We are Under Attack
We are Under Attack
By the Least Publishable Unit
Evidence
• Zillions of mediocre papers
— On increasingly narrow topics
— Of interest to almost nobody
— With high serial overlap
• Number of submissions to conferences (including this
one) is out of hand
— Requiring a PC of multitudes
— Generating pretty random reviewing
— With a goal of rejecting a paper if it is the least bit
controversial
3
Evidence
• General wisdom
Until acceptance {
float a bad paper to a conference;
improve it based on reviews;
}
• Leading to yet more submissions
4
Further Evidence
• I got hired at Berkeley in 1971
— With 0 publications
• I got tenure at Berkeley in 1976
— With 7 publications
• You can’t get an asst professor job unless you have at
least this
• Tenure cases typically have 4X this number
• Asst. professors are neither 4X smarter nor work 4X
harder 35 years later
5
Two Modest Proposal
• Increase demand
• Decrease supply
6
Increase Supply
• Co-opt a few more conferences
• Anything with the words “big data” in the title is a
candidate, e.g.
— ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing
— New IEEE Conference on Big Data
• Move major conferences to a poster format
— At least for thenarrowly focused papers
— So the 3 people who are interested can yack with
the author
7
Decrease Supply
• Create a “Standing Committee” of “gray beards”
— Say 20 people
— Organized by subareas
• Which would review up to 2 extended abstracts per
year
— say 6 pages
— from legitimate researchers (who would have to
be screened)
— I.e. take your best pair of shots per year
• Basically a universal program committee
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Decrease Supply
• Every paper would get a score
— Say an integer between 0 and 20
• Any conference (PODS, CIDR, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE)
could then pick the top ranked and previously
unpublished abstracts (presumably with a sub-area
bias)
— Which could then be expanded into a full paper
• Has the nice feature that rejected papers
automatically roll over to the next available
conference
— Could augment this with a mentoring system…
9
Over Time
• Gray beard average score (GBAS) would be the
significant metric in tenure decisions….
— Importance not volume!
10