3 ms·

I can see that narrative with Springer, but the IEEE is a nonprofit, the main professional society for large areas of computer & electrical engineering. It's no

by mjn 13y ago

I can see that narrative with Springer, but the IEEE is a nonprofit, the main professional society for large areas of computer & electrical engineering. It's not necessarily the best-run nonprofit, but they aren't trying to pump up a stock price or give an ROI to investors or anything. They do need some revenue to pay for their ongoing operations, but in theory they should also be very interested in ensuring that revenue-generating operations don't compromise their main mission and reputation (which is the reason to raise revenue in the first place). I think part of it is that historically the IEEE has wanted to be relatively open to new fields of research, so if you have a few professors willing to vouch for a new conference, the IEEE is willing to sponsor it and publish the proceedings. It's quite decentralized and any of the various "societies" and "interest groups" within the IEEE can sponsor a conference without central approval... and it's also fairly easy to start a new interest group. That system depends on most active IEEE members being legitimate researchers, though, who are in good faith trying to put on real conferences. If that's true, it makes sense for the approval policy to be relatively permissive. But some people have been taking advantage of this and producing vanity conferences, so this system probably needs to be tightened. Either the IEEE needs to exercise more control over conference approval, or they need to be more diligent in kicking out people who abuse the trust of the permissive system. The ACM (the main professional society for computer scientists) is somewhat more conservative about sponsoring new conferences, though that does occasionally produce the opposite problem where it takes a lot of legwork (and sometimes politicking) to get a new one accepted.

p4bl0 13y ago
I sincerely hope you are right. However, as pointed out in other comments, most researchers know what are the good and bad venues in their particular fields. This means that in reality, who is the publisher of a journal or of the proceedings of a conference matters less than the reputation of the conference or journal itself (sadly, that may be less true when it comes to recruitment in academia) which is given by the quality of the papers published in there. If I had to chose fights I guess it would be for the generalization gold open access and for the end of bibliometrics before trying to get these publishers more involved in what they publish (since we don't really need them anymore).
- mjn 13y ago
  I think that's true within a field, yeah. But outside the really top conferences, stuff as famous as SIGGRAPH, my experience has been that publisher affiliation is given significant heuristic weight, especially when people slightly outside a field are evaluating a conference they aren't personally familiar with (either researchers in other areas, or administrators/deans/etc.). A non-HCI researcher (even another CS researcher) might wonder, is this HCI conference I've never heard of any good? If it's an ACM HCI conference, many people will automatically attribute to it some baseline level of credibility, while if it's a completely independent conference, you start out more in the hole having to justify that this conference is legit. A top conference like SIGGRAPH could probably get away with not being ACM (though the ACM affiliation probably helps with deans/etc.), but more specialized, mid-tier conferences have a harder time going DIY. I don't think that should always be the decisive factor, just that it's an issue. Last year I was proceedings chair of a conference that I did help move out of ACM, which it had been affiliated with and published with for the previous few years (http://www.fdg2013.org http://www.fdg2013.org). There were various reasons for it, one being that being ACM-affiliated imposes significant bureaucracy and some financial costs that have to be recouped in registration fees (they're super-paranoid about the event insurance, for example). Another is that the conference is in a field (game studies, game AI, etc.) where we hope non-academics will also read the papers, and being open access would make that a lot easier. Being in the ACM Digital Library doesn't prohibit authors from putting up non-paywalled PDFs on their own sites, but it does prevent there from being an official, centralized open-access proceedings. But I would say we did lose some previous participants as a result of the move. For some people, moving from "an ACM conference, with proceedings archived in the ACM Digital Library" to "an independent conference, with proceedings published by the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games" is a deal-breaker: they see it as a drop off in prestige, from something they can list on their CV and use for their tenure case to something they can't. This varies completely based on university and field, of course, but a number of people told us losing the ACM publication was a big deal for them, and would lead them to publish elsewhere. One researcher from Brazil even said that his travel funding depends on the conference being sponsored by a major professional organization (IEEE/AAAI/ACM/etc.), so if we went independent he wouldn't be able to come anymore. I still think it was the right move on balance, but I can see the situations some of these people are in as well. There's also a little bit of an archival question. The ACM DL will probably still exist in some form in 50 years. Will an independent conference's archive still exist in 50 years? To tackle that question we're investigating being archived by a new open-access archival initiative from the University of California (http://escholarship.org http://escholarship.org). There's a possibility this may also mollify some of the people upset about losing the "ACM" publisher line, since they could instead list a "University of California" publisher line, which is also a well-known institution. Another conference I've published in has taken that strategy, with the University of Michigan (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/ http://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/). I think this might be an attractive way for conferences to keep the institutionally-archived cred while getting out of the paywall mess. However it does require these archives to then do some decent vetting so they don't archive fake conferences and lose their credibility.

by mjn 13y ago

p4bl0 13y ago

I sincerely hope you are right. However, as pointed out in other comments, most researchers know what are the good and bad venues in their particular fields. This means that in reality, who is the publisher of a journal or of the proceedings of a conference matters less than the reputation of the conference or journal itself (sadly, that may be less true when it comes to recruitment in academia) which is given by the quality of the papers published in there. If I had to chose fights I guess it would be for the generalization gold open access and for the end of bibliometrics before trying to get these publishers more involved in what they publish (since we don't really need them anymore).

mjn 13y ago
I think that's true within a field, yeah. But outside the really top conferences, stuff as famous as SIGGRAPH, my experience has been that publisher affiliation is given significant heuristic weight, especially when people slightly outside a field are evaluating a conference they aren't personally familiar with (either researchers in other areas, or administrators/deans/etc.). A non-HCI researcher (even another CS researcher) might wonder, is this HCI conference I've never heard of any good? If it's an ACM HCI conference, many people will automatically attribute to it some baseline level of credibility, while if it's a completely independent conference, you start out more in the hole having to justify that this conference is legit. A top conference like SIGGRAPH could probably get away with not being ACM (though the ACM affiliation probably helps with deans/etc.), but more specialized, mid-tier conferences have a harder time going DIY. I don't think that should always be the decisive factor, just that it's an issue. Last year I was proceedings chair of a conference that I did help move out of ACM, which it had been affiliated with and published with for the previous few years (http://www.fdg2013.org http://www.fdg2013.org). There were various reasons for it, one being that being ACM-affiliated imposes significant bureaucracy and some financial costs that have to be recouped in registration fees (they're super-paranoid about the event insurance, for example). Another is that the conference is in a field (game studies, game AI, etc.) where we hope non-academics will also read the papers, and being open access would make that a lot easier. Being in the ACM Digital Library doesn't prohibit authors from putting up non-paywalled PDFs on their own sites, but it does prevent there from being an official, centralized open-access proceedings. But I would say we did lose some previous participants as a result of the move. For some people, moving from "an ACM conference, with proceedings archived in the ACM Digital Library" to "an independent conference, with proceedings published by the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games" is a deal-breaker: they see it as a drop off in prestige, from something they can list on their CV and use for their tenure case to something they can't. This varies completely based on university and field, of course, but a number of people told us losing the ACM publication was a big deal for them, and would lead them to publish elsewhere. One researcher from Brazil even said that his travel funding depends on the conference being sponsored by a major professional organization (IEEE/AAAI/ACM/etc.), so if we went independent he wouldn't be able to come anymore. I still think it was the right move on balance, but I can see the situations some of these people are in as well. There's also a little bit of an archival question. The ACM DL will probably still exist in some form in 50 years. Will an independent conference's archive still exist in 50 years? To tackle that question we're investigating being archived by a new open-access archival initiative from the University of California (http://escholarship.org http://escholarship.org). There's a possibility this may also mollify some of the people upset about losing the "ACM" publisher line, since they could instead list a "University of California" publisher line, which is also a well-known institution. Another conference I've published in has taken that strategy, with the University of Michigan (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/ http://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/). I think this might be an attractive way for conferences to keep the institutionally-archived cred while getting out of the paywall mess. However it does require these archives to then do some decent vetting so they don't archive fake conferences and lose their credibility.