Thursday, February 15, 2007

Sometimes it's a strange thing with academic conferences and the publishing of the proceedings. First people pay money (the conference fee) to be allowed publishing something there. Then they pay again by ordering the proceedings for their local university libraries. Finally they blame the big conference organizers that everything is so expensive but they still insist on publishing at the most expensive conferences and reading only papers submitted there because they claim that they are on the highest academic level. Aren't they actually supporting these expensive conferences that way? They could just submit their papers to cheaper conferences and thus increase the quality level there.

After all I am not that sure at all that the quality of the most expensive conferences is necessarily the best. Those conferences suffer as well from bad quality assurance during the reviewer process. Currently I have again a paper lying on my desktop where I found two mathematical errors within a very short time. One of those errors is even fundamental for the algorithm thus doing it the way it is described in the paper simply does not give useful results. I wonder why we need a review process if such fundamental errors are not caught there? It seems all the reviewers involved in the process for this papers did not really understand that part of the paper and then just accepted it because they didn't want to confess that they don't understand it.

After all this paper has good contents in general but I would have expected the reviewers either to catch these errors (at least the fundamental one) or to confess that they don't understand the content and opt-out of the review process. --- Ok, I agree that this is another dream of an ideal world...

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