Peer-reviewed scientific journals

Olivier Danvy

Department of Computer Science

Aarhus University

Aarhus Friday 7 May 2010

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Science

A scientific result

must be

independently verifiable.

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Reviewing

The process of

independent verification.

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A peer

Another scientist.

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A journal

An archival publication forum.

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Peer-reviewed scientific journals

Olivier Danvy

Department of Computer Science

Aarhus University

Aarhus Friday 7 May 2010

6

Plan

1. Peer-reviewed scientific journals.

2. A first-person experience report.

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Origins

As pointed out by Jens-Christian Djurhuus:

• Ludvig Holberg (1750): peer-reviewing is

“the cause of scientific progress.”

• From the Royal Society (1660)

to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences

and Letters (1742).

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Challenges

• the exponential growth of educated scientists

• a profitable business

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The publication cycle (1/2)

• submission of the initial report of a result

• assessment of appropriateness

• selection of reviewers

• reviewing

• editorial decision

• feedback to the author

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The publication cycle (2/2)

Possible outcomes:

• acceptation

• acceptation conditionally to some revision

• request for revision and resubmission

• outright rejection

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The submission

Which kind of article?

(cf. Parberry’s advice)

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Appropriateness?

Up to the editor(s) in chief.

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Which reviewers?

Tension:

• competence

• availability

And also:

• the candid reviewer

• the conflicts of interest

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The reviewing process

• can take time

• editorial backup plans

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Editorial decision

• assessment

• feedback to the reviewers, possibly

• outcome

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Feedback to the author

• acceptation

• acceptation conditionally to some revision

• request for revision and resubmission

• outright rejection

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So, a good journal

• publishes good papers, and

• reviews them quickly.

Plus, hey, bibliometrics.

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Jens Palsberg on scientific journals

“I hold these truths to be self-evident,

• that authors of a good paper deserve

a thorough and helpful review of their work

while authors of a bad paper deserve

to be told quickly that the journal

is an inappropriate venue for their work,

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• that reviewers deserve

to spend most of their time

on good papers, and

• that readers deserve

a journal with papers that

the review process has greatly improved.”

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Where to publish?

• in open journals (eg, lmcs-online.org)

• in associative organizations (ACM, IEEE)

• in private publishers (Springer, etc.)

But what about the copyright?

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The copyright issue

It is overblown:

In practice,

the publishers only copyright

one watermarked pdf file.

So: feel free to put the extended version

on your web page.

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On open access

• commercial publishers (the rich get richer)

• non-commercial publishers

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Plan

1. Peer-reviewed scientific journals.√

2. A first-person experience report.

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Lisp

and Symbolic Computation

• founded in 1987

by Dick Gabriel and Guy Steele

• renamed in 1998

by Carolyn Talcott and myself

Higher-Order

and Symbolic Computation

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A niche journal

λ

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• The Mystery of the Tower Revealed

• Mix: A Self-Applicable Partial Evaluator

• Runtime Tags Aren’t Necessary

• SELF: The Power of Simplicity

• Callee-Save Registers in CPS

• Syntactic Abstraction in Scheme

• The Discoveries of Continuations

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• The Next 700 Formal Language Descriptions

• Polymorphic Type Assignment and CPS

• Recursion from Iteration

• Monads and Composable Continuations

• Call-by-Need and Continuation-Passing Style

• VLISP

among many others.

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My progression

• reader

• author and reviewer

• associate editor

• co-EiC

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Guidelines

• Claude Bishop:

How to edit a scientific journal

• Andrew Appel:

How to edit a scientific journal by e-mail

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Claude Bishop’s checklist

• have a record of published research

• be currently active in research

• be reasonably well organized

• have tact, diplomacy, and good judgment

• have a sense of humor

• be at an appropriate stage of their careers

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Ah, the power

• cool special issues (Strachey, Landin, etc.,

and partial evaluation, continuations, etc.)

• cool papers (Consel, Dybvig, Feeley, Futamu-

ra, Goldberg, Jagannathan, Henderson, Leroy,

Krivine, Morris, Queinnec, Reppy, Reps,

Reynolds, Steele, Sussman, Wand, etc.)

• editorials galore

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Christopher Strachey

• the idea and the opportunity

• the realization (e.g., Penrose)

• the marketing

• the impact (e.g., Scott, Dijkstra)

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Ah, the responsabilities

• “I am up for tenure soon!”

• This submission just does not cut it.

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The eternal battle

• authors

• copy-editors

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Example: Growing a Language

“This is the text of a talk

that I gave one day last fall,

in the tenth month of the year.

I have fixed a few bugs here and there

and changed a phrase or two

to make my thoughts more clear.”

...a booby trap for copy-editors.

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The way out

• a lot of diplomacy

(“they think they know what they are doing,

e.g., having formatted their PhD dissertation

themselves”)

• the actual style files:

what you write is what people will read

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Managing egos

• authors

• reviewers

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Useful reviews

1. summary

2. analysis

3. overall recommendation

4. misc.

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Editorial efficiency

• Reusing (or not) reviews of previous versions

of the submission.

• The other co-Editor in Chief.

• The Associate Editors.

• The Advisory Board.

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Two recommendations for authors

1. Submit short papers:

the shorter the submission,

the quicker it is reviewed.

2. When you are asked to review a submission,

just say yes.

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Editing: the ultimate charity work

• once upon a time in Western Jutland

• editors are taken for granted

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The future

• of scientific journals

• of editors

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Reference

Eric Norden’s hilarious short story:

“The Curse of the Mhondoro Nkabele”

in, e.g., Mike Resnick, ed.

Inside the Funhouse, 1992

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