I’ve stopped following DBWorld, SEWorld, AISWorld and similar mailing lists tired of getting hundreds of call for papers I have no interest in reading.
It seems that some publicity chairs believe that their work will be measured by counting the number of times they send the call for papers of a conference (your first have the preliminary call, then the official call, then the reminders of the deadlines and finally the notifications of deadline extensions; process is repeated for each event, including individual workshops, tutorials,… , in the conference) generating tons of emails spamming my inbox folder.
Let’s be clear, when was the last time that you received a call for papers of a conference that:
- You didn’t know it existed AND
- You were interested in
My guess is that your answer is never (any empirical study on the number of attendees of a conference that heard about it through a call for papers they saw in a mailing list?). Senior researchers already know all the conferences in their domain. Junior ones can get this information faster by asking the senior researchres instead of browsing the hundreds of call for papers available online at any time.
So, let’s save everybody’s time and energy by drastically reducing publicity emails from conferences. One as a reminder the conference still exists (or announcing a new recently created) is fine but that’s it. I’d really appreciate it.
(if you’re looking for a position then I´m afraid you should stick to those lists since it’s still the best place to learn about job openings)
Toyally agree but two thoughts: you need a better email filtering system – gmail is great. And check out WikiCFP, which can even integrate with your calendar.
I do use Gmail and I have plenty of filters defined to minimize this problem (so be careful if you send me an email with certain keywords in the subject 🙂 ) but this is not a solution to the problem, it’s just a workaround.
And regarding wikiCFP, sure that can be also a good alternative. Let’s stop sending emails around and just agree that we will all add our CfP there.