Regarding the ACP Vote on Whether to Change the "ACP Publishing Model"
Eugene Freuder
Eugene Freuder
I assume most of you have received the mailing from the ACP, which solicits ACP membership opinion on two Questions regarding publication matters. I suggest we take this week (through Friday, July 3) to allow for discussion of these Questions in this forum. That will still leave plenty of time to vote.
While there has been prior discussion at CP conferences, and a survey, regarding publication matters, I think it would be helpful to have an opportunity now to discuss these specific Questions. While I appreciate that the ACP mailing itself lays out Pros and Cons, rather than advocating a particular outcome, I think we could still benefit from additional input.
While I will myself, of course, listen to as well as participate in, the discussion, at this point I expect to vote “No” on the two Questions asked by the ACP.
I will break up my initial contribution to the discussion into two separate posts. This post will make the case for the existing Constraints journal, and describe how it is seeking to respond to the concerns raised in the ACP mailing. The next post will focus on the problems I see with the New Publishing Model described in the ACP mailing, and the danger of having two competing journals.
The Constraints journal has been through a difficult patch lately in terms of attracting submissions. However, it has taken several steps to address this. This activity has come, at least in part, as a positive response to the attention the ACP has drawn to this problem.
Unfortunately, with all the good intentions in the world, the ACP discussions of the journal at recent conferences has also, in the short term, had the unintended consequence of further depressing submissions. In the recent ACP Survey, some respondents mentioned hesitating to submit to the journal because it wasn't clear whether it would continue. As someone who has two papers in journals that no longer exist, I can understand that. However, since one of those journals was the short-lived Constraint Programming Letters, I am all the more cautious about entertaining proposals for a new journal for our field. Constraints has been here for 30 years.
The ACP mailing presents two motivations for considering a change to our publishing model and/or a new journal: the recent paucity of new submissions to Constraints and also the lack of open access. Thanks to outgoing Editor-in-Chief Mark Wallace and incoming Editor-in-Chief Helmut Simonis, and with the help of “Outreach Editors” Zeynep Kiziltan, Anna Latour, and myself, as well as the Communications officer of the ACP, Roie Zivan, there have been a number of recent initiatives designed to address these concerns.
- There is now a “mirror site” for the journal at the ACP website where new papers can be freely accessed — and authors can provide short video introductions.
- The Springer SharedIt program, which allows authors to widely share free access to their papers has been better publicized.
- There are 3 Special Issues in train, including a 30th Anniversary Special Issue, and 3 more under discussion.
- Awards for Classic and Prominent Papers have been established.
- The new positions of “Outreach Editors” have been added to the masthead.
- Increased promotion of the journal has begun in social media, the Constraints Google Group in particular.
- A 30th Anniversary Panel is planned for CP 2026.
You can help bolster the submissions pipeline.
- There are 59 regular papers accepted for CP 2026. There were 37 papers at the recent CPAIOR. Searching for the keyword “constraint” among the upcoming IJCAI-ECAI 2026 accepted papers yields 54 results. It wouldn’t take many of these 150 papers developed into journal submissions to fill out the next volume of Constraints. Submit!
- The Special Issue program has been reinvigorated. Propose your own Special Issues!
- Note that Constraints has an Applications Editor, a Letters Editor, and a Surveys Editor. Apply! Correspond! Survey!
Helmut and I, and I’m sure other members of the Editorial team, will be at CP 2026 in Lisbon. Bring us your ideas.
I would now like to provide some information that puts the current journal situation in historical perspective, and demonstrates why Constraints is worthy of our continued support.
First, here is some data I retrieved with the help of Publish or Perish:
- Constraints has averaged around a paper a year with 150 or more citations in Google Scholar.
- It has averaged around one paper per issue with 50 or more Google Scholar citations.
- One of its papers has 500 citations. The journal’s h-index is 72.
Please see the additional information contained in the attached document.
-- Gene
Eugene Freuder
Eugene Freuder
I note that the two questions the ACP mailing asks — abut a new publishing model and a new journal — are related. As the ACP mailing says: “If we simply create a new open-access journal without changing our publishing model, the problem of low number of submissions to the journal will likely remain.”
I will argue here that the New Publishing Model described in the mailing is fatally flawed.
The voting materials also note that if the ACP establishes a new journal, Springer could decide to continue publishing Constraints with a “fresh and not necessarily representative editorial board”. That would indeed be a problem, but it is also quite possible that the current Constraints editorial board would remain with Constraints, making it that much more difficult to attract a representative editorial board for the new journal.
In any case, having two competing journals for our relatively small field would be a major problem in itself. The challenge of attracting enough submissions already faced by our one journal would presumably only be worse for each of two journals.
When I first just quickly read Question 1 about a New Publishing Model, I assumed that it was just asking if Constraints journal papers should be offered a presentation slot at the Conference, in addition to the papers submitted to and accepted by the Conference in the usual way. That actually sounds like it might be good for the journal and the Conference. But that is not what is being asked.
The New Publishing Model referred to in Question 1 would replace the CP conference as we know it with a meeting of the same name at which authors of papers published in a new journal would be offered an opportunity to present their journal paper. (In theory the New Publishing Model could be implemented with the current Constraints journal, but the Constraints journal is independent of the ACP.)
The New Publishing Model says that the CP Conference as we know it will cease to exist. The Conference would have “no more program chair nor program committee”. CP Conference papers as we know them would cease to exist. The usual process of writing and publishing CP Conference papers, getting feedback — from reviews and in person at the Conference — and then extending/expanding/revising the work into journal papers, would cease to exist.
Logically it seems to me that this New Publishing Model can have two outcomes:
- The new “journal” would accept what heretofore had been conference-level papers, and thus would not be a high quality journal, but effectively a rebranded conference proceedings.
- The new journal would accept only what always would have qualified as journal papers, and thus would presumably have trouble publishing enough papers to fill up a conference program. Authors would not have an opportunity to publish, present, receive feedback on (and add to their CV) their conference-level work at the new CP “Conference”.
Neither of these options seems desirable.
In one case we’re effectively saying that can’t have a real journal, in the other that we can’t have a real conference.
— Gene
Barry O'Sullivan (Computer Science)
Dear Gene, Colleagues,
I very much share Gene’s concerns. The ACP’s “new publishing model” proposal represents a major departure from our current practices and, in my view, creates significant and unnecessary risks that could have serious negative consequences.
I made a proposal at a recent ACP GA that, I’d argue, represents a way to strengthen our journal and offer a diversity of paths to publication of CP research. My proposal was that we adopt into our usual CP conference an _additional_ journal track modelled on what is done at ECML/PKDD. Papers would be submitted by specific dates to partner journals – in our case my proposal is that this would be Constraints – and papers accepted in that way would automatically be presented at the conference. Of course, the conference would continue as it currently does with a PC Chair, a PC, submission deadlines, etc. The 2026 ECML/PKDD Journal Track is described here:
https://ecmlpkdd.org/2026/submissions-journal-track/
The CP community should strive towards both a strong conference and a strong journal. We should focus our efforts on making our current assets in this regards as strong as possible. Fundamentally altering the conference and creating a new journal from scratch seem far too extreme to me. And it is speculation whether this changes address the problem. I believe they would make it worse.
If there is the capacity in the community to generate a sufficient number of journal papers to populate an entire conference program then we have more than enough capacity to utterly transform the Constraints journal. I believe that we should test this capacity by implementing what I proposed, namely an ECML/PKDD-style journal track, in our usual CP conference. All those papers would be published in the journal, not in the conference proceedings. The conference proceedings would publish the usual conference papers submitted directly to the conference in the usual way.
I believe we do need a traditional conference – we actually have two in the area of constraints (CP and CPAIOR - the latter, like Constraints, not being under the ACP remit). A strong CP conference provides the necessary forum for early results, for networking, for our students to meet and build relationships with colleagues, and to share early work. The ACP proposals remove that very important role of a conference. Instead it becomes a place where we only get to see papers that have already been published. The motivation for a high attendance is significantly diminished. I would predict that the CP conference would fade into insignificance, CPAIOR would grow, which is great for that conference, but we have two strong conferences now. Why weaken any of them?
My proposal does not address the issue of open-access. However, I believe the first priority should be to work on this with our current publisher, pointing to growth in the number of submissions. I recently co-founded a new journal with the ACM – ACM AI Letters – which is currently a diamond open access journal for the next three years. We are working with the ACM to ensure that it remains a diamond open-access journal after that period and they are very receptive to that. I believe all publishers are becoming more receptive.
I would also like to take the opportunity to acknowledge Gene’s enormous role in establishing the CP conference and the Constraints Journal, amongst his many other seminal contributions and service to our community. We should listen and reflect carefully on what is being said. I have known Gene for almost 30 years. On the few occasions I found myself not agreeing with him I always learned much later that I was wrong all along 😊
I will be voting “no” to the two questions. We need to help our journal, and we can do that. I believe there is far too much risk in the “new publishing model.” We have the publication assets we need and with some tweaks those assets can really work for us. Let’s focus our efforts there and address the issues in a systematic manner.
Kind regards,
Barry O’Sullivan
Past ACP President (2012-2017)
_________________________________________________________________
Professor Barry O’Sullivan, FAAAI, FAAIA, FEurAI, FIAE, FICS, MRIA
Chair of Constraint Programming, School of Computer Science & IT
Institutional Lead, Rinn Artificial Intelligence, University College Cork
Director, Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence
Director, UCC Futures on Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics (AIDA)
Chair, National Research Ethics Committee for Medical Devices
Member, Irish Government’s National Science Advice Forum
Editor-in-Chief, ACM AI Letters | Web: https://dl.acm.org/journal/ailet
School of Computer Science & IT, College Road, University College Cork, Ireland
Tel: +353 21 420 5951 | Web: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryosullivan/
From:
const...@googlegroups.com <const...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Eugene Freuder <e.fr...@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, 30 June 2026 at 07:19
To: Constraints <const...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [constraints] The ACP Mailing: Part II
[EXTERNAL] This email was sent from outside of UCC.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Constraints" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
constraints...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/constraints/0ed87429-981d-4c7c-896f-c5e538285afan%40googlegroups.com.