Ernie's 3D Pancakes

First annual STOC business meeting drinking game

Take one drink if any of the following happens:

• Someone complains about the lack of paper proceedings.
• Someone complains about more stringent conflict of interest rules.
• Someone announces a new conceptual theory conference in China.
• Someone asks why nobody's posted a STOC business meeting drinking game yet.

Check, check, check, check. I'm glad I'm not giving the talk tomorrow.

Update: Damn, I forgot “Someone complains about SIAM's organization of SODA.”

Innovations in Computer Science

The call for papers for the first annual conference on Innovations in Computer Science has been released. ICS is a new theoretical computer science conference, with a very small but stellar program committee (Avrim Blum, Shafi Goldwasser, Sanjeev Khanna, Christos Papadimitriou, Rafael Pass, Nir Shavit, Vijay Vazirani, Andrew Yao (Chair)) with the goal of “encouraging new ideas, approaches, perspectives, conceptual frameworks and techniques.” To quote further from the call for papers:

• Novel and promising ideas will be given preference in the selection process. The program committee of ICS will assign significant weight to the conceptual message communicated by the submission.

• The program committee will prefer papers that open new and fruitful directions of explorations. In other words, ICS will prefer papers that make first steps in new directions and raise new questions, over papers that provide the last word on a well-established direction.

• At the discretion of the program committee, the evaluation process may be interactive, so as to include questions to the authors and clarifications by them, if necessary.

Or as Vijay Vazirani said at lunch, they want the first paper (of many) on a topic, not the last (or even worse, the next).

Submissions are due September 15, 2009, which might be after the announcement of papers accepted to SODA 2010, in case you're thinking of submitting a paper that SODA will find too novel, promising, or conceptual. The conference itself is January 4-7, 2010 in Beijing, roughly two weeks before SODA.

More details are promised at the business meeting tonight.

Yet another reason to hate Elsevier

First the price gouging, and then the arms trading, and now this:

Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist. What's wrong with this is so obvious it doesn't have to be argued for. What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications...." Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn't know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!

Update: It wasn't one fake journal. It was six fake journals. And as David reminds us, Elsevier is quite willing to play silly buggers with self-citing crackpots as long as they improve impact factors.

Now tell me again: Why do we submit papers to, referee papers for, and buy journals from these people? Some sort of misplaced sense of loyalty? Or some sad combination of apathy and inertia? What will it take for the research community to cut Elsevier loose?

Better alternatives, perhaps?

Full disclosure: I'm a coauthor of a paper that is about to appear in the SOCG 2008 special issue of CGTA, an Elsevier journal. If I'd been the sole author, I would have refused the invitation, but I don't have the right to unilaterally overrule my coauthors, especially the younger ones, who need the gold star in their CVs far more than I do. In retrospect, especially after reading this story, I wish we had refused the invitation. Or perhaps I should have just removed my name from the paper.

Update (May 16): Lots of good discussion at the Secret Blogging Seminar.