Computer Science Research Community: The Death Spiral?

Two disturbing trends are arising within the computer science research community: increasing occurrences of double submissions by authors and irresponsible attitudes among professional service volunteers with regard to their service assignments. Here, the author suggests that one of the relevant professional societies—such as IEEE—take leadership in addressing this issue by creating a committee that would track and publicize such behaviors to create backpressure against them and reverse these negative trends. Moreover, an existing mechanism within IEEE that handles plagiarism complaints could provide the foundation for the broader misconduct committee proposed here.