SE Journals in 2036: Looking Back at the Future We Need to Have
This work tackles the unsustainable peer-review system in software engineering journals, which is an incremental step toward improving publishing efficiency for researchers.
The paper addresses the scalability crisis in software engineering publishing by proposing a future vision where traditional peer-review practices are reformed through alliance, process unbundling, and cultural shifts to handle global growth and new methodologies like LLMs.
In 2025, SE publishing faces an existential crisis of scalability. As our communities swell globally and integrate fast-moving methodologies like LLMs, traditional peer-review practices are collapsing under the strain. The "bureaucratic anomaly" of monolithic review has become mathematically unsustainable, creating a stochastic "lottery" that punishes novelty and exhausts researchers. This paper, written from the perspective of 2036, documents potential solutions. Here, the editors of ASE, EMSE, IST, JSS, TOSEM and TSE dream a collective dream of a brighter future. In summary first we stopped fighting (The Journal Alliance). Then we fixed the process (The Lottery / Unbundling / Fixing the Benchmark Graveyard). And then we fixed the culture (Cathedrals/Bazaars).