We need a better and different model. Everyone reads papers off the internet – people may use proceedings to discover what papers have been approved, but other than that everyone downloads their reading in .pdf form. So conferences and journals have become, instead of publishers, verifiers of quality.
This is even more frustrating because, even though I download all my .pdfs and read them from the web, I have to cite their publication in a (possibly obscure) journal or proceedings and pretend that the URL (c.f. Universal Resource Locator) does not exist. The most I am culturally allowed to do is to possibly give an arXiv resource id, but certainly not a grody URL. Online-only journals with everything open-access simply can not get here fast enough if you ask me.
Unfortunately, not only did nobody ask me, but computer science seems to be one of the sciences that is the slowest to adopt new technologies. Physicists made arXiv and have rumor-mill wikis devoted to public dissemination of job openings. CS people, possibly in an effort to disprove the stereotype and to make themselves look more “real”, have distanced themselves from these ideas. We need to get over ourselves.
Computer science can have a real effect on things and computers are increasingly relevant to everyone’s life. The field is so young that new papers can have implications not just for the direction of the field, but also an immediate impact on network operator practices or on programmer habits. Or at least these papers could if they were published in a way that anybody could read them. We need to stop being afraid of other fields judging us and start disseminating our research far and wide using this amazing international communications tool that we have constructed. And we need to do it NOW. I’d really like it if every paper not only had a link to the .pdf, but also had a link to an associated slide presentaation, and possibly a pdf of the slides, and possibly even a webpage. None of this is required of course, but if the authors are willing to give more info, why is it so hard for me to find it?
In our effort to be a “real science”, we are engaging in cargo-cult communication practices right when all the other fields are changing in light of the technologies we have wrought. That is like a black fly in my chardonnay, I tell you what.
