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The culture of rejection in computer science publications

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Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#131

Post by Jensson »

whatshisface wrote: post #123
blagie wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mystery. Behavior converges to incentives: * You do get academic points for chairing a conference, and as a chair, you do need to find reviewers. * A colleague is running a conference, and asks you to do a favor. You want to help your colleague. Reviewing papers wins you points with them, and declining to review burns bridges. When you're running a conference, you'd like them to reciprocate. Plus, they might be on…

> Reviewing papers wins you points with them, and declining to review burns bridges. When you're running a conference, you'd like them to reciprocate. Surely they'd get upset if you rejected all of the good papers, thereby ensuring that they would have a bad conference.

Just accept people who has held a lot of conference talks before and it will be fine. That is the fastest and easiest way to review, so unless there is pressure to do things differently that is how most will do it.

If there is space still left at the end you can look at the others and take the first paper that looks fine until there are no spots left.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#132

Post by Jensson »

agumonkey wrote: post #127
blagie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well-known in a research community. I'm positioned such that I don't need more academic points. I've mostly stopped publishing in branded prestige academic venues, in part due to rejection rates. My goal in doing work and writing papers is to see them disseminated. The acceptance/rejection process is asinine -- studies show it's basically random. I've had one paper in my whole career where the reviewers did a pro…

> My goal in doing work and writing papers is to see them disseminated. The acceptance/rejection process is asinine -- studies show it's basically random. I've had one paper in my whole career where the reviewers did a proper review (e.g. worked through the math). The rest were quick skims. Comments often show the reviewers never read the paper. The stuff that makes it through this process is often nonsense, while ve…

Because the leaders are the people who made their careers in the current system and they wouldn't benefit from making things more meritocratic. These are the people who argues endlessly saying meritocracy is bad for reason X or reason Y, they just want to keep their current privileges.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#133

Post by Eridrus »

kmmlng wrote: post #42

I think it's not surprising that conferences have to perform some selection. You need the right amount of participants and talks. If a high rejection rate achieves the right amount, it is hard to argue against it. But why are publications tied to conference attendance anyways? Sure, there also journals, but submitting to a journal tends to be an especially slow process. If you are in a fast-paced field, submitting to…

ArXiv is fine for what it does, but it does not provide any sort of dissemination support.

IMO the best thing about CS conferences is the poster track where you can walk by hundreds of posters, and the information is (when done well) much more easily digestible than papers, and you get to ask questions, and these are nowhere near their limits.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#134

Post by xdavidliu »

Hackbraten wrote: post #65
secondcoming wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, but I don't know what it actually does stand for. It's definitely not Personal Computer

The acronym is not web-search friendly either. Been looking through this thread and search engines. Nothing helped. For example, not a single one of these [1] makes sense to me in that context. [1]: https://www.allacronyms.com/PC/university

this is one of my pet peeves. You and dozens of other people probably spent collectively hundreds to thousands of minutes and brain cells wondering what PC stood for, while the people who originally typed "PC" instead of program committee saved maybe a fifth of a second.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#135

Post by xdavidliu »

ghaff wrote: post #21
impendia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once reviewed a math paper for a double-blind journal. Most math journals aren't double blind (as you say, I can often tell who the authors are) -- but this is one focused on expositional articles that undergrads might enjoy. Anyway, I read it, didn't find it all that interesting, and recommended that the paper be rejected. Afterwards, I googled the paper's title and found a signed copy: the author was one of the m…

As someone who has been on the conference committee for (non-academic) conferences, I'm not a particular fan of blind selections. Yes, I get the desire to not just give slots to "the usual suspects" which at least historically has often happened at a lot of conferences I attended. But the reality is that there are people who you know based on overwhelming experience will give great talks that attendees will appreciat…

> there are people who you know based on overwhelming experience will give great talks that attendees will appreciate and learn from ... do you really want to reject them?

If I'm reading correctly, you're saying that sometimes a work deserves to get in based (at least partly) on the author's name recognition (for historically having given good talks) and not solely on the merits of the work itself. I see the point you're trying to make, but something about this argument makes me uncomfortable.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#136

Post by ghaff »

Jensson wrote: post #131
whatshisface wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reviewing papers wins you points with them, and declining to review burns bridges. When you're running a conference, you'd like them to reciprocate. Surely they'd get upset if you rejected all of the good papers, thereby ensuring that they would have a bad conference.

Just accept people who has held a lot of conference talks before and it will be fine. That is the fastest and easiest way to review, so unless there is pressure to do things differently that is how most will do it. If there is space still left at the end you can look at the others and take the first paper that looks fine until there are no spots left.

There is (for good reason) more focus today on diversity--broadly defined e.g. new speakers--for non-academic conferences these days. However, there were quite a few conferences in the tech sector historically that tended to have a core of "the usual suspects" with others grabbing a smaller number of leftover slots. TBH, I probably benefited from this over the years. (Conferences run by companies follow somewhat different rules but still usually have a stable of Top Rated Speakers who tend to get slots.)

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#137

Post by jononor »

musicale wrote: post #105
xhkkffbf wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But journals do have an economic restriction. More pages cost more money and the subscription fees only go so far. I suppose page charges might balance some of the editorial costs, but those are also limiting. They can't be too high or they'll chase away submissions.

> More pages cost more money and the subscription fees only go so far arxiv.org's budget is instructive: around $2M for 181K new submissions and a digital library of around 2M articles. Works out to about $12 per new submission. For a reviewed journal or conference, presumably all published papers would have to be reviewed, much as they are currently by volunteer reviewers who review all papers before publication or…

12 USD is the current cost per submission. But I do not think that they need to 2x their budget to handle 2x the amount of articles. Marginal costs per article will be lower.

But your point stands, this stuff costs real money. So I just donated 100 USD to Arxiv, as they host a few of my papers. And thousands of other articles that I have read, for free and super accessibly.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#138

Post by thaw13579 »

JohnClark1337 wrote: post #76
logisticseh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "cream" rising to the top is often less genius and more politically savvy with the right connections on the PC. I'm generally nauseated when I interact with American CS academics. Every time I attend a conference, PC, or NSF panel, I am so glad I chose industry. It's like IRL twitter. (Europe seems to be better for some reason.) > If you're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from the private sector you s…

I'm curious where all the money goes, since student loans are incredibly high but teacher pay is so low. I'm guessing the answer is 'random nonsense that shouldn't matter'.

In my university teaching experience, I found that everyone up the administrative chain to the top gets a cut, with the teaching faculty themselves receiving 1-2% of the annual tuition...

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#139

Post by kleingeld »

ath0 wrote: post #32

I'm long past my academia phase, but recently led the PC for an industry conference (accept rate: ~15%). 1. Curation is important both for the physical limits (venues only fit a certain number of people), attention limits (attendees will usually retain only a handful of "nuggets" no matter how packed the agenda is) and interaction limits (you can't meet everyone at a large conference). 2. If the goal of a conference…

Try "publishing" in https://researchers.one

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#140

Post by thaw13579 »

tremon wrote: post #40
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not "a simple man", you're an agitator lashing out at criticisms of behaviour and culture.

Isn't the agitator the one who wields the phrase "toxic culture"?

Probably depends on whether the claims are substantiated with good evidence.
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