As usual this started with the standard slides about what IACR is, what it does etc etc. Greg Rose announced that the funds are bouyant, despite fluctuation in the dollar. We now have 1521 members, of which 348 are students.
This Crypto had a record number of submissions, 230, of which 42 were accepted. Phil reported on his techniques at promoting a balanced a good programme, including trying to get more CHES related papers into the programme. Given Bristol had one such paper accepted, it is clear that his efforts succeeded; at least for us.
Announcements at the meeting where that Helena Handschuh will be General Chair for Crypto 2013. Phong Nguyen will be PC co-chair for Eurocrypt 2013, with Arjen Lenstra being the IACR Distinguished Lecturer.
In future LNCS proceedings will be made optional to attendees, in addition to opting out of paper delivery of the journal, which has already been decided.
Future elections, for directors, will be done by approval voting. This is to enable a more expressive form of election.
The main (possibly contentious) issue was the move towards Open Access publication for our conferences. This is starting to become more and more important, as funding bodies are now starting to insist that all govenment sponsored research is made available in one of a number of Open Access methods. In some sense this is only correct, since we do research and it will only become impactful if people are able to read it. Whilst we are lucky at Bristol to have access to all of Springer LNCS, not all universities and companies are so lucky.
The IACR board put forward a plan to move to full Open Access for conference proceedings, i.e. the publication is available immediately world wide for all people. The IACR is looking at a number of offers from both Springer-Verlag and other organizations (e.g. Usenix). The main proposal is to use a variant in which the cost is born by the IACR and not the authors. A vote was taken which was overwhelming in its support for moving to Open Access, indeed no-one was against.
Finally the meeting ended with an idea to move to a different mode of reviewing; for example something the database community are currently doing. For example as explained at http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/. This is certainly something which is worth considering for the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment