Call for Papers: FSE 2014 Workshop on Academic Publishing 2.0

17th November 2014
Hong Kong

http://promisedata.org/pub/2014/

Important Dates :

Submission: July 14, 2014
Notification: Aug 1, 2014
Camera ready: Aug 11, 2014

Goal:

To hold a meeting of academics at FSE'14 to design "The Journal of Software Engineering", a next generation refereed open science forum, to be launched in 2015.

Call for Papers:

We ask for two page position papers that address this question: how do we want to distribute our ideas?

As academics, this is an important question. We spent much of our time writing, reviewing, editing articles. Yet we have very little say in the nature of the publishing machinery that presents all that work to the world. Our premise is simple:

If we generate the content, should we not also control how that content is assessed and disseminated?

This workshop is timely as many program chairs and editors are rethinking how to make journals more relevant and important, but there is no official venue for doing so. This workshop will be that venue for software engineering re- searchers.

Rather than use an existing publication forum (that we may have issues with) we wish to design a new kind of publication tool that takes full advantage of Internet-age methods. So the goal of this workshop is to determine (1) what practices best match our needs and (2) what methods take most advantage of 21st century publication technologies (e.g. on-line review systems, fast blogging methods, social media, etc).

We want to learn from the past and to design new publication tools based both on existing practices, but also explore new ideas that have not been previously implemented. To this end, it is also important to look outside the field of software engineering (SE) to develop this proposal. Many other fields have developed highly successful formats that are very different to those in current use in SE. For example, there are newer styles of journals that are employing "fast paths" methods with great success. For example:

Bioinformatics publishes hundreds of papers a year with 1 month review cycles. And they have a five year impact factor of 6.3 (much higher than TSE or TOSEM)
Physics Letters boast that "Rapid publication times gives Physics Letters the edge over other journals in the field."

Format:

The workshop will be one-day long, in three sessions.

The morning session will comprise participants presenting their 2-page position papers, arguing for some small number of best practices that the authors feel is important to make journals more effective. Participants will be given a short amount of time to explain their position with significantly more time allotted towards discussing these ideas.

The early afternoon session will be devoted to break out groups trying to assess different proposals for this new journal. From the morning sessions, we will cluster like-minded researchers and ask them to prepare flip charts describing their ideal publication forum.

A final session, later in the afternoon, will seek to document common threads relating to (a) what must be done; (b) what could be done; and (c) what should not be done.

Submissions:

Submit two page pdf documents via our Easychair site using the ACM SIG proceedings.

Papers will be selected based on strength of evidence (empirical, argumentative, or otherwise) and novelty.

Please see detailed instructions at:

http://promisedata.org/pub/2014/submit.html


Organisers:

Convenors

Emerson Murphy-Hill,
North Carolina State University, USA

TIm Menzies,
North Carolina State University, USA

John Grundy,
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Programme Committee


Andrew Black, Portland State, USA
Matthias Book, U. Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Bojan Cukic, UNC Charlotte, USA
Massimiliano Di Penta, U. Sannio, Italy
John Grundy, Swinburne, Australia
Cristina Lopes, UC Irvine, USA
Andrian Marcus, UT Dallas, USA
Tim Menzies, NcState, USA
Emerson Murphy-Hill, NcState, USA
Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Bern, Switzerland
Jan Vitek, Purdue University, USA
Tao Xie, U. Illinois, USA
Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft, USA