Tip toeing toward beta
Andrew, Jérémie, and I are slowly incrementing our way towards a beta. Slowly, of course, because this is a volunteer project for volunteer work, and definitely a priority that falls behind teaching, research, and other service. Oh, and also the general chaos of the United States, which is creating no end of uncertainty about the future of research in the U.S. and globally.
All that said, we believe in this project. I also need Reciprocal Reviews in my work as Editor-in-Chief as soon as possible, where it’s getting harder than ever to find Associate Editors and reviews to contribute work, but we’re receiving record submissions.
We don’t have a timeline, but we do have a clearer sense of the work that remains:
See our (finally populated) issues page, which contains our known remaining work towards a beta, and a few other features. Most of the issues are remaining core functionality or interaction design improvements. If you’re interested in contributing, comment on an issue, and we can coordinate. We’d love to have pull requests from anyone in the community who believes in the mission!
See our beta milestone if you want to follow along on our progress. The percentage there is misleading, of course, because much of the platform and it’s functionality is built. We’re not committing to it, but at our current pace, a beta release in summer 2025 feels possible.
You can also track our progress on our design specification, which describes use cases, defines the data schema, and maps out the core requirements for the beta. Feel free to submit issues if you see a way to improve it, or things we haven’t considered!
In my dreams, we launch a beta for ACM Transactions on Computing Education, where I’ve already done the political work to pilot this. That would mean:
A public place to volunteer to review
Integration with our ScholarOne journal instance via emails, automating the creation of submission and reviewing transactions.
A lot of tracking of impact, including assessing things like desk rejection volume (which should go down), review quality changes (which should go up), submission volume (which should go down), time to reviewer agreements (which should go up), and time to decision (which should go down).
There are many ways to help us get there!
Help with development
Offer design critiques, helping is make something as simple as possible
Spread the word