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There's two main problems. First, the field is too saturated -- too many people publishing papers. Second, the reviewers are the same people that publish papers -- it's a zero sum game (regardless of acceptance criteria). Submission numbers this year have been absolutely crazy. I honestly don't think it can be solved.
And yet, submission numbers follow the (N = actually new papers)/(p = rate of acceptance) trend, approximately. The difference between a 20% and 35% acceptance rate is ~5N vs ~3N papers in the submission pool.
The real issue is careers valuing where papers are published over what they contribute, and incentives won’t change until hiring and funding reward depth over volume.
> valuing where papers are published over what they contribute And who is the arbiter of that? This is an imperfect but easy shorthand. Like valuing grades and degrees instead of what people actually took away from school. In an ideal world we would see all this intangible worth in people's contributions. But we don't have time for that. So the PhD committee decides on exactly that measure whether there are enough pu…
We already know there is some way to do it because researchers do salami slicing where they take one paper and split it up into multiple papers to get more numbers, out of the same work. Therefore one might for example look at a paper and think, how many papers could one get out of this if they were to take part in salami slicing in order to get at-least some measure of this initially.
If there's more good papers due to more activity, doesn't that allow for the possibility of more conferences and journals to publish to, which increases the acceptance rate? I don't think that the solution has to be that existing conferences and journals accept more.
The problem is that external environment (namely hiring) creates pressure to publish in a handful of prestigious venues. Nobody wants to be the odd one out that has their papers in some less well known conferences.
The problem is every coauthor wants to increase submissions, LLMs are great at making something that looks OK at first glance, and people have low(er) expectations for a conference paper. A recipe for disaster.
Extrapolate a bit and there are LLM written papers being peer reviewed by LLMs, but fear it not, even if they are accepted the will not be cited because LLMs are hallucinating citations that better support their arguments! And then there is the poor researcher, just a beginner, writing a draft, simple but honest material getting lost in all this line noise, or worse out, feeding it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that external environment (namely hiring) creates pressure to publish in a handful of prestigious venues. Nobody wants to be the odd one out that has their papers in some less well known conferences.
There could be more top-tier conferences, though. If the field grows, it makes perfect sense for the number of top-tier venues to grow as well (for whatever percentile we set as a threshold to be "top-tier"). And creating more venues is also good for people who might not have funding for long trips across continents (although lately, accommodation costs tend to be increasingly dominant with respect to flight costs in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There could be more top-tier conferences, though. If the field grows, it makes perfect sense for the number of top-tier venues to grow as well (for whatever percentile we set as a threshold to be "top-tier"). And creating more venues is also good for people who might not have funding for long trips across continents (although lately, accommodation costs tend to be increasingly dominant with respect to flight costs in…
This has to be organic and is not guaranteed to happen. You can't just arbitrarily declare a conference "top tier".
As pointed out in the comments, conferences have physical limits on the number of presenters (even in poster sessions), so the number of accepted papers at top conferences will likely stop growing at some point. (Perhaps it should have been capped already.) This will probably lead to new conferences appearing to satisfy the "demand", but more conferences of varying quality is probably better than reviewing at top con…
NeuriPS, CVPR and ICML are solid brands that took decades to build.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has to be organic and is not guaranteed to happen. You can't just arbitrarily declare a conference "top tier".
In general you're right, but I believe that there are ways to do it. For example, if an existing top tier conference split into several (e.g. say that NeurIPS decides to hold 3 conferences a year, NeurIPS-America, NeurIPS-Europe and NeurIPS-Asia, or whatever) in practice they would probably be top tier from the get go.