Conferences and Journals Should Release Number of Submissions Made by Each Author

Many researchers are submitting tons of papers to conferences and journals. There is generally no downside to doing so since rejected papers are not visible to anyone.

The ICLR conference releases all rejected papers along with author identities on completion of the review process. This leads to accountability. However, the release of rejected papers also leads to resubmission bias, and this resubmission bias is indeed one of the top concerns among researchers concerning fully open peer review.

So what can we do that will lead to some accountability towards submitting tons of papers but still avoid resubmission bias?

Don’t release the submitted papers, but just release the number of submissions made by each author, sorted in decreasing order of the number of submissions.

This will lead to some public accountability for overwhelming the system. Another benefit is that it will allow for design of better policies such as authorship-dependent quota rules (which I think is another essential ingredient today for handling the submission volume). Only releasing the numbers will keep the papers themselves private and avoid resubmission bias.