A free CG journal?

For the last few years I've been discussing the possibility of setting up a free computational geometry journal with my colleagues. For me the two main reasons of having a free journal is the price we pay for a subscription (CGTA costs EUR 1,041/year) and the copyright transfer.

The idea would be to make the journal completely free which would require it to be as low maintenance as possible. The aim is to make the journal belong to the community and hence minimize the workload on individuals. How can this be achieved and what are the issues that must be considered?

• The journal should work as a traditional journal with the difference that papers are only published on-line and are free to access by anyone.
  
  
• The editorial board (including the Editors-in Chief) should be changed regularly. I believe 3-5 years is a reasonable time to serve as an editor.
  
  
• Fairly large editorial board, say 30 (reliable) researchers. Try to distribute the papers among the editors.
  
  
• The editors have to take greater responsibility throughout the process - from submission to publication. For example, the editor has to check that the final version is in the required format. One should also allow the editors to have more power, for example, if authors don't follow the stated procedures then the editor should have the right (within reason) to reject it, all to minimize work for the editors.
  
  
• Aim to only accept high quality research since this will decrease the number of submissions (at least in the long run). Since the journal isn't making any money it doesn't have to publish any issues if there are no papers accepted.
  
  
• Where to host it? If we buy a domain name then it doesn't really matter where we host it and we could move it if necessary. A domain name is cheap so this isn't a problem.
  
  
• Free Journal management systems are available. I played around with Open Journal Systems which might be adequate (needs to be investigated further).
  
  
• How to get ranked? If the journal is successful it will get ranked sooner or later. Is this a problem initially?
  
  
• Name of the journal? Suggestions?
  

It doesn't sound hard, but I'm sure I forgot lots of issues. Comments and ideas are highly appreciated.

2008 - the year of reviewing

The other day I thought about what I've been up to in 2008. Looking back I felt that I've been very busy but haven't had enough time for research. At the same time last year I had approximately 12 months of exciting "2008-time" in front of me to do something new and intersting, so how did I waste it:

- 1 month vacation
(I miss the 43 vacation days I had while doing my postdoc in the Netherlands...if it wasn't for the weather and the food I might even consider going back)

- I spent almost 2 months travelling (research visits and conferences).

- 2 months reviewing papers!!!
Yes it's true! I spent almost two months of 2008 reviewing papers. I'm sure you wonder how it can add up to two whole months. Well, I reviewed 9-10 journal papers. Each of them required 2-3 days of full time work (on average). I reviewed roughly 60 conference papers - each of them took 2-3 hours to review (on average). In total 25 days of journal reviewing and roughly the same amount of conference reviewing. Scary stuff! This is almost 20% of my work time in 2008! What do I have to show for it? Well, I actually got a free book from Springer (reviewing for DMKD) and a "Certificate of Recognition" from CGTA as a "Top reviewer"...Yeah!

This left me with 7 months for research, teaching and administration. Obviously this has to change in 2009. Either I decrease my vacation (don't think so) or the amount of time I spend on travelling and reviewing. If you read this far then you probably realised that this post is just a long excuse on why I have to turn down review requests in 2009.

- My four 2008 highlights were SWAT (I really enjoyed being the pc chair even though it took a lot of my time), Mohammad Farshi's and Damian Merrick's PhD graduations and that I had a record number of journal publications (7).

Happy New Year!

Computer Science in Lund dissappears

I should have written this post a long time ago but for some reason I was hoping the decision would change.

I did my undergrad and PhD at the computer science department at Lund University in Sweden. Sadly it seems as the department will be closed down. The decision (Swedish) was taken by the faculty board in November 2007. As far as I can tell the decision was taken purely on a financial basis (even though the department is tiny compared the departments of biology, chemistry and physics).

The research at the department focused on algorithmics and AI and the small algorithms group was headed by Andrzej Lingas. The group, that among others also includes Thore Husfeldt and my former supervisor Christos Levcopoulos, has always been very active and produced high quality research and PhDs. When I was a PhD student there was a rather big group of successful students, for example, Andreas Björklund, Anna Pagh, Jesper Jansson, Mikael Hammar and Jesper Larsson.

From next year there will be no Computer Science education in Lund (however, there will still be a computer engineering program at the faculty of engineering). As far as I know it is unique for a large university. It will be very sad not to be able to visit my old department when I go back to Sweden.

CATS 2009 accepted papers

CATS 2009 list of accepted papers is out.

I heard rumours (Prabhu and Tasos) that CATS got roughly 50 submissions this year. This is a huge increase from recent years when we've had approximately 30 papers per year.

The conference will take place in Wellington the 20-23 of January.

Attending ACM GIS 2008

The last stop on my around the world trip is Los Angeles and ACM GIS. The conference venue is in a big hotel complex in Irvine somewhere. If I look out the window of my room I see a lot of big buildings but not a single person...scary. I arrived on Thursday afternoon but I was so jet lagged that I fell asleep and missed the last session and the banquet. I woke up at 2:30am on Friday morning and could finish my slides well before my presentation at 9am.

I attended all the talks on Friday. Not much to report, some interesting talks but nothing that stood out. Should try to remember to write a post discussing conference venues, i.e., (remote) hotels vs. universities. Looking forward to get back to Sydney after all the travelling.

Dagstuhl - moving objects

In Dagstuhl for a workshop on moving objects. As usual I'm enjoying myself. It's something special about spending one week (unfortunately only three days in this case since I have to fly to ACM GIS) on a remote castle with lots of smart people and working on new and interesting problems.

This workshop is very diverse with people from computational geometry, data bases, GIScience, geography, visualisation... Which is good in the sense that I learn something new from every presentation. The drawback is, of course, that it's sometimes hard to communicate across areas, but it's getting better and better.

On Wednesday we did the "compulsory" hike and as usual (except when hiking with Helmut Alt) we got lost (I'm not blaming anyone).

Project performance

NICTA has come up with a new great project performance indicator...the number of visitors to its project webpage. Needless to say that our project is not among the top performers. So if you want to support the algorithms people at NICTA please visit our webpage!