[HilbertSpace]

That lament was one of the leading topics in the Google+ community that was the the subject of the article.

Yes, the article was mostly about the community and not the issues of the community. But the article did list some of the leading issues of the community, and I responded to one of them. Uh, the issues of that community are more important than just the existence of the community! So it should have been appropriate for me to have commented on one of the issues of the community.

[gphilip]

Thanks for that clarification. If I may trouble you once more,

I do see a list of the issues of the community in that article, set apart in slanted font. As far as I can see, the issue which you highlighted in your comment here is not present in that list. Which among the listed issues, in your opinion, implies that they "can't get their research papers published" ?

EDIT : Removed unintended formatting.

[HilbertSpace]

The article had, early on:

"I can’t speak for other disciplines, but within computer science, I’ve always felt that these meta discussions were inadequate — in terms of volume, vigor, and format. They happened mostly at conferences were largely limited to more senior/well-connected researchers, and lagged behind some of the serious problems that have accumulated such as restrictive publisher copyrights and very low acceptance rates at journals and conferences."

So, the claim here I noticed was:

"some of the serious problems that have accumulated such as ... very low acceptance rates at journals and conferences."

So, a big topic in that community was a "serious" problem getting published. So, I outlined how to get published. Simple.

In a word, my outline said to 'mathematize' CS. That suggestion is potentially earth shaking, likely not already in the community, and should be a welcome contribution.

[gphilip]

I see. Now I get your comment, thanks.

So you read "very low acceptance rates" to mean : "Alas, very few of our papers meet the criteria for publication". And hence the exhortation to produce novel, correct, and significant work if they want to get published.

You couldn't be more wrong.

The "very low acceptance rate" which the OP laments means the exact opposite of what you seem to have understood. Namely: In most of the better CS conferences and journals, the number of submissions which make or exceed the grade is so _large_ compared to the number of available slots for publication that a significant amount of "novel, correct, and significant" work has to be routinely rejected. Just because the conference/journal has its physical limitations. It is a problem of plenty, not of scarcity. As an example, see the Forward of the proceedings of last year's STACS [1] :

"The STACS 2011 call for papers led to 271 submissions from 45 countries. ... there were intense and interesting discussions. The overall very high quality of the submissions made the selection a difficult task."

And no, they are not saying this for form's sake. The story is similar for the other highly rated conferences. This is common knowledge in the respective communities, and often mentioned in the prefaces to their proceedings.

This difficulty in getting _good_ work published of course has a deleterious impact on research and on the growth of the community, and the OP was lamenting _this_. At least this is the impression I got from reading "low acceptance rates".

Off topic: STACS is one of the few CS conferences which publish their proceedings free online under a Creative Commons license.

[1] http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2011/2993/pdf/1.pdf

[_delirium]

It's also not only scarcity, but academic-incentives-driven artificial scarcity: in the U.S. especially, many advancement committees have started using acceptance rate as a misguided proxy for "conference quality". So if you want people to see publishing in your conference as a valuable addition to their CVs, you need to have a <30% acceptance rate, preferably more like 10-15%, so you can be counted as a "very selective" conference. This is a bit silly, because acceptance rates are hugely influenced by submission pool, but it's how the institutional system currently works.

[HilbertSpace]

I wrote:

> The main criteria for research work are "new, correct, and significant". Do well on all three of these and have NO PROBLEMS getting reviewed and published.

So, I said that have to "do well".

So your

> You couldn't be more wrong.

is a bit strong.

I've published maybe a dozen papers, and I've never had a paper rejected or needing significant revision.

I've never been interested in publishing, and maybe the situation has changed a lot in the last few years while I've being doing other things.

Whatever, my original post to help CS profs get published was not wanted, and I've deleted it. The CS profs can struggle on their own.