As a follow-up to my earlier post on scaling up the number of papers that conferences accept, I wanted to comment on the reviewing load imposed on program committees. Ken Birman and Fred Shneider have a thought-provoking article on this topic in May's issue of CACM (thanks to Yuiry Brun for the pointer). They touch on many points, but one issue they do not explicitly consider is the possibility of increasing the size of the program committee itself to reduce the workload.
The figure below shows the size of the program committee and the number of submissions for the last few years of SOSP and OSDI (OSDI 2002 is left out since I could not find data on the number of submissions). Note that I am not counting program chairs in the PC size, since presumably they do not shoulder the same burden for paper reviews (indeed, they have a much harder job).
I also estimate the number of reviews by each PC member, assuming that -- on average -- every paper gets four reviews. This is a guess and it…
The figure below shows the size of the program committee and the number of submissions for the last few years of SOSP and OSDI (OSDI 2002 is left out since I could not find data on the number of submissions). Note that I am not counting program chairs in the PC size, since presumably they do not shoulder the same burden for paper reviews (indeed, they have a much harder job).
I also estimate the number of reviews by each PC member, assuming that -- on average -- every paper gets four reviews. This is a guess and it…