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  • Krzysztof Gajoskgajos@hci.social
    Oct 28, 2026, 8:16 PM

    At CHI'26, we published a paper showing the harm done by institutions that scale up imperfect decision-making processes without also investing in their appeals capacity (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318).

This year we had an 11,424 word submission rejected from #chi2027 “because it exceeds CHI’s length limit”. The CHI’s length limit is 12,000 words. “Desk rejection decisions are final.” There is no appeal. There is no due process.

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Replies

  • Krzysztof Gajoskgajos@hci.social
    Oct 28, 2026, 8:17 PM

    What probably happened is that there are no good tools for counting words in PDFs (while there are good tools for counting words in the source Overleaf or Word documents). The overworked AC relied on an imperfect tool that did not allow them to cleanly exclude tables or appendices (which should be excluded from the word count) and eded up with an incorrect assessment. It is predictable and inevitable that such mistakes would happen. Yet there is no way to recover from them.

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  • Andrés Monroy-Hernándezandresmh@hci.social
    Oct 29, 2026, 3:06 AM

    @kgajos the underlying problem is that we have valued productivity more than impact for too long.

    As usual, LLMs have amplified that problem by enabling people to produce more papers, which in turn forces the review system to rely on band-aids.

    Things would look very different if students were expected to graduate and get jobs with 1 or 2 deeply impactful papers, either for society or for the field.

    Our dept floated the idea of asking job candidates to pick 1 or 2 papers for their apps.

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  • Jennifer Jacobsjsquare@hci.social
    Oct 29, 2026, 4:28 AM

    RE: hci.social/@kgajos/11752037448

    I'm hearing reports of this happening to numerous authors.

    It is a major failing that there is no appeals process for results like these.

    Furthermore, if the CHI PC does not offer transparency on what transpired with this year's review process, including mistakes and the rate of incorrectly rejected papers, I'm not sure how the conference moves forward.

    Without some understanding and trust in the process, peer review falls apart.

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  • Cesare Pautassopautasso@scholar.social
    Oct 30, 2026, 12:01 PM

    @kgajos why not display the official word count upon submission? Or provide authors with the official word counter tool?

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