Publication Etc.

Disclaimer This is a complex and emotional topic. – There are many facets of the problem. – Any “solution” will have good and bad points and be hard to implement. – We will not design a solution today.

Plan for talk Some thoughts on the problem. A straw-man “solution,” just to: – Be concrete. – Provide a target to attack for discussion. – We should focus much more on the problems that exist rather than this straw-man – even I won’t advocate implementing it without a lot of refinement. Most of the session will be discussion (or lunch will be early).

What is the problem? Too many people striving to write too many papers. Among the results: – Conferences are either too large and diverse or ridiculously selective. – PCs are enormous, fickle, and have a hard time finding good programs. – Researchers face a depressing task of generating all these papers and getting them past program committees.

The coming deluge… Scary scenario: – As more of the world develops research universities… – As more existing universities “fill up” with researchers… the problem will get (much) worse. We are living in the “good old days” of 10 years hence.

What the problem is not Young researchers don’t have the high morals and research taste of the old guard. Young researchers have a genetic deficiency that leads them to prefer LPUs over high impact fundamental work.

Some observations on papers Once-in-a-decade papers tend to appear only about once every 10 years. Paradigm-change causing papers tend to appear only about as frequently as paradigm changes occur. Asking everyone to only write once-a-decade, paradigm-changing papers is stupid.

So why do we have so many papers? Two factors: – Many more researchers. – Many more papers per researcher. These researchers are smart: – Publishing a lot of papers in good places guarantees [a moderate level of] success. – Going for lots of singles has a higher expected payoff than always swinging for the fences. So they write a lot of papers.

How can we address the problem? Supply – reducing the supply of papers. Demand – reducing the demand for these papers. Capacity – creating scalable publishable systems that can handle the deluge.

Reducing supply Make our field really unattractive so no one enters it? Ask everyone to please write fewer papers? Shame people by calling their work LPUs? Establish and enforce quota systems? All are doomed; like fighting drugs by asking suppliers to stop.

Reducing demand Thought experiment: if writing 5X papers gave no benefit over writing X, the problem would be lessened (perhaps by a factor of 5). So how can we do this? – Tell everyone to stop counting papers in evaluations? – Many of us already do not count papers in evaluations, but unlikely to succeed worldwide anytime soon. Guess: solution must be linked to capacity.

Straw-man idea All papers go to one clearing house. Every paper is “accepted” there. Conference PCs comb this clearing house for papers. – Each PC member picks a few papers to bring to the PC meeting (small, and face-to-face). – Each PC member is an advocate for his/her selections. – No obligation to review any paper in the clearing house. – Conferences compete for the best papers. It will be brutal but life is hard.

Creates a two-tier system Clearing house publishes everything. – Everyone gets the experience of performing research and writing it up. – The ecosystem continues to be fed with interested people dedicated to interesting projects. – The lucky few will get recognized with conference paper invitations. Want to be a researcher? – Figure out how to get invitations. Fail to get invitations? – Have great career in industry.

Discussion? Your comment/idea goes here…