Many of our procedures are focused more on those active and established in the evaluation process. I believe we can do better by aiming to serve the entire community, which will profit all of us.
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Evaluations – Industrial Challenge
An actual industrial problem, described in way academics can understand, made public, can help steer research towards reality. Research aiming to be relevant to reality needs proper evaluations, ideally of actual industrial problems. In my experience, this is often hindered by ECRTS addressed the issues by providing “Industrial Challenges“, use cases from reality, in which…
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Welcoming New Participants – First Timer Reception
So finally there are new persons coming to the conference, great! Now ease their way into the conference and use the chance to expand the conference community. For me and many other members of the community, conferences are also a social place with plenty of networking going on. A while ago, I attended a conference…
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Suggestions for better Research Assessment: San Francisco Declaration
An substantial number of institutions and individuals have signed to support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which is critical of the use of journal impact factors in assessing research. I find the reasoning behind and suggestions for how (not) to do assessments quite interesting, see examples quotes below. A tool is provided, Reformscape,…
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Journal rankings have negative impact
Björn Brembs, Katherine Button, and Marcus Munafò argue and provide facts in their paper “Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank” Cathy O’Neil analyzed the findings in her blog, interesting reading and another argument that we should not use numerical indicators for qualitative evaluations The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment provides conclusions on how…
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Resist Schoolyard Peer Pressure
Only because other conferences are doing it, you don’t have to – the benefit to your conference and its community matters. A few times I received suggestions for changes in ECRTS motivated by “but the other conferences are doing it”. This sounds to me like schoolyard peer pressure ala “all the other kids have sneakers…
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Paper length
I believe paper length restrictions are a historic artefact, needed to keep printing and shipping of proceedings low. It can have a side effect of harming the community: if as authors we run out of space, and lets face it, we do most of the time, we have the choice between cutting our contents or…
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Best paper – Outstanding papers, Award Visibility
Highlighting achievements is a good thing. The conference can signal which papers it considers very good, and authors can take deserved credit. ECRTS moved from single Best paper only to a number Outstanding papers to serve these goals better. In my experience, there is rarely a single best paper, clearly above all others. Typically there…
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Community friendly timing
Conference timing can have impact on time with families, quality of life, etc. At ECRTS, Sophie Quinton brought in changes to our timing to suit our family and personal lives better.This included having the submission deadline on a Thursday. We “anytime on earth” semantic, even in the eastern parts of the world the deadline is…
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Edward Lee – “The Toxic Culture of Rejection in Computer Science”
Edward Lee posted on the Sigbed Blog “The Toxic Culture of Rejection in Computer Science” on negativity in CS conference culture, with some interesting observations, some resonating with issues addressed in this blog: “We have come to value as a quality metric for conferences a low acceptance rate. This feeds a culture of shooting each…