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

2026-01-27

AI Summary

This work addresses a looming scalability crisis in software engineering academic publishing, where traditional peer review—strained by the rapid growth of the research community and the swift integration of large language models (LLMs)—has devolved into an inefficient lottery that stifles innovation and exhausts reviewer resources. Adopting a retrospective narrative from the year 2036, the paper presents a novel, consensus-driven vision co-authored by editors of multiple top-tier venues. It proposes a systemic reform pathway centered on journal consortia, decoupling of review processes (e.g., enhanced reviewer assignment mechanisms and shared benchmark repositories), and a cultural shift from the “cathedral” to the “bazaar” model of scholarly communication. Grounded in anticipatory socio-technical design and informed by institutional economics and community governance models, this approach offers a concrete roadmap for rebuilding a sustainable, inclusive, and innovation-friendly publication ecosystem.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies

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).

Problem

• scalability
• peer review
• software engineering publishing
• existential crisis
• stochastic lottery

Innovation

• Unbundling
• Journal Alliance
• Benchmark Graveyard
• Peer Review Reform
• Open Research Culture