussion for sure.

-Sue

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Touch [mailto:touch@isi.edu]
> Sent: Friday, July 23, 2010 5:29 AM
> To: sbmoon@kaist.edu
> Cc: 'Victor Bahl'; 'Mani Srivastava'; tccc@lists.cs.columbia.edu
> Subject: Re: [Tccc] Different community, similar problems? (Henning
> Schulzrinne)
>
> Hi, Sue (et al.),
>
> On 7/22/2010 1:07 AM, Sue Moon wrote:
> ...
> > Conference or journal, if we could make sure that reviews are done well,
> > why should it matter?
>
> In a word, tenure (replace with whatever review process you prefer).
>
> We're all reviewed in various ways. Asserting that "networking is
> different", vs. other fields (either within CS, across engineering, or
> throughout other disciplines) doesn't cut it.
>
> IMO, we need to determine whether there's something about our work that
> truly is unique and warrants <10% conference accept rates and long
> review timelines - and make that case on its own merit (not just "that's
> how it's always been"), or we should *adapt* to the common modes of
> scientific discourse.
>
> Joe

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