Set up a free journal?

For as long as I can remember our community has been complaining about the costs of "our" scientific journals. I looked up the institutional prices for the journals I usually submit to: Discrete and Computational Geometry ~1000 USD, GeoInformatica ~800 USD and SIAM Journal on Computing ~700 USD. This adds up to a lot of money for the libraries.

So instead we should all submit to cheap/free journals such as the ACM journals (ACM TALG is ~250 USD), Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications and Chicago Journal on Theoretical Computer Science (is it still alive?). I have two questions:

1. With the exception of the ACM journals, the cheap/free journals don't seem to be doing very well. So why don't we submit to cheap/free journals?

2. Is it hard to start a new journal? If not, why don't we have heaps of new journals? There are new conferences popping up every day, why no new journals? Also, if it's easy why don't we just start one?

SWAT deadline passed

We've got 109 submissions to SWAT 2008. Less than expected but hopefully the quality will be higher than expected! Now the hard work of picking the ~35 most interesting papers will start.

CCC 2008 accepted papers

The list of accepted papers for the computational complexity conference was announced last week. From a quick look through the list i picked these 4 for the top of my papers-to-read stack:

NP-hard sets are exponentially dense unless coNP is contained in NP/poly
Harry Buhrman and John M. Hitchcock

Amplifying Lower Bounds by Means of Self-Reducibility
Eric Allender and Michal Koucký

Lower Bounds and Separations for Constant Depth Multilinear Circuits
Ran Raz and Amir Yehudayoff

Constraint Logic: A Uniform Framework for Modeling Computation as Games
Erik D. Demaine and Robert A. Hearn

SoCG'08 notification

The big day for the CG community is here - the sausage notification. There were 127 submissions of which 42 were accepted. I was lucky to get my paper "A Simple and Efficient Kinetic Spanner" together with Mohammad Ali Abam and Mark de Berg accepted (See previous post).

It was also good to see that some of the students that I've been working with lately had a couple of papers accepted. For example, Martin Nöllenburg had two papers accepted (one son and two SoCG paper in one week, congratulations!) and Maarten Löffler had one paper. Also, Kevin and Maike Buchin who are visiting us at the moment had a paper accepted on Polychromatic Colorings of Plane Graphs.

By only looking at the titles there are several papers that look very interesting, for example, dynamic coresets by Timothy Chan and Similarity Search for Point Sets under Translation by Minkyoung Cho and David Mount. I'm looking forward to read them.

There will probably be more on this in a future post.

STOC 2008 accepted papers

List of accepted papers for STOC 2008.