Database Publication Practices: Recap of SIGMOD 2004 Panel Zachary G. Ives University of Pennsylvania May 11, 2015 VLDB 2005, Trondheim, Norway

Observed Problems  Conferences are being flooded:  Lack of dis-incentives against not-ready-for-prime-time submissions  Common practice to re-submit every rejection to the next conference – not always with major fixes  Requires immense program committees  Result has been a lack of quality control or consistency in reviews  Not only frustrating, but can harm careers!

Possible Solutions Two classes:  Make it harder to submit (or re-submit) papers  limit number of submissions; break SIGMOD => VLDB => ICDE pipeline  Or: streamline and improve the review process (see SIGMOD04 proceedings + SIGMOD Record summary, and VLDB05 conference proceedings for more details than I have time for here)

Ideas for Improving the Review Process  Increase quality control and participation in reviews:  Open reviewing on the Web  More reviewers per paper  Two-tier PCs (as with ICDE)  Mandatory physical PC meetings  Reviewer evaluations  Hybridize journals (more effective reviews) and conferences (prestige & visibility):  “Institutional memory” (opt-in) for borderline rejections in conferences – similar to journals’ consistent reviewers + rebuttal  Accelerated journal reviews, mechanisms for prestige  Merging of journals and conferences: use the conference as a forum for presenting the most interesting papers from the past year