Novel Practices

Many societies, in different sub-disciplines of computing, are making changes to the publication process in selected conferences and journals.  Some of these are experimental, some have since failed, others are more established.  A sampling of these is here:

1. ACL provides pre-publication mentoring.
2. ETAI (Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence)  was an early creative effort.
3. Global Internet Workshop was a one time experiment with open (non-blind) reviewing, described in You must be joking: a historic open reviewing at global internet ’07 by Michalis Faloutsos, Anirban Banerjee, and Reza Rejaie ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3):79-82, July 2007.]
4. Author feedback is used by many conferences. One that took this farther then most is PAM. This is described in Author feedback experiment at PAM 2007 by Konstantina Papagiannaki, 37(3):75-78, July 2007.
5. ICLP has had a conference/journal hybrid in operation since 2010, with two classes of conference papers: those published in a journal and those not.
6. NIPS  is considering some far-reaching changes.
7. SIGMOD Digital Review was an effort to provide post-publication reviews without changing the publication process itself.  It has since been reborn as Pubzone.  The idea for these schemes was described in ACM-SIGMOD Digital Review: Restaurant Ratings for Technical Papers by H. V. Jagadish, SIGMOD Record, 29(1), Mar 2000.
8. SIGOPS has given thoughtful consideration to the issue of republishing extensions of conference papers in journals.
9. VLDB is perhaps the farthest along of these.  There is a hybrid journal/conference called PVLDB, with an informative FAQ, and a published vision paper.