[TYPES] Two-tier reviewing process

[Alessio Guglielmi]

Hello,

At 09:21 -0800 29/1/10, Kim Bruce wrote:
>I'm not saying we should move away from refereed conferences, but 
>they should not be the be-all and end-all.

At 14:47 -0500 29/1/10, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, which is why
>it is so difficult to change things.

At 16:02 -0500 29/1/10, Rajeev Alur wrote:
>The real problem is with the current submission process that is 
>causing enormous overload: there are too many conferences, everyone 
>(experts and non-experts) is writing and submitting too many papers, 
>but there are too few (so-called) expert reviewers (the challenge of 
>getting serious reviews in a timely manner is a headache for journal 
>editors also).

At 11:01 +0100 30/1/10, Roberto Di Cosmo wrote:
>Reputation is a sophisticated object, and IMHO it does not or should 
>not come just from the number of papers published: in our field, we 
>know well that designing a powerful abstraction is an accomplishment 
>worth hundreds of incremental improvements of the state of the art, 
>so one breakthrough paper that subsumes dozens of previous works 
>should not be counted as 'just one more paper'.

Just a few examples of criticism I have recently read on the list 
(and I also got personal messages along the same lines).

There seem to be many that agree on the points above, and in general 
on the feeling that our over-reliance on conferences, especially for 
hiring and tenure, is grotesque. It reminds me of the game of 
Canabalt (try it if you didn't already: 
<http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/>).

I wonder whether we can make our dissatisfaction more visible than 
just some complaining on the list, for example by agreeing on a 
little manifesto and adopting some healthy behaviour, to be 
publicized on our web pages. I suggest the compromise that I adopt: 
refusal to deal, in any way (papers, committees, refereeing, 
invitations), with conferences that publish proceedings, except for 
papers with colleagues that are seeking jobs/tenure. The objective is 
not to kill conferences, just to correct the imbalance.

For those that might think that this can slow their career: of course 
the freedom from the frenzy will make you have better, 
non-incremental ideas! Be bold, eventually you'll be better off.

For the manifesto, I propose to keep it simple and to the point: you 
don't discover America with a canoe, you don't go to the moon on a 
firework, etc.

I'm happy to collect ideas and make a synthesis.

-Alessio