Perspectives Workshop: Publication Culture in Computing Research

Over the last few years, our community has started a collective conversation on several topics related to our publication culture: The uniqueness of the publication model in computing research: the emphasis on conference publishing and the decline of journal publishing; the large and growing number of specialty conferences and workshops that are really conferences; coping with established publication cultures in the (other) sciences and with the different cultures of different computing sub-communities. Cultural issues: the culture of hypercritical reviewing and the decline of thorough constructive reviewing; tenure and promotion practices that encourage short-term research; the influence of bibliometry on publication behavior and tenure practices and the quality of bibliometry. New publication models: the tension between open access and reader-pays publishing, and the spectrum in between; the role of social media in scholarly publishing; the role of various actors: commercial publishers, scientific societies, academic publishers and archives; the place of self-publishing or publishing in public repositories; the need to develop new rules for data citation, sharing, and archiving. While computing research has been phenomenally successful, there is a broad feeling that our publication models are quite often obstacles. Yet there is no agreement on whether our publication models need to be radically changed or fine tuned, and there is no agreement on how such change may occur. Over the last two years, a vigorous discussion has been going on through editorials, Viewpoint articles, and blogs of the Communication of the ACM – see [Overview (PDF)].