SE Journals in 2036: Looking Back at the Future We Need to Have

TL;DR

This paper envisions a sustainable future for software engineering publishing by proposing reforms to peer review, community collaboration, and cultural change, addressing scalability and innovation challenges faced since 2025.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, forward-looking framework combining new review models, community alliances, and cultural shifts to improve scholarly publishing in software engineering by 2036.

Findings

Established the Journal Alliance for collaboration

Proposed the Lottery system to replace traditional peer review

Suggested unbundling review processes and cultural reforms

Abstract

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).