Thursday, February 11, 2010

FOCS 2010 Call for Papers is Up

Luca Trevisan sent me the link for the call for FOCS 2010.

Key points: The deadline is April 7. And, in a move that I approve of, there's no page limit on submissions -- instead, "Material other than the abstract, references and the first 10 pages may be considered as supplementary and will be read at the committee's discretion." Having just submitted papers to ICALP where we had to go through the "move things to an appendix" routine, I think this is the right way to go.

4 comments:

Yuriy said...

I don't see the difference (concerning the no-page-limit rule). If you want the committee to read what's most important to you, then you still have to go through "move-to-appendix" procedure, otherwise they will just read the first 10 pages (which are not necessarily the most important 10 pages). So to me this change looks mostly cosmetic.

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

Yuriy -- I'd like to think the committee would show a bit more discretion. So yes, if I have a 20 page paper, I shouldn't expect them to read 20 pages and should re-organize accordingly. But if my paper hits 10 1/2 pages and I still have references to go, I'd like to assume that (if they're still interested at that point) the reviewer will read to the end, and I won't have to play stupid games like deleting references or moving stuff around to hit an arbitrary 10 page limit.

Anonymous said...

I don't see any reason why you couldn't have a 15- or 20-page paper. The limit simply means that the reader had better be convinced, after reading the first 10 pages, that the remainder is worth reading.

Yuriy said...

I guess you're right. Indeed I had in mind a paper which goes far beyond 10 pages. For the case you're describing the new rule may be significant. Now I wonder - are there many such papers (near 10 pages), or the most are much lengthy?