ACM SGB Meeting Materials October 26, 2009 - Best Practices Session

Philip Wadler, SIGPLAN, said several newly involved leaders would like a Wiki set up for best practices. We should be recording and sharing ideas. Right now SIGPLAN has one wiki for each conference, we might do something else. Setting up a Wiki immediately following this meeting will help the leadership discuss issues. It must be done immediately so that we can begin using it.

Una-May O’Reilly, SIGEVO, said GECCO has always been a very large conference. We’re receiving a lot of feedback from our members. Our granting agencies are being very selective about which conferences they sponsor. We want to keep our acceptance rate down and quality up. They we would experience a dip in attendance. SIGEVO would like to push acceptance rate down.

Joe Konstan, SGB EC, said from the three conferences he worked with, they have created other forms through which people can feel like they published. In two of those conferences that was short papers, in form of posters. Workshop papers (I hate workshops that are mini-conferences, but they work very well to explore preliminary areas).There are different strategies – some abstracts in the proceedings, but they always make it very clear.

O’Reilly added that SIGEVO does offer tutorials and all that, but they need more. They don’t want people to be able to make it seem like they have a long paper in our conference when they don’t.

Alex Wolf added that people have tried to have separate volumes, but that kind of thing disappears in the electronic world where everything looks equally credible. We’ve been asked when the DL will revamp its proceedings presence. It needs to be rethought and organized. Right now it’s organized a list of proceedings over the past year. It’s a big effort and there are many things to do in the DL, but we need to worry about bibliometrics and click counts.

Fisher added that she went to the ICFP page a few weeks ago. All the workshops were listed with the conference proceedings as if they were the actual proceedings

Henning Schulzrinne, SIGCOMM, wondered if other communities have seen uptake in plagiarism cases and double publications.

John White said ACM actively pursues plagiarism. There is increased collaboration with cross publishers to catch these things early on.

Marculescu, SIGDA, said DA has developed a database for detecting plagiarism.

Wadler said several years ago SIGPLAN put together its own publication policy, which says if you’re in doubt, contact the chair. Every CFP linked to this policy. We’ve greatly reduced it by using this process.

Lewis said he was tasked by the SIGIR chair to look into this. Is there an ACM policy and yours (SIGPLAN’s) is a clarification?

Wadler answered that people have to obey the SIGPLAN and ACM policy.

Marculescu said currently the system is for DA conferences (12 events). If others would like to share, let her know. SIGDA is able to discover quite a few cases of doubling. They do have issues with other SIG conferences that potentially overlap in topics with SIGDA.

Owen said SIGGRAPH has a way to deal with publication issues in general. The perception is that a lot of SIGs have a director of publication who stays for 3 years, and then you have a new one. Our person now has been doing it forever, so he knows very well the process. So anytime SIGGRAPH has any issues, he brings them up and is experienced to smooth over the issues and handle them.

Yannis Ioannidis, SIGMOD, asked if there are any SIGs that have experience with remote participation (over the web, wikis) for people who can’t attend a conference because SIGMOD is experiencing a lower attendance.

Wolf said Joe Konstan is leading a task force at Council level on data capture. The task force is trying to figure out a cost model for that.

Munson, SIGWEB, said conferences in most fields are a networking events primarily.

Margaret Martonosi, SIGARCH, said after the first 20 years, acceptance dropped. Since that point, we do double tracks instead of single track. Aside from the scheduling process, there is no assessment that the quality has dropped.

Carey Williamson, SIGMETRICS, wondered about the advertising program offered to the SIGS and whether or not some SIGs were seeing large sums of revenue.

Donna Cappo, indicated that the publications dept. did try to sell advertising for the SIGs, but there wasn’t a lot of success with the downturn in the economy.