Academic selection and publishing strategy

I have blogged several times about the high carbon cost of our conference system. One reason change is difficult is that deviating from the traditional publication model can hurt one’s academic career. A typical example is when a tenured academic tries to adopt more sustainable practices for herself, but when a student is part of a project, she is forced to submit to far-away conferences simply because those are the venues that will carry weight on a student’s CV.

This feels like an untractable problem, but it is actually possible to change academic selection criteria. For example, the committee that recruits new TCS researcher at CNRS (“Section 6”) chose to have the following in the recruitment criteria:

Evaluation is performed in a qualitative manner and takes into account all aspects: originality, interest, difficulty and scope of contributions, quality of the journals and conferences, contribution to the results in case of co-authors, etc. The section can also take into account a possible publishing strategy if it is explained, such as, for example, avoiding remote conferences so as to limit their ecological impact, avoiding venues that are not open access without article processing charges, etc.”

Implementing such a change doesn’t appear to be very difficult: this text was changed in 2020, when a new committee was formed, and it was the result of a consensus. I believe it can have a significant impact by challenging the implicit status quo — the idea that if you want a position, the only thing that matters is the number of publications you have in conference X, regardless of the collateral damage.

If you are in a committee writing this kind of text for positions or grants, consider adding a similar paragraph! It is also relevant for short-term positions like postdocs, because the more we see this, the more normal it will feel.