Comments on: The tyranny of deadline extensions

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:49:55 +0000

I was once on a conference committee and we planned—at the beginning—our deadline and extension deadline. No one on the committee seemed to think twice about the fact of the deadline being extended. When the first deadline came around, we already had about 10 more submissions than we could accept. The extension was issued (despite my questioning whether it was necessary) and we received a further 30 submissions over the two weeks of the extension.

Part of the problem may be that, like in advertising, conference committees can’t be unilateralists; either we all extend our deadlines, or none of us do. Personally, I would much prefer that deadlines are never extended and that no one expects them to be extended. If you’re interested in presenting a paper, you submit it by the deadline. If you don’t, you’re not.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:26:42 +0000

Yes true, the ‘requested by multiple authors’ line probably indicates less author demand rather than more in a lot of cases. I mean, you _never_ see deadline extensions for funding calls…

By: Ben Fields

Ben Fields — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:14:41 +0000

First off, I agree completely that this practice is really annoying.

I always wonder how much this is tied to the number of papers submitted by a couple days before the deadline. In my horrifically unscientific appraisal there seems to be a (probably mild) inverse correlation between the acceptance rate of a conference and the likelihood of a deadline extension. The things (in my conference spread) that almost always extend are the conferences that accept considerably more papers then they reject, whereas the conferences that tend to not extend their deadlines have quite low accept rates (ie. sigchi basically never does and has an acceptance rate of around 20%). So the cynical take is that rather than ‘requested by authors’ paper extensions are a function of trying to increase the pool of paper submissions to a conference that otherwise would have few submissions.

Though there is the other point about building a culture of assumed extensions that feeds this problem and makes it difficult to change…

Anyway, back to writing this paper that’s due this evening (there was a 15 hour extension, that I’m basically ignoring)…