Editorial: The Best of Two Worlds -- Present Your TODS Paper at SIGMOD

It just became even more attractive to publish your research results in ACM Transactions on Database Systems: The leadership of ACM SIGMOD and TODS have decided to offer the authors of certain TODS articles the opportunity to present their article at the " next " SIGMOD conference. This agreement aims to make it more attractive to members of the SIGMOD community to publish in TODS, as well as to further enrich the technical program at the SIGMOD conferences. Journal and conference publication differ in a number of respects. In the following, I review important differences, from the perspective of journal publication, and present a case for publication in TODS. When a submission is received for consideration of publication in TODS, the submission is assigned to an Associate Editor who then is in charge of handling the submission and, in a sense, serves as the submission's ombudsman: The handling Associate Editor aims to do what is right for the submission and will take into account the author's responses to reviews. While the aim is to provide review results within 4 months, the journal's review process can accommodate special circumstances as needed to get things right. For example, additional reviews can be obtained in a review round, and an additional round of reviewing can be introduced. The traditional conference review process has a fixed schedule of deadlines and does not offer this flexibility. Some conferences have tried to achieve some of the flexibility by allowing one round of revision. Some conferences have also introduced procedures that may be viewed as a means of approximating the Associate Editor role as found at journals. They have introduced program committee vice-chairs and meta-reviewers, and they have introduced author feedback. In my experience, these innovations to the conference review process are valuable but do not combine to yield the benefits of the journal review process. Specifically, what I call " hit-and-run " reviews still occur at times. These are superficial reviews that simply reject a paper without offering specific reasons. Key reasons why such reviews occur is that they are fast to do and that reviewers know that they can get away with them because there is no time for iteration. And I believe that the vice-chair and meta-reviewer roles are not always effective, mainly due to tight deadlines. They simply often have to make accept/reject recommendations with the information already available. Another difference between the …