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Stream: community: general

Topic: CALCO is in trouble!

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 20:27):

I just received the following email:

Dear Fabrizio Romano Genovese,

You can find below the call for papers for CALCO 2021. We would like to kindly ask you to help us distribute the call through your network.

In the last few editions, the number of submissions for CALCO has declined; this is in part due to the success of the core community in publishing in broader conferences such as LICS, FoSSaCS, POPL... We must be proud that the community has reached this level of maturity, yet we must take action to make sure CALCO continues to thrive. We have ensure that this year we broaden the topics and the PC has also been chosen intentionally to broaden the scope of CALCO.

Increasing the number of submissions is important to ensure we continue being able to publish the proceedings with LIPIcs, which is a well-known open-access venue for the proceedings of top-class conferences. The agreement with LIPIcs is currently under review and if we cannot show a change in trend we are at serious risk of losing it, which would be a real shame for the conference. We therefore ask you to help us in this endeavour of ensuring we can remain within LiPICS and that we can continue thriving as a community!

Forgive us the highly unorthodox mail, but in troubling times we must pull together... and together we can do great things!

All the best, stay safe, Fabio and Alexandra

CALCO is a nice conference, and it is a pity that they are in this situation. If you have something to submit, please do! Here's the link!

https://easychair.org/cfp/CALCO2021

Chad Nester (Mar 30 2021 at 22:00):

The publication system in computer science (CALCO is a computer science conference) is insane and counterproductive. Even if it would make more sense for my work appear at a venue like CALCO, I am heavily incentivised to target LICS, POPL, etc. To an absurd degree, these smaller conferences where people are interested in each other’s work are marginalised in favour of e.g. POPL, which seems to consist largely of people talking past each other.

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:03):

Indeed I would also submit my best work to LiCS etc. Still, sometimes I have work that I know wouldn't get accepted there, but it's not worthless

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:04):

Small-ish conferences are good for that. Also, as you say, at small conferences people listen to you more, so it's also an opportunity to turn said work into a top-tier conference work via feedback and collaboration. Incidentally, this is exactly what happened to CALCO and why now there are less submissions

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:04):

For me, this means that the CALCO model works, since you eventually land to LiCS and POPL through it. One more incentive to submit.

Chad Nester (Mar 30 2021 at 22:07):

I think we should make a conscious effort to move away from conferences as publication venues. Do you think CALCO would make sense as a conference with no proceedings?

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:11):

I think they already have things that do not get into proceedings

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:12):

In any case, no proceedings is fine for me as long as there's peer review and a way to get tenure track credit for your submissions

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:12):

The whole academic systems is fucked, but people still need ways to build their careers.

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:15):

For me there are basically three kind of "meetings":
Dagstuhl style: Defo the best, take 10 people, lock them in a room for 10 days, and that's it. This is our model for the Statebox summit btw.
Small conferences: There are talks, but feels like a family reunion and you meet a lot of people with which you chat and get ideas and make progress. Still not as good as the previous one but nice nevertheless
Big conferences: You just go there to build your CV/Career, no one cares about what you do, often the topics are so broad that it's even difficult to meet someone sharing your interests. All in all it's a pain, but you got to do it if you want to have a future in academia.

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:16):

Any kind of effort that makes 1 and 2 more relevant, and 3 less relevant to build a career is something I'd be happy about.

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 30 2021 at 22:17):

Then there are journals. There are literally zero reasons why a journal in 2021 should be something more than an arxiv handle with some reviews attached to it, and everyone trying to convince you of the contrary is lying.

John van de Wetering (Mar 31 2021 at 15:05):

For that reason:
:heart: Compositionality :heart: Quantum :heart:

John van de Wetering (Mar 31 2021 at 15:07):

Fabrizio Genovese said:

Then there are journals. There are literally zero reasons why a journal in 2021 should be something more than an arxiv handle with some reviews attached to it, and everyone trying to convince you of the contrary is lying.

Even the additional services that they provide, like copy-editing, are completely useless. I just had a paper accepted in a good journal, and their copy-editing was so bad, that I had to go in and tell them to fix the errors that they introduced.

Jules Hedges (Mar 31 2021 at 15:35):

Calco is for sure one of the conferences I want to survive. And I think there are serious upsides to the current publish in conference proceedings model. Especially how fast it is and how everything works to an immovable timetable. When you're in PhD and postdoc years that's really valuable to be able to "hit the ground running"

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 31 2021 at 19:51):

Yeah, but I'd argue that the deadlines do not come from the proceedings, but from the conference. If you have a conference with no proceedings, but with peer review, you'd have a strict deadline anyway to decide acceptance.

Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 31 2021 at 19:52):

The problem is that conferences without proceedings aren't usually considered prestigious, but in principle you could have a very prestigious conference with no proceedings, you just submit some arXiv link, they review it, rate it, and if they like it they let you give a talk.

Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 01 2021 at 08:30):

Fabrizio Genovese said:

The problem is that conferences without proceedings aren't usually considered prestigious, but in principle you could have a very prestigious conference with no proceedings, you just submit some arXiv link, they review it, rate it, and if they like it they let you give a talk.

The idea that a talk at a conference should have to be based on a published paper or preprint is still baffling to me as a mathematician.

Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 01 2021 at 08:32):

I wouldn't mind submitting to CALCO, but I don't know enough computer science language to wrap what I do in a package that would be accessible to the audience there. I hope they get the submissions they need!

Chad Nester (Jun 08 2021 at 08:41):

I was considering submitting an early ideas abstract to CALCO this year, but it takes place entirely during CT2021, so no.

JS PL (he/him) (Jun 08 2021 at 09:32):

Chad Nester said:

I was considering submitting an early ideas abstract to CALCO this year, but it takes place entirely during CT2021, so no.

Both are online, no? You can do both.

Chad Nester (Jun 08 2021 at 09:42):

CT is in-person (probably also online), and I intend to be present.

JS PL (he/him) (Jun 08 2021 at 09:50):

Chad Nester said:

CT is in-person (probably also online), and I intend to be present.

Yah CT has an online component as well. While things might have improved lots by end of August (I'm optimistic), unless quarantine and testing rules for international travel ease up, those outside Europe will have a hard time getting to CT in person (like me, I'll be back in Canada and probably have just finished 2 weeks of quarantine!)