To: Andrew Calder
GPO Box 2702
Canberra ACT 2601

Dear Andrew,

For the upcoming ERA exercise, I understand that the ARC decided to
exclude conferences assigned the Field of Research code 0807 (Library
and Information Studies) from the ERA rankings at the request of the
Australian Library and Information Association.

Unfortunately, there are a number of conferences that have been
allocated to this code which are not generally attended by members of
ALIA, but are key events for Australian researchers in Computing
Science, for whom conferences are a key component of their regular
research outputs.  The exclusion of these conferences from the
rankings was therefore carried out without any consultation with the
affected communities.

The decision to exclude these conferences from the ERA rankings has
two significant effects:

First, it will damage researchers who have targeted these conferences
as part of their publication strategy.

Second, for two computing-focused Australian conferences -- the
Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS) and the Australasian
Language Technology Association Workshop (ALTW) -- this will adversely
affect the number of submissions they receive, and this as a result
will then damage the quality of these conferences.

In particular, since these two conferences are the natural meeting
places for Australian researchers in the information retrieval and
natural language processing areas, the action will actively harm these
research communities.

I request that you consider amending this decision urgently, and that
you reinstate the ALTW and ADCS conferences to their original B
ranking before these conferences and research communities are
adversely affected.

The problem appears to have arisen because of an assumption that there
are single bodies, such as ALIA, which are best placed to comment on
entire groups of FOR codes.  This assumption fails to recognise that
interdisciplinary research does not obey such rigid demarcation.  It
seems likely that, in the absence of more fine-grained assessments of
FOR codes and the publication venues that fall under them, there will
be many other groups affected by decisions of this kind.

Yours,

<signed>