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SE Journals in 2036: Looking Back at the Future We Need to Have

Tim Menzies, Paris Avgeriou, Robert Feldt, Mauro Pezzè, Abhik Roychoudhury, Miroslaw Staron, Sebastian Uchitel, Thomas Zimmermann

TL;DR

Problem: the SE publishing system cannot scale with global growth and rapid AI velocity, as traditional peer review becomes stochastic and inefficient; Price's Law implies roughly half of contributions come from the top $\\sqrt{N}$ researchers, with $N \\approx 19{,}000$ in SE contexts. Approach: a six-fix redesign anchored in Price's Law, leveraging a cross-venue alliance, lottery triage, hybrid automatic/manual reviews, modular publications, and Catalyst Criteria, together with Executable Papers and open artifacts. Contributions: portable review lineage, automated structural gates, micro-publications, and a two-speed Cathedral/Bazaar culture that separates depth-driven and agile research. Impact: the changes reduce wasted effort, accelerate dissemination, and align publication with industry needs through open, executable, and practitioner-facing outputs.

Abstract

In 2025, SE publishing faces an existential crisis of scalability. As our communities swell globally and integrate fast-moving methodologies like LLMs, traditional peer-review practices are collapsing under the strain. The "bureaucratic anomaly" of monolithic review has become mathematically unsustainable, creating a stochastic "lottery" that punishes novelty and exhausts researchers. This paper, written from the perspective of 2036, documents potential solutions. Here, the editors of ASE, EMSE, IST, JSS, TOSEM and TSE dream a collective dream of a brighter future. In summary first we stopped fighting (The Journal Alliance). Then we fixed the process (The Lottery / Unbundling / Fixing the Benchmark Graveyard). And then we fixed the culture (Cathedrals/Bazaars).

SE Journals in 2036: Looking Back at the Future We Need to Have

TL;DR

Problem: the SE publishing system cannot scale with global growth and rapid AI velocity, as traditional peer review becomes stochastic and inefficient; Price's Law implies roughly half of contributions come from the top researchers, with in SE contexts. Approach: a six-fix redesign anchored in Price's Law, leveraging a cross-venue alliance, lottery triage, hybrid automatic/manual reviews, modular publications, and Catalyst Criteria, together with Executable Papers and open artifacts. Contributions: portable review lineage, automated structural gates, micro-publications, and a two-speed Cathedral/Bazaar culture that separates depth-driven and agile research. Impact: the changes reduce wasted effort, accelerate dissemination, and align publication with industry needs through open, executable, and practitioner-facing outputs.

Abstract

In 2025, SE publishing faces an existential crisis of scalability. As our communities swell globally and integrate fast-moving methodologies like LLMs, traditional peer-review practices are collapsing under the strain. The "bureaucratic anomaly" of monolithic review has become mathematically unsustainable, creating a stochastic "lottery" that punishes novelty and exhausts researchers. This paper, written from the perspective of 2036, documents potential solutions. Here, the editors of ASE, EMSE, IST, JSS, TOSEM and TSE dream a collective dream of a brighter future. In summary first we stopped fighting (The Journal Alliance). Then we fixed the process (The Lottery / Unbundling / Fixing the Benchmark Graveyard). And then we fixed the culture (Cathedrals/Bazaars).
Paper Structure (9 sections, 3 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 9 sections, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Houston, We have a Problem
  2. Six Fixes for SE Journals
  3. The SE Journal Alliance
  4. The Lottery
  5. Review = Automatic + Manual
  6. Cathedrals and Bazaars
  7. Unbundling the Monolith
  8. Escaping the Benchmark Graveyard
  9. Conclusion

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Consider two citation models. (a) Stochastic: Feedback loops cause unbounded citations; i.e. authors with many citations always earn yet more citations due to their viability. This would appear as a straight line on log-log graph of "paper rank" versus "citations standing". (b) Merit-based: Quality has some natural limits where most author quality clusters around a mean, with a few large outliers. Citations from such a population should appear like a bell curve, which on a log-log graph would be a non-linearity. The Green plot (left) shows data on authors whose papers scored ten most citations in leading SE forums 2013 to 2023 monperrus2025most. Note that the SE data matches a power law distribution (center) better than a merit-driven curve (right).
  • Figure 2: SE author density is four times that of machine learning (from luo2025iclr) reflecting either higher effort is required or vastly different authorship cultures.
  • Figure 3: Different kinds of papers.