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.

RIP Future Work

Future work from many years ago remains unscathed. I prefer to not write these sections anymore -- they make me uneasy, especially the work part of it. However, I cannot jettison the section altogether. A situation where the a reviewer says 'It's a solid, conceptually well-founded paper that reconciles some long-standing issues in our field. I feel however that lacking a future work section the next steps are unclear, which will likely plunge our field into chaos. Hence the reject.' is not entirely unimaginable. So I started using Future directions instead. It is not only noncommittal, it is also in the spirit of spreading enlightenment -- I may follow them, but if you were any good, you'd follow them too.

The possibilities in a finality

In one of the papers I coauthored: "Finally, Section 6 concludes this paper". May be the writer thought about the possibility that finally one may not conclude a paper. Or perhaps, finally, one could conclude some other paper. Or perhaps, there is a Section 7, but Section 6 concludes this paper. Or some combination of the above -- Section 6 concludes this paper, but Section 7 some other. Or perhaps the author knows how very tedious the paper is, so he wrote the sentence to reassure the reader that there is an end to the tyranny.