4 ms·

I wonder if this culture arises out of necessity. Many conferences claim to not have a set quota of papers they accept, but in practice there is a limitation t

by Athas 4y ago

I wonder if this culture arises out of necessity. Many conferences claim to not have a set quota of papers they accept, but in practice there is a limitation to how many presentations can be accommodated given the physical and temporal limitations of the venue. The quota may grow slightly over time, either by shrinking the time allotted to every presentation (ICFP is really squeezing it these years, for example) or adding parallel tracks, but there are ultimately fairly hard physical restrictions. This inevitably limits how many submissions can be accepted, which also creates an otherwise unnecessary air of competition, even between otherwise unrelated papers. Journals don't have this restriction; you can always put out more volumes. I suppose I enjoy conferences as much as any CS practitioner, but it does not strike me as a sustainable or scalable publication method.

xhkkffbf 4y ago
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.
- Athas 4y ago
  Modern journals don't actually print all that much, and I'd expect the marginal cost of publishing additional papers to be very low.
- musicale 4y ago
  > 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 rejection. If Prof. Lee is right then reviewing effort could go down overall due to fewer resubmissions.
  - jononor 4y ago
    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.

by Athas 4y ago

xhkkffbf 4y ago

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.

Athas 4y ago
Modern journals don't actually print all that much, and I'd expect the marginal cost of publishing additional papers to be very low.
musicale 4y ago
> 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 rejection. If Prof. Lee is right then reviewing effort could go down overall due to fewer resubmissions.
- jononor 4y ago
  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.