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1 is the only acceptable acceptance ratio
… which is of course a bit of a polemic title, let me try to motivate: How can acceptance ratio serve as measure of quality of a conference Acceptance ratio, i.e., the fraction of total number of accepted papers over the number of submitted papers, is considered as important quality indicator of a conference. I…
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Research Conferences vs. H-Index Machines
I find numerical evaluation systems bad for the community. Evaluation criteria, notably h-index, are forced upon us by actors outside our control, e.g., funding agencies, promotions boards etc. Consequently, meeting such criteria becomes important. I do not understand why.See this post for comments on acceptance ratio. At ECRTS, we tried to move towards a conference…
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Rules alone cannot ensure fair procedures
Rules can be an important part of conference procedures. If made public, they contribute to transparency of conference procedures and provide insights to non-core members of the community. Conferences are fiendishly complex with many inter-dependencies. They should be dynamic, adjusting to changing demands for best supporting the community over time.I believe rules cannot provide complete…
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Open Access
A goal of research is to ultimately to benefit society with research results available to the public. The conference work done by volunteers, and in the end tax payer funded, should aid this goal. The current model of major publishers such as IEEE or ACM, is to profit from restricting availability of results. Lets have…
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What is a good paper depends on the type of contribution
Evaluation criteria are mostly of a one-fits-all type. I believe they should be different, based on the type of contribution, e.g., theory or practice; and they should be made public. Much of our understanding of what kind of papers are suitable for which conference is primarily based on historical knowledge, participation in TPCs, etc., and…
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How does the Conference serve the Research Community?
The research community in a field, e.g., real-time systems, consists of everyone working in the area, independent of their role in TPCs, whether they publish in respective outlets or not. The conference serves the entire community (and society overall, but not detailed here) by The conference does not serve Any member of the overall community…
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Quantitative Solutions don’t solve Qualitative Problems
A reflex to problems often seem to be “do more of x”. Let’s look at an example: “Not happy with the quality of the review process? Do more reviews per paper.” Lack of quality in paper selection procedures can often be attributed to bad reviews by uncommitted reviewers or TPC members. Such reviewers should not…