A proposal for a new publishing model in Computer Science | Hacker News Reader

A proposal for a new publishing model in Computer Science

yann.lecun.com

31 pointshpenedones6 comments

One would think that Computer Science, of all the fields, would have an open publishing system (where all papers are accessible to all). One would be mistaken....

Some authors do the right thing and post versions of their papers on their own websites. But many don't; and it is a shame.

I cancelled my ACM and IEEE memberships because I see these organizations are perpetuating this broken system. They already charge a lot for attending conferences; why make people pay for the conference papers? And libraries, etc. will pay for the journals anyways; why lock the papers behind paywalls? This just doesn't make sense.

Unless more researchers speak up and protest, nothing will change, unfortunately.

Fortunately, the situation is much better in some specific areas of CS. For example, computational linguistics: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/

Very interesting. However what prevents this system from splitting out into virtual cliques consisting of same groups that exist today? There is no doubt that the proposed system is more accommodating of the non-US, non-European authors. However since the RE entities are free to choose what they review, what is the incentive to dig through piles of papers from unknown authors?

According to the article, "However, authors may formally request that a particular RE review their paper. They may make only one such formal request at a time. The RE is given a short time to accept or refuse to review (e.g. 2 weeks) and a slightly longer time before the author is allowed to submit a request to another RE (whether the requested RE has produced a review or not). RE will have an incentive to review good papers, as their reputation will increase with the quality of the papers which they are the first to rate highly."

I think the way this system will "bootstrap" itself is by having a few initial conferences use it as their main submission venue. Basically, this would replace a conference management system like Easychair.

Through one source or other, the system needs to have more bandwidth for processing more papers in a better way then is possible with current system. I am trying to think where does that extra bandwidth come from. As I see, there are 2 sources.

One, as you pointed out from the article, is that existing reviewers put in more time and energy in the system to gain reputation.

Another possibility is that since anyone can come in and start reviewing, people actually on the periphery of the system or outside the system might be able to add more bandwidth. For example, a student in India is no longer limited to review mostly for Indian conferences. He can dig around, find good papers from anywhere and give them more publicity. He can start as a feeder for more established REs and in time gain enough reputation to branch off on his own. I think this may be the major source of extra bandwidth that the system is able to harness.

When I've sketched out designs for similar systems, I've dealt with that problem by having it acceptable to hire reviewers. Me expectation is that high karma reviewers would be in high enough demand that they could make a living as reviewers.

I'd also expect that there would be science writers who would serve as reviewers to get the earliest possible access to research that might be interesting to write articles about. (I'm assuming most researchers would want to get at least some reviewer feedback before putting their paper out on some public site).

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