An interesting publication experiment in the logic-programming community

Krzysztof Apt has alerted me of the changes that have taken place in the Logic Programming community. The Association for Logic Programming (ALP) recently left the Springer LNCS series and embraced a new publication model for the proceedings of their flagship conference (the International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP)) that tries to upgrade the papers directly to journal papers. Here is how the co-chairs of the 2010 edition of the conference describe the new publication model and its rationale.

The Logic Programming (LP) community, through the Association for Logic Programming (ALP) and its Executive Committee, decided to introduce for 2010 important changes in the way the main yearly results in LP and related areas are published. Whereas such results have appeared to date in standalone volumes of proceedings of the yearly International Conferences on Logic Programming (ICLP), and this method – fully in the tradition of Computer Science (CS) – has served the community well, it was felt that an effort needed to be made to achieve a higher level of compatibility with the publishing mechanisms of other fields outside CS.

In order to achieve this goal without giving up the traditional CS conference format a different model has been adopted starting in 2010 in which the yearly ICLP call for submissions takes the form of a joint call for a) full papers to be considered for publication in a special issue of the journal, and b) shorter technical communications to be considered for publication in a separate, standalone volume, with both kinds of papers being presented by their authors at the conference. Together, the journal special issue and the volume of short technical communications constitute the proceedings of ICLP.

The special issue of the journal  Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP) devoted to the 26th International Conference on Logic Programming Special is the first of a series of yearly special issues of that journal putting this new model into practice. It contains the papers accepted from those submitted as full papers (i.e., for TPLP) in the joint ICLP call for 2010. The collection of technical communications for 2010 will appear in turn as Volume 7 of the Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) series, published on line through the Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server (DROPS). Both sets of papers will be presented by their authors at the 26th ICLP.

This seems a very interesting way of dealing with some of the concerns that have been aired by some pundits about the publication culture within CS, while preserving the crucial role that conferences play in CS. I think that it is certainly worth a thought.