Proposal for modifying STOC/FOCS submission procedures.

There has been concern among some people in the
theory community about the increasing heavy burden of
refereeing, the bias towards highly technical papers over
conceptual ones, and the reluctance of senior researchers
in the field to serve on STOC/FOCS committees. This
proposal aims to (partially) address these issues by a
small modification to the submission process.

Under the proposal, the main abstract submission process
would remain unchanged. The new feature would be a
short two page abstract due a week after the main stoc/focs
deadline. This two page abstract would give the authors an
opportunity to explain the conceptual contributions, the outline
of the proof, the easy to understand core of the paper or a
special case of the main theorem that illustrates all the main ideas.

To understand the motivation for the abstract and better picture
its contents, think about how often the 20 minute presentation at
STOC/FOCS provides a better insight into the research than the
paper. While preparing the talk, the authors can step back and
try to explain something interesting about their work - either the
core of their proof, or a special case of their theorem, or the
new conceptual framework that they introduce. The one week
period after the mad rush to the STOC/FOCS deadline would
provide a chance to reflect, and additionally there would be an
incentive for the authors (just as in the conference presentations),
to simplify.

A few points about the proposal:

1. The new proposal would give the program chair a week to
assign papers to committee members, thus accomplishing the
goal of this year's early title and brief abstract submission.

2. The proposed change takes special care not to change the
format of the main STOC/FOCS submission. This is because,
for all its faults, it has served the theory community well. The
deadline provides a spur to many researchers to put their
thoughts into order; many a crucial lemma are proved in the
week or two leading up to the deadline.

3. This brings us to an important question: should the contents
of the proposed two page abstract not already be part of the
main submission? Ideally they should. But the reality about the
STOC/FOCS deadlines is that the time leading up to them is
typically spent in a mad rush ironing out bugs in lemmas,
generalizing the results, verifying correctness and just
coordinating between coauthors to get the paper out the
door. The one week period after the deadline would provide
the space to step back and consider the results in their
entirety. There is also the question of incentives. The
incentives during the main deadline are weighted towards
verifying correctness and generalizing the results. The two
page abstract asks for the opposite - to strip the paper of
any unnecessary generality, to emphasize the main ideas in
the proof without worrying about all the details.

4. Would the short abstract be published? No, though authors would
undoubtedly incorporate some of their ideas into full paper.

5. Preliminary reactions of colleagues who have been sounded out
on this proposal have been quite positive. A common reaction is
that it could do a lot of good and in the worst case it would do
little harm to try it once.

6. One final point; the theory community has grown tremendously
over the last 15-20 years. Old timers in the field might remember
that program committee members in the big "theory schools"
could expect to hear talks about a significant fraction of submitted
papers well before the program committee meeting. With the much
larger and geographically diverse theory community today, the two
page abstract could restore some of these features.