[Air-L] AoIR 14 Announcement. Extended Deadline and More

[Alexander Halavais]

I don't think our aim is to be a pain in the ass. At least not solely.

You're right: consistency in submission does not necessarily aid the
review process. There are certainly difficulties in reviewing for an
interdisciplinary conference, as each of our reviews over the years
makes clear. But picking the same typeface won't help with that.

What it will help with is providing a consistent article style for
SPIR. I think you will agree that a mishmash of styles makes reading
such a collection difficult, and this is why collected volumes,
journals, and proceedings try to provide some consistency among
contributions. Given that the editorial committee for SPIR is entirely
volunteer, we are asking for your help in this process.

The pain happens somewhere, and I guarantee that those brave souls who
are taking the helm of SPIR for a second year will get more than their
share. We recognize that asking contributors to conform to a
consistent style adds work on your end, but it allows us to--for the
first time in several years--provide the work of our membership in a
way that the broader community can easily access. I think it's
important that our work have a life beyond the conference, and I hope
this will help provide it.

- Alex


On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 5:53 PM, David J. Phillips
<davidj.phillips at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> I would like to strongly object to this:
>
>> 3. In the interests of providing reviewers with consistency in submitted papers, all paper submissions must adhere to the SPIR template.  That template is now linked on the CfP page of the AoIR 14 site.  See it at http://ir14.aoir.org/cfp/
>
>
> What is the point?
>
> Does any reviewer really have a problem reading papers in formats other than this? Can they not compare the content of papers if those papers have different margins or font sizes or long quote conventions?  Do our reviewers read only one journal? Are they desperately confused by varying citation styles?  If any of these are the case, they are perhaps not qualified to review.
>
> AoIR is interdisciplinary. Style templates are associated (for reasons I've never fully understood) with certain disciplines.  Why are we forcing our authors into one particular disciplinary form?
>
> And simply in terms of efficiency, it is a much bigger pain in the ass (for me anyway) to write in a different template than it is to read in a different template.
>
> What am I missing here? What's the point?
>
> djp
>
>
>
> David J. Phillips, Associate Professor
> Faculty of Information
> University of Toronto
>
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