We are Drowning in a Sea of Least Publishable Units (LPUs)

Diagnoses Paper-inflation:

• Compared to 25 years ago...
  • the field grew by 3x
  • a single researcher publishes ~5x more
• Conferences are overwhelmed with submissions, hindering review

As a result, our conferences are full of boring, narrow papers which have little or no long term impact. [...] This will clearly lead to a “death spiral”.

Ideas

• Lightning Talks for more "slots"
• Posters instead of talks, so that the "the 10 people who are interested in narrow topics can talk with the author about the work"
• New classes of papers: Besides "industry", "demo", and "research" papers, there could be "broadly interesting" and "controversial/speculative" papers.

  Of course, moving in this direction will force administrators to work harder. They can no longer just count publications; instead they will have to figure out the actual impact of any given job applicant. In our opinion, this is a good thing to do.

• "A dozen more narrowly focused conferences instead of three 'zoos'"

I think the "administrators can no longer just count publications" is way off. Jochen Gläser mentioned that there was a case where administrators had a linear factor (e.g. 3) to convert the value of books publised to journal publications.

I don't understand why open source isn't embraced more/yet. It is mentioned in the community section of the seattle report. Why not focus on the combination of:

• successful open source projects, measured by github stars/contributions to ensure usefulness to the world
• academic publications, measured by (duh) publications to ensure scientific value

This combination should ensure that neither irrelevant "we worked a lot to produce a graph"-publications nor unscientific but popular open source projects game this system (at least not in this way / that easily).

Fochler and Sigl: Anticipatory Uncertainty: How Academic and Industry Researchers in the Life Sciences Experience and Manage the Uncertainties of the Research Process Differently shines an interesting light onto this.