Talk:Accepting More Papers
From Health of Conferences Committee
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Starting Comments
Some argue that too-high acceptance rates (e.g., 40%) don't challenge the field enough; while too-low acceptance rates (< 15%) enourage too much conservativism in program committees. Thus, as a field grows some feel the paper publishing opportunities should also grow to keep acceptance reasonable (e.g, 20-30%).
SIGPLAN
- There also seems to be a sense that the conference/journal system is broken. At least a vocal minority think that our community place too much importance on conference papers. This group thinks we need to improve the journal response rate, make journal publication meaningful, and increase the acceptance rate at conferences significantly.
SIGMETRICS
- Sigmetrics has increased the committee size (since we are suppose to review all the papers ourself) and increased a bit the number of accepted papers (one year we had 2 parallel sessions and we've had longer days), so basically we can do a bit over 30 papers these days (rather than say around 20-25). ...
SIGACCESS
- For the '05 conference, there were more submissions than expected and the number of manuscripts assigned to each reviewer was very large (about 7). Not surprisingly, this created unhappy members of the Program Committee who had not expected so many manuscripts to review. To deal with this, the PC Chair indicated that committee members could ask colleagues to review some of the papers in areas in which their colleagues were particularly qualified. These people who were asked for special reviews were listed separately in the conference Proceedings.
- While this system worked post hoc for the situation, it is not ideal. For '06, a larger PC has been created. The conference has not resorted to charging a reviewing fee or tracking reviews from conference to conference. We have, however, worked to better describe criteria for acceptable papers in the hopes of reducing the number of unqualified submissions. For example, in the past there has always been a tendency for authors to submit papers about proposals they have that have not been tested sufficiently. The CFP for '06 makes clear that testing with user populations will be important in the evaluation of submitted manuscripts.
