Welcome, a little more seriously
One or two people asked me if I am serious, and I guess the initial post was a bit silly in tone. So let’s try that again.
Welcome to Not Relevant, a new electronic journal for information retrieval research. We want to publish bleeding-edge research papers, especially those that current IR conferences are rejecting due to an apparent lack of vision. We will also publish letters, short research papers, reviews, and surveys.
Our editorial policies are being developed right now. Here’s the prototype framework. The goal is to publish solid advances in the state of the art, game-changing work, research that pushes the boundaries of IR. We are not looking for incremental improvements.
Authors submit an article via email, and the editorial board solicits reviews from the information retrieval community. These reviews are single-blind and confidential. An editorial board member is appointed as the shepherd for the paper. Once reviews are complete, the editorial board member writes an open (not blind) review summarizing the reviews. If the paper is accepted, it is published on the blog along with the editorial review.
All published articles are open – there are no restrictions on access to articles aside from the authors’ copyright, which they hold; Not Relevant is not owning anyone’s content but our own. Articles will be posted to the blog – the blog post is the abstract, and a link to the article hosted here. Posts will allow comments and ratings. We will monitor comments and only moderate as necessary. Publication is on a rolling basis, and we’ll come up with a reliable citation scheme.
Is this a real journal? Yep. It’s brand new and has no track record, but the editorial board are all very qualified researchers. We do not plan to publish substandard papers, and we hope you’ll help us grow the reputation that makes a good journal.
You can help by commenting to the discussion here, emailing me, sending us papers, and/or volunteering to help either as a reviewer or an editorial board member.
Not Relevant 
is it accurate to describe this forum as http://www.cidrdb.org/ for sigir?
Probably. I’m not familiar enough with CIDR to know the circumstances of its birth, but the web page looks familiar. We’re not a conference, but similar to CIDR, I don’t see NR competing with IRJ or TOIS… the aim is completely different.
This is a great initiative. I would suggest to be more concrete with the copyright policy, e.g. use a Creative Commons license as PLOS and other Open Access publications do: http://www.plos.org/journals/license.php
That’s a good idea, formalizes my thinking but I want comments from others, too. (As a US Govt employee, my papers are generally in the public domain!)
I wonder if PLoS can do DOI assignment for us… I don’t want to pay a big registrar. Or perhaps the ACM DL will do it.
The CHI community created a special track for “stuff that does not fit” called alt.chi [1]. It seems as they also try to tackle the problem that the incremental improvements get accepted but the innovative and weird stuff gets rejected.
IMO if your paper get rejected it was just the wrong venue. Probably because the conference is to conservative or the reviewer to dump but more often because the paper was just not good enough. After all we talk about an acceptance rate below 20%. That means for every paper that you get in 4-5 papers get rejected. That is another thing I like about the CHI community, they started keeping the acceptance rate above 20% and accepted 277 papers in 2009 (compared to 157 in 2008).
[1] http://www.chi2010.org/authors/cfp-altchi.html
Looking forward to it!