Rambles around computer science

Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time

Mon, 02 Feb 2015

Thoughts on peer review

My PLDI submission was rejected. I'm not too sad about this, since the reviews were basically encouraging, and on balance I agree that the paper can still be improved and was arguably not (quite) ready yet.

However, despite certain innovations, namely two-phase review and rebuttal, the conference review process is as creaky as ever. This is rather dispiriting, and the longer I spend doing computer science research, the more bizarre our system seems. I filled in the anonymous post-conference survey, but since my comments apply more widely than to a single instance of a single conference, I feel like forgoing my anonymity and re-posting them here (lightly edited). I hope they don't have too much of a sour-grapesy flavour—at least, that's not really how I'm feeling.

Something I didn't elaborate in my survey response: what would this “progressive model” be? It might involve reserving a smaller part of the programme for short presentations of recent journal publications, and a larger part of the programme for short presentations of high-quality in-progress work. This would be work at a substantially more advanced stage than a typical workshop paper—possibly reasonably mature already, but not yet accepted for publication in a journal. Initially, it seems important to ring-fence the slots for the latter kind of presentation, to avoid having already-published work always trump the not-yet-published stuff. Eventually, in a well-functioning community there would not be much call for the former kind of slot, since most journal publications would describe things that had been presented at previous conferences.

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