Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 10:35
From: "Hofmann, Alfred, Springer DE"
To: Marian Bubak


Dear Marian Bubak,


Thank you for your reminder that we owe you the decision about KIKO 2005.

I very much regret to have to inform you that the LNCS series editors decided to reject KIKO from publication in LNCS. The main reason is that this conference does not meet the standards of internationality which we usually impose; depite the involvement of several people from abroad, the PC is predominantly made up by Polish scientists and the list of papers to be presented consists of a huge majority of papers by Polish authors; furthermore, the scope of the conference is rather broad and seems incoherent so that such a proceedings hardly would meet the interest of an international audience.

From your exceelent cooperation on numerous successful LNCS projects, your are probably aware that LNCS serves the international reserach and development community in computer science rather than national communities. We have clear indication from library subscribers that they don't like proceedings being included in LNCS which mainly reflect the state of the art from a smaller regional or national community. One measure to restrict growth of LNCS in the light of the boom of submissions of new proposals which we experience presently is not to accept projects which do not reflect the state of the art in a reasonably focused area.

Furthermore, with regard to future KIKOs, we hardly can imagine that KIKO can be gradually developed in a fully relevant international meeting with proceedings in LNCS unless dramatical changes are implemented. It also was said during the evaluation of KIKO in discussion with the LNCS series editors that there is so many other international conferences and workshops in place on software engineering; at the other side, application and experience oriented interaction between research communities and down to earth application professionals certainly can better take place in smaller regional or national communities and such meetings are probably best conducted in the mother lanuage of such communities with proceedings published primarily to the attention of the smaller audiences.

Again, I am sorry that we cannot extend the excellent cooperation with you to cover KIKO. I ask for your understanding of our decision.

Thanks and best regards, Sincerely,

Alfred
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Alfred Hofmann
Springer Heidelberg
Editorial Director
Computer Science