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Re: RAE / conferences



Hi Peter, plus CPA fraternity

Forward at will - I am long past caring who knows I'm a heretic.

Just to add that my anciently historical field of astrophysics knew just three journals in which to publish, and not that many conferences, which tended to be large but covering many subordinate fields together. Computing 'boasts' several thousand journals, and countless conferences.

It became clear to me sometime ago that even 'prestigious' (ACM, IEEE) journals and conferences were pretty much closed shops. Because of things like RAE, each little club is able to promote its members by almost automatically rejecting papers from anyone they didn't admit. This explains the number of such venues, which cannot otherwise make sense, and gives the lie to any association of acceptance/rejection rate and 'quality'.

Cats spread their kind by fouling the garden of anyone who doesn't own a cat. The only answer is to get a cat of your own. Pretty soon, there's a heck of a lot of cats. For cat read conference or journal. The difference is CPA is NOT a closed shop.

IMHO CPA is a last bastion of common sense. Discussion is open and the true academic value - what you can learn from each other by coming - is high. This is so precisely because the organizing society has consistently refused to play this stupid game. It's the last place left I feel some measure of co-operation, and not just pointless competition.

For scholarship to survive, we need honest people with rank to resist, and to revive the old tradition of keeping the crap off the heads of those trying to still progress and inspire and help along the young.

If it's all down to petty alliances and politics then we're better off shagging each other in business. At least there's some reward on offer, even if it's only money.

One other thing. In defending CPA last year, I was able to point to a much better than typical balance between industry and academic delegates. This stuff DOES get applied more than most alternative approaches, perhaps because it can boast interest from theory to hardware. With the massive rise of embedded systems, it's timely too.

Resistance is NOT futile! RAE will disappear soon enough. These things never succeed, by anyone's measure, in the end.


Ian



Dr. Ian East
Department for Computing, School of Technology
Oxford Brookes University
Turing Building
Wheatley Campus
Oxfordshire OX33 1HX
01865 484529               ireast@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
ML U08006 C & Unix
ML U08033 Computer Hardware

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