<p>ECCC is supposed to reject any paper that is submitted without something that appears to be a proof for all of the main theorems.  There is no expectation that a board member is going to check that the proof is actually correct (although some board members may do this, at least on occasion).  In that sense, the standards for &quot;refereeing&quot; for ECCC are much lower than for a journal (and I would argue that the level of refereeing for journal submission is higher than for STOC/FOCS, since the amount of time available for STOC/FOCS submissions is severely limited).  [One should not confuse &quot;level of refereeing&quot; with &quot;degree of selectivity&quot;, which are entirely different.]</p>
<p>Since ECCC is a community effort by the board, it does occasionally happen that some papers &quot;time out&quot; just because the board members were too busy, or assumed that someone else would look at a particular paper.  At least, this was true back when I was on the board; it happened rarely, but it did happen.  But the rationale for the &quot;time out&quot; aspect of ECCC is that, if a submission is really a &quot;complexity&quot; paper, then at least one board member should think that it looks interesting enough to act on it reasonably promptly.  There are papers that are actually garbage, or that are so off-topic that they shouldn't have been submitted to ECCC; those papers either get rejected promptly by a board member, or they just ignored and hence &quot;time out&quot;.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-05-08T02:26:10.377Z
2024-05-08T02:26:10.377Z
Eric Allender
<p>Apologies for the soft question. ECCC (the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity), on its website (<a href="https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ECCC</a>), says it is a compromise between the negligible peer review of ArXiv and the long waiting time of journal submissions. If one had to assign a value to the strength of the peer review process of ECCC (<span class="math-container">$0$</span> being arXiv's and <span class="math-container">$1$</span> being STOC/FOCS level), what would it be?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-05-05T06:43:29.760Z
The Chaitin constant.
Emil Jeřábek
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-05-05T13:16:53.080Z
About 0.111......
Ryan Williams
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-05-05T20:33:01.130Z
I can tell you this much: I have attempted to upload a paper only once in my life there. After waiting for more than two months, it was rejected because apparently nobody bothered to look at it: "Submissions that are not reviewed within two months ['2-month-rule'] are rejected, after the board members were warned about it." I never in my life had anything rejected from arXiv.
domotorp
CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-05-06T14:03:05.837Z
The screening process is explained here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1107458.1107484
There we also read: "The standards for publications in ECCC are high due to the involved board members."
Hermann Gruber
<cc.complexity-theory><soft-question><paper-review>
How stringent is the peer review process of ECCC exactly?
Tejas
# How stringent is the peer review process of ECCC exactly?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2024-05-04)

Apologies for the soft question. ECCC (the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity), on its website ([ECCC](https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/)), says it is a compromise between the negligible peer review of ArXiv and the long waiting time of journal submissions. If one had to assign a value to the strength of the peer review process of ECCC ($0$ being arXiv's and $1$ being STOC/FOCS level), what would it be?

**Tags:** cc.complexity-theory, soft-question, paper-review

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: The Chaitin constant.  
> **username_2**: About 0.111......  
> **username_3**: I can tell you this much: I have attempted to upload a paper only once in my life there. After waiting for more than two months, it was rejected because apparently nobody bothered to look at it: "Submissions that are not reviewed within two months ['2-month-rule'] are rejected, after the board members were warned about it." I never in my life had anything rejected from arXiv.  
> **username_4**: The screening process is explained here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1107458.1107484 There we also read: "The standards for publications in ECCC are high due to the involved board members."  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_5 on 2024-05-08. Score: 12 | Accepted answer

ECCC is supposed to reject any paper that is submitted without something that appears to be a proof for all of the main theorems. There is no expectation that a board member is going to check that the proof is actually correct (although some board members may do this, at least on occasion). In that sense, the standards for "refereeing" for ECCC are much lower than for a journal (and I would argue that the level of refereeing for journal submission is higher than for STOC/FOCS, since the amount of time available for STOC/FOCS submissions is severely limited). [One should not confuse "level of refereeing" with "degree of selectivity", which are entirely different.]

Since ECCC is a community effort by the board, it does occasionally happen that some papers "time out" just because the board members were too busy, or assumed that someone else would look at a particular paper. At least, this was true back when I was on the board; it happened rarely, but it did happen. But the rationale for the "time out" aspect of ECCC is that, if a submission is really a "complexity" paper, then at least one board member should think that it looks interesting enough to act on it reasonably promptly. There are papers that are actually garbage, or that are so off-topic that they shouldn't have been submitted to ECCC; those papers either get rejected promptly by a board member, or they just ignored and hence "time out".


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