[TYPES] Dealing with conferences for the environment conscious

[Alessio Guglielmi]

Dear Sergei and list members,

I clarify the proposal I had made last week about participating in conferences.

The problem to address is publication inflation, which is favoured by 
the abundance of conferences and their abnormal relevance in hiring 
and tenure decisions. The only conferences that pose a problem in 
this respect are the `refereed' ones, whose proceedings are published 
(and so they constitute valid beans).

Clearly, there are good aspects to conferences, so I propose a 
compromise, with the hope to gently push the system towards a more 
reasonable balance between the well pondered and the frantic.

Come to think of it, my proposal, which only concerns conferences 
with `refereed' and published proceedings, could be presented in 
three varieties:

1 - PESCETARIAN: Only submit papers where some other author from 
oneself is in need of a job or tenure (and they speak at the 
conference), and reject invitations as invited speaker.

2 - VEGETARIAN: In addition to 1, do not `review' papers for those 
conferences (and compensate with very accurate reviews of journal 
papers) and do not participate in their committees.

3 - VEGAN: Do not submit to, participate in, review for, and organize 
conferences with published proceedings.

(I can imagine fruitarianism: only read and cite journal papers, the 
good fruits of research, no living creature harmed; but that seems 
extreme.)

If that is of any interest, I'm a vegetarian, and have been such for 
thirteen years before getting a permanent job.

There are many that seem to agree with the general principles of my 
proposal, although perhaps not on the details. I was wondering if we 
can reach a consensus and state our position in an organised and 
visible fashion, so to have an impact.

Ciao,

-Alessio


At 12:09 +0100 31/1/10, soloviev at irit.fr wrote:
>Dear Alessio,
>
>your suggestion seems to me not very clear. Do you mean
>that conferences that publish proceedings are not good? I was
>recently disappointed a few times with certain conferences
>(well, organized by philosophers of mathematics) where
>we made a usual effort to write a reasonnably detailed
>conference contribution and they published only a very
>short abstracts, and put the full
>texts on some ephemere web site.
>(It was not clear from their "call for papers"!)
>
>Also the phrase seems ambiguous:
>>refusal to deal... with conferences that publish proceedings, except for
>>  papers with colleagues that are seeking jobs/tenure.
>Who is making an exception - you (for papers with colleagues?)
>or the organizers (for the papers with their colleagues -
>and you don't approve?)
>
>It is difficult to agree with such position, if it is indeed
>what you suggest to put in the manifesto.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Sergei Soloviev
>
>
>
>>  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.
>>
>  > -Alessio