[OSGeo-Discuss] Call for Papers for FOSS4G 2013 Academic Track

[Jeff McKenna]

Hello Barend, Venka, Andy, Max, Nick, and Puneet,

First I want to thank the Academic chairs Barend and Franz-Josef for
volunteering for the management of the difficult process of the
selection of papers for the FOSS4G 2013 event.  I am impressed by their
passion and dedication to getting papers published in the Transactions
in GIS journal, this is very important.

I want to make a strong reminder to all of the FOSS4G 2013 local
committee (academic or otherwise) to make sure to be adding to your
"Lessons Learned" wiki page as you travel down this path (the time to be
adding thoughts is now not later when you have forgotten: as a
documenter, I know those that say "oh I'll do that later" never ever do,
ever).  Please begin writing your thoughts for 2013 at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2013_Lessons_Learned  You will notice
that is is blank for 2013.   These thoughts are very important to share,
as future local committees will be reviewing these (take a look at all
the wonderful lessons learned from previous events linked from that
page, really wonderful to have).  Thank you, and future event committees
will thank you.

Regarding the Academic track call for papers for 2013, of course we must
respect the local committees decisions.  I am listening to Barend's
thoughts, as well as long-time FOSS4G academic leaders like Venka and
Massimiliano.  I feel that the 2013 committee could consider their
feedback, and possibly extend the deadline by a month to March 1st.  It
would give researchers some breathing room to prepare their papers,
which, yes is earlier than past FOSS4G events but if we all want papers
within these journals we must respect these early deadlines.  Of course
the local committee doesn't have to make an extension, I am only making
a suggestion.

Another idea, or reminder, I have for the committee is to be as open as
possible; for example, there is a mailing list setup just for FOSS4G
Academic discussions (I believe this was probably last used in 2010, but
it is there to discuss openly with academic FOSS4G leaders).  Again,
there is no official requirement for local committees to use these
mailing lists.  http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/foss4g-academic

Finally, I just now went back to examine the FOSS4G 2011 Academic Track
process used.  In fact that year I was also on the Academic Selection
committee, which was led wonderfully by the hard-working Rafael Moreno.
 On February 1st a "Call for Papers" was released for the Academic
track, and the call was actually for abstracts (yes google archives can
trick you sometimes, as the title was for "Call for Papers" but if you
read the release the first step was abstract submission).  The deadline
for academic abstracts was April 15th.  We received approximately 60
academic abstracts (note that the day before the deadline, on April
14th, we only had 9 submissions so far - Paul Ramsey would be nodding
his head at this, as this is very common, the many submitted right at
the deadline).  Rafael then instructed us to have our abstract rankings
back to him by May 16th.  From those rankings the plan was: the top 11 +
2 (backup) were invited to submit a paper for TGIS; the next 11 + 2
(backup) were invited to submit a paper for the OSGeo Journal.
According to my email archives the deadline for those full papers was
July 30th; and we received a total of 17 full papers.  The rest
(history) should be discussed on the FOSS4G Academic list with the
academic leaders (I am not one), but I hope this little history summary
helps the 2013 committee move forward.

Again thanks for the hard work of the 2013 local committee.

And thank you all for your FOSS4G passion (Puneet was right to put it
all in perspective).

-jeff
OSGeo President







On 13-01-25 7:26 AM, b.j.kobben at utwente.nl wrote:
> Dear Venka and Massimiliano,
> 
> I feel we have to defend the Foss4G2013 AT a bit here (as AT co-chairs we
> should ;-)
> 
> It is actually not true that "Previous FOSS4G's had abstract review by the
> academic committee
> and selected authors were asked to submit full papers closer to the
> conference dates."
> Both in the 2010 and 2011 conferences we had submission of full papers,
> not abstracts. 
> 
> The reason for this is that academics nowadays need to publish, if we want
> or not, and that means we have to offer a possibility of official
> publishing for the AT papers. The only way to achieve that is have journal
> outlets secured well beforehand and for that you need to set up a "Journal
> Type" submission and reviewing system, which means selection of full
> papers. Having to first select promising abstract, then ask these people
> to write full papers, and then have these properly peer-reviewed, all
> before the conference publication deadline, would mean we'd need an even
> earlier deadline.
> This by the way is nowadays accepted academic practice at conferences that
> offer Jopurnal publication outputs.
> 
> I agree that 7 months before the conference seems like a very early
> deadline, but for the reviewing process, the editing and processing of
> accepted papers and preparation of manuscripts for publication, it
> actually is quite a tight time table. Note that the advantage is that if
> your paper is accepted, you are assured of it being actually published at
> the conference date, something may academics are keen for...
> 
> Note also that the normal (non AT) tracks at Foss4G continue to offer
> submission and reviewing based on abstracts.
> 
> We will have this year (as in previous years) an Academic Committee. These
> are the people that will be asked to do the full paper reviewing, and we
> have just this week invited candidates and have asked them to agree to do
> this important task. The list will appear on the site once the reviewing
> process starts.
> 
> I hope this answers some of your questions.
> 
> 
> For further questions, comments and remarks, please don't hesitate to
> contact the Academic Track co-chairs:
> 
> * Franz-Josef Behr (Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences):
> franz-josef.behr at hft-stuttgart.de
> * Barend Köbben (ITC-University of Twente): kobben at itc.nl