On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:45:02 +0200 Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakel...@webdrake.net> wrote:
> On 08/12/2013 05:57 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > > On 8/11/13 4:45 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote: > >> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 23:37:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu > >> wrote: > >>> That's an odd thing to say seeing as a lot of CS academic > >>> research is ten years ahead of the industry. > >> > >> I would personally venture to say that the publication practises of > >> academia in general and CS in particular have many destructive and > >> damaging aspects, and that industry-academia gap might be narrowed > >> quite a bit if these were addressed. > > > > Could be improved, sure. Destructive and damaging - I'd be curious > > for some substantiation. > > In the case of CS in particular, the publication system is different > from much of academia because it's so strongly based around > conferences and conference proceedings. I'd say that's damaging in > several ways. > > First, it means people write to the submission deadline rather than > to their work having reached a satisfactory point of readiness. All > other activities grind to a halt in the run-up to major conference > deadlines -- you see students and postdocs in particular pulling > all-nighters in order to make sure that everything gets done in time. > > Besides the health implications of that, such a last-minute rush has > plenty of scope for making mistakes or introducing errors, errors > that will be in the permanent academic record with little scope for > correction (conference proceedings generally don't carry errata). > There are also more direct sources of bias -- e.g. if the work is > based on user surveys, the chances are all the people in the lab > _not_ working towards a paper deadline will be shanghaied into > completing those surveys, disrupting their own work and also ensuring > that the results are based on a very skewed selection of the > population. > > This pressure to deliver on deadline something that will be accepted > by the conference can also lead to quite a superficial approach to > the existing literature, with references skimmed quickly in order to > find any random phrase that may support the current piece of work > (even though on closer reading it may actually indicate the opposite). > > The second source of damage comes via the conference review process. > Because conferences are all-or-nothing affairs -- you get accepted or > you don't -- there's a strong tendency to submit multiple papers > presenting different facets of essentially the same work to multiple > different conferences, just to ensure that _something_ gets > accepted. That means overwork both for the authors (who have to > write all those extra papers) and also for conference referees, who > have to deal with the resulting excess of papers. > > Reviewers are also working to deadlines, and with a lot of papers to > assess in a short space of time (which is very disruptive to their > other work), that can lead to snap and very superficial judgements. > If there's a discrepancy in the amount of work that has to be done -- > e.g. a "yes" means just a "yes", but a "no" means having to write a > detailed report explaining why -- that can lead to accepting papers > simply to lessen the workload. > > There are also financial aspects -- because most conferences > (understandably) won't accept papers unless at least one author comes > to present, it means that authors' ability to publish their work can > be constrained by their labs' ability to fund travel, accommodation > and conference fees rather than by the quality of what they've done. > > And finally, when all is done and dusted, the proceedings of > conferences are almost invariably then locked up behind a publisher > paywall, despite the fact that almost all the document preparation > work is done by authors and conference volunteers. How many tech > businesses can afford the annual subscriptions to digital libraries? > (I'm thinking small startups here.) > > I suppose you could say that many of these issues are > personal/professional failings of individual researchers or labs, but > in my experience these failings are driven by the pressure to publish > conference papers, and young researchers are pretty much trained to > follow these working practices in order to succeed. > > What particularly frustrates me about this particular situation is > that the justification for the current system -- that computer > science is too fast-moving for journal publication to keep up with > the latest results -- simply doesn't hold water in an age of > electronic publication. It's habit and professional career > structures, rather than the interests of research communication, that > maintain the current system. > > I could go on, but I think these examples will serve as > substantiation. :-) You really should post that somewhere as a "blog" article.