Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Jeff Naughton on some challenges for the community

The presentation may be found here:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~naughton/naughtonicde.pptx

Some of his key points

- Low acceptance rates is a major cause for the current situation of publish or perish. The solution is to accept more papers, perhaps all papers.

Although I never felt comfortable boasting about the acceptance rate of the venues where my papers have appeared, I never gave it much thought either. Conferences should stop boasting about their selectiveness.

- Three random reviewers simply does not cut it. Reviews should be more discussion-oriented.

- To mitigate the problem of bad reviews, publish the reviews. Let the authors be anonymous, but reveal the reviewers' identity. Let's put our money where our mouths are.

I have seen many many bad reviews. We should not let reviewers get away with bad reviews.

- Let's take advantage of technology to come up with new publishing and dissemination models! Check out the LiquidPub project (http://liquidpub.org/)

We need to think hard about these things. We need courage too.