Dear Aidan,
Congrats, great piece which I really enjoyed reading!
Two small remarks:
1)
FWIW, I would add one more point in "Journal pain-points"
the strict deadlines in conference revieweing and - at least perceived - less strict deadlines in journal reviews, community journals slower overall in CS, compared to other communities. I have to admit that I only have annectotal proof for this, it was mentioned I believe in a panel on the issue with e.g. Moshe Vardi and Sweitze Roffel onboard at FLOC in Vienna's summer of logic a couple of years ago.
I think this is an important factor across conferences and journal in a confrerence-culture heavy community like ours.... could be added under "Poor reviewer incentives:".
2) While sthey're still exclusively publishing with Springer, I found the 2-tier publishing model of BPM conference very interesting, where papers can be accepted as full conference papers (in Springer's LNCS) or in the "BPM Forum", see https://dblp.org/db/conf/bpm/index.html for less mature papers (published in Springers less prestigeous(?) "Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing" series.
This allows them to accept more papers, and would be combinable IMHO with a journal model for the top tier papers.
I find this model interesting to consider when re-thinking a mixed journal/conference model and it would be interesting to explore routes to combine with the VLDB model, or in other words would lend itself to a combination of Option1+Option2 as one.
just my two cents,
Axel
p.s.: also left this as comment on your blog, thanks again, also for the great gathertown discussion with Claudia and yourself at ISWC!
--
Prof. Dr. Axel Polleres
Institute for Data, Process and Knowledge Management, WU Vienna
url: http://www.polleres.net/ twitter: @AxelPolleres
> On 02.11.2022, at 05:16, Aidan Hogan <aidhog@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Inspired by discussions at the ISWC Townhall, and previously at the JWS plenary call, I published a blog post here discussing the issues of Open Access publishing in the context of Semantic Web research:
>
> https://aidanhogan.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/27/publishing-research-semantic-web/
>
> Also adding in CC members of the SWSA task force set to look into this issue; as well as Uli and Claudia with whom we discussed this issue for ISWC 2022; Pascal and Krzysztof as EiC's of SWJ; as well as Jim, Zhixiong and Ying as EiCs of Data Intelligence. (Apologies; I know some of you are already on the list.)
>
> The post covers the context of the OA issue, why there is a push to move away from publishers like Elsevier (in particular) and Springer, different types of OA, advantages and disadvantages of different types of OA, precedents for conferences and journals in CS that have moved to (zero-fee) Diamond OA and (inexpensive) Gold OA, general issues relating to the conference vs. journal paradigm in CS, precedents of CS conferences that have moved partially towards a journal model, and a concrete proposal for how publishing research on the Semantic Web could potentially look in future (as some food for thought).
>
> I hope you might find the post interesting! And hopefully it's not too long (I wanted to cover the issue in a self-contained and fairly complete way for those also maybe new to the topic).
>
> Comments welcome!
>
> Best,
> Aidan