According to a shocking Viewpoint article in the Communications of the ACM, there’s corruption in the computer science community. I know, I know: film at eleven. But this corruption involves cheating by academic computer scientists. Cheating is never okay, of course, but as with certain public officials—the police, say—we expect actual scientists to be held to a higher standard in their professional role. Even petty violations can’t be tolerated. That’s why it’s so disturbing to discover systematic, intentional cheating.
The TL;DR is that one or more small group(s) of computer scientists have colluded to game the paper review process—read the CACM article for the details. That’s important to all of us because it means that important results may not get published due to the cheaters’ papers being published instead.
It’s also important to the computer scientists because their publication history is vital to their tenure and promotion. That’s the point of the cheating. It’s also a consequence of the time honored but probably outdated university incentive structures that prioritize publishing in prestigious journals. As Goodhart’s law predicts, any metric used to determine an outcome becomes useless as a metric. That’s because it will be gamed just as in this case.
This is the same dynamic stemming from the same root cause as the current contretemps involving journal publishers. The academic community complains and rends their garments about the cost of buying the journals but it’s their own rules that enable the publishers’ rent seeking. Don’t look for anything to change soon.