Picking Papers, Part 1
I think one of the most mysterious parts of a conference like this is how the papers in the refereed paper tracks get picked. Let me see if I can de-mystify that process for you. It is a little bit of a tale, so sit back and let me tell you the story. To tell this right, I have to go back to the beginning so let’s hop in the way-back machine and start there…
Once upon a time (November and December 2004, actually), the program committee and I worked hard to pull together the CFP for this year’s conference. The CFP is either the Call for Papers or Call for Participation depending on who you ask. It provides the official rules about paper submissions. At the same time we also created the latest version of the author guidelines.
Both of these documents took a fair amount of effort because of a change in this year’s preferred format for submissions. After a bunch of discussion with the LISA community starting at last year’s conference and with the current program committee, it was decided that draft papers would become the new preferred format over the previous standard of extended abstracts. There’s a whole slew of arguments both for and against this idea that I can blog about at a later time if you are interested. Suffice it to say, we thought it was reasonable to try this shift for a year and see what happens.
Shortly before the CFP was published, the official submission system/web review system for the conference was brought online by the fine folks at USENIX. If you are interested in how that system works, hang on for a bit because you’ll be hearing plenty about it soon.
So, we get the CFP ready, we publish it to the web, let the LISA community know about it, throw open the door to the submission system and….
nothing.
lots of nothing.
the big donut.
If you thought there might be hordes of people just waiting to submit papers (like I did), you thought wrong. Our first submission came at the very end of March 2005. It turns out that most papers (and this is considered normal for LISA) were submitted within 24 hours of the May 10th submission deadline.
All in all, we received 52 submissions. This is down from ~70 of the previous year (which itself was down from the year before that). Why the decrease? I wish I knew. Was it the change in preferred format? Increased speed of life? Dunno, theories welcome.
Ok, so at this point we have 52 submissions to review, how do papers get picked? For that, you’ll have to see the next entry.