FROM THE CHAIR

As I write this, SIGIR members are voting in the new Executive Committee. I would liketo thank everyone who has put themselves forward for one of the offices. The SIG runs
on volunteer effort: the SIGIR Forum editors, the website’s information director, theawards chair, the IR list editor, conference committees, reviewing, and so on. Your greatideas and constructive energy will benefit everyone. I hope that others will touch basewith the new Executive to find out how they can help with the SIG’s operations.
You may have noticed recent announcements by the ACM about changes in the digital
library policies. You can see some of the options available to you as an author at
http://authors.acm.org/. Perhaps most useful is a way to provide a link from your home
page to some or all of your ACM publications, allowing anyone to read those papers
regardless of whether they subscribe to the digital library. ACM also now provides a way
for you to pay to have your publication made openly available via any access method.
Making material more openly available is something that ACM is striving to accomplish.
Doing that while still generating funds to support the digital library itself is theirchallenge.
In addition to SIGIR 2013 in Ireland this July/August, watch for announcements about
SIGIR 2014 (Gold Coast, Australia) and SIGIR 2015 (Santiago, Chile). The location for
SIGIR 2016 will be announced at the SIGIR business meeting in Dublin. The Executive
will be looking for informal bids for SIGIR 2017 at that time, too. So if you have apossible venue for SIGIR that year in Asia or Australia, please consider making a bid.
You can find more information at http://sigir.org/bid.html.
Many conferences sponsored by SIGIR are also coming up soon; look for their calls forpapers and participation. JCDL 2013 is in Indianapolis, Indiana, the week before SIGIR.
CIKM 2013 will be in San Francisco this October/November, CIKM 2014 in Shanghai,and CIKM 2015 will be in Melbourne, Australia. WSDM returns to New York City inearly 2014 after three years elsewhere. Please check http://sigir.org/events/eventsupcoming.html for a list of other events of interest to the IR community.
When I agreed to be a candidate for Chair of SIGIR, I had two “planks” in my platform:
rethinking the foundations for a high-quality SIGIR conference and exploring thepossibility of regional SIGIR conferences. Although there has been a great deal of
discussion of these issues since then, I am not convinced they are “solved.” I hear
complaints about the reviewing process and about inconsistencies between conferences, I
notice a proliferation of IR-related summer schools and workshops, I am told of people
who submit their IR papers outside of traditional IR venues to get “better consideration,”and I worry that papers that take risks, that stray from the mainstream, or that do not

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discuss techniques that can be monetized in the short run are not treated well. Recent IR
conferences have made strides toward addressing these issues by rationalizing the pool ofreviewers, by increasing the prestige of posters by making their papers longer, and by
trying to raise the acceptance rate so that riskier but good papers are less likely to be lost.
I step down as Chair of SIGIR feeling that there has been some movement forward, butthat much more needs to be done. I would like to see cooperation between the major IR
conferences to recognize and support the fact that papers rejected by one conference are
handed off to the next, to connect disparate workshops and mini-conferences with SIGIR
more formally, and to explore ways to create regional IR conferences where they do notalready exist. If you’re interested in these or related issues, please seek me out so that we
can work for more changes.
As always, please touch base with me or any other member of the Executive – or with thenew Executive starting in July! – if you have any issues that you feel should be discussed
or if you wish to help with any of the SIGIR work.
James Allan
chair_sigir@acm.org

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