Re: Elsevier

[Vaughan Pratt <pratt@cs.stanford.edu>]

One institution that hasn't been mentioned is conference proceedings.  I
don't know why but mathematics generally seems to take a more casual
approach to these than engineering.  Whereas mathematics conferences
tend to expect the talks to ripen into carefully refereed publications
afterwards, whether together in a proceedings or separately in various
journals, engineering conferences tend to insist on issuing a bound
proceedings with 4-10 pages per paper, leaving it up to the authors to
decide whether they want to submit a more polished version to a journal
later.  For both mathematics and engineering a conference may invite a
subset of the papers for a special issue of a suitable journal.

This difference is sensitive to the needs and circumstances of
publication.  Ostensibly the primary purpose of publication is
dissemination, with author kudos supposedly secondary.  Lately the
latter has been badly skewing the former, with conferences seemingly
worrying as much about appointments and promotions as about
dissemination.  This may well be a side effect of the web, whose search
engines support associative retrieval of polished articles and daily
blogs alike, solving the access problem without addressing the
evaluation problem.

This technological revolution is transforming the publication world
faster than universities, libraries, and publishers can follow in real
time.  Appointments and promotions have until recently been mired in the
tradition of relying on refereed journal publications in strong
preference to conference publications.  Libraries continue to follow the
taste of deans in preferring to archive journals over conference
proceedings, with the result that at least pre-web articles in
conference proceedings are inaccessible to the clients of many
libraries.  And publishers seem to have a certain inertia that makes
them slow to adapt their processes to the outgoing tide of publication
costs, an inertia that strands them on the rocks of their expensive old
methods.

This is all changing, slowly but inevitably.  Engineering deans are
becoming more willing to equate at least flagship conference
publications with journals.  Search engines are making libraries less
relevant for current material, while the ongoing digitization of older
material is starting to make basement stacks less relevant.  And
authors, editors, referees, and libraries are forcing the collective
hand of the publishers by avoiding the most expensive.

In this disruptive scenario the potential exists for conferences to
assume more of the role of journals.  The effect of journal refereeing
by itself is achieved for conferences with two mechanisms: refereeing
(supposedly quicker and less careful than for journals), and limited
capacity at the top---flagship conferences have acceptance rates of
20-40%, forcing the overflow into lesser conferences.  Whereas in the
past appointments and promotions were judged on the fact of journal
acceptance in combination with the assessment of their quality by peers
and seniors, these two criteria are now joined by a third: the quality
of the conferences that accepted the candidate's papers.  Historically
journal quality while a factor took a back seat to mere acceptance;
today it is made more important by the need to justify the supposedly
less careful refereeing and certainly hastier preparation of conference
papers.

If this trend towards attaching more importance to conference
publication is where we're all headed, it will happen in engineering
before it happens in mathematics for the simple reason that engineering
promotes conference publication more strenuously than does mathematics.

Vaughan