Jack Davidson

Digital Library

Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award

USA - 2023

citation

For leadership in and contributions to ACM's Publications Program

Professor Jack Davidson has made extensive and important contributions to ACM's publications program, and to the ACM Digital Library. He served as co-Chair of the ACM Publications Board from 2010 through 2021 and has been the founding chair of the ACM Digital Library Board since 2021.

In those roles, he has led several key efforts of significant importance to ACM, its membership, and the computing community. Professor Davidson led the ACM's revitalization of the digital library (DL), including taking on leadership of ACM's new DL Board and building a team of volunteers who advanced the DL's infrastructure, data, services, and interfaces. He also led the ACM's efforts towards open-access publication, moving from a subscription-based, free-to-publish model towards open access, now a Council-level commitment. He has driven efforts around publications ethics from plagiarism to more complex cases of compromised reviewing, broken confidentiality, and bullying, guiding the ACM's Publications
Board through investigations and guiding related policy changes. He has advanced more inclusive publications policies and practices; for example, he drove ACM's groundbreaking policy on author name changes, a policy that is being cited as a worldwide model for inclusive treatment of transgender authors as well as authors who change names for reasons of religion or marriage.

A critical aspect of enduring insights in the computing science research is replicability. Under Professor Davidson's leadership the ACM has introduced new interdisciplinary journals such as the ACM/IMS Journal of Data Science, as well as introducing a new line of Research and Practice journals, and introducing the Proceedings of the ACM series. Dr Davidson has led an immense effort to establish standards for the evaluation of research artifacts and research results, to drive for replicability in research  by enabling authors and replicators to submit and publish research artifacts, to carry out review of those artifacts, and to carry out replication studies.

In sum, Professor Davidson has had a major impact on ACM, and on the computing sciences community.

 

Press Release

ACM Fellows

USA - 2008

citation

For contributions in compiler design and implementation.

2023 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award

Jack W. Davidson, Professor, University of Virginia, receives the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for leadership in and contributions to ACM’s Publications Program.

Davidson served as Co-Chair of the ACM Publications Board from 2010 through 2021 and has been the founding chair of the ACM Digital Library Board since 2021. In those roles, he has led several key efforts of paramount importance to ACM, its membership, and the computing community. For example, Davidson led the effort to revitalize and enhance the ACM Digital Library, including chairing ACM’s new DL Board and building a team of volunteers who are advancing the platform’s infrastructure, data services, and interfaces.

Davidson also helped guide ACM through the difficult process of moving from a subscription-based free-to-publish model towards full open access, which ACM is on track to complete within the next few years.

Concurrent with these efforts, Davidson challenged the ACM’s Publications Board to address some of the longstanding issues in academic publishing. For example, as publication ethics cases expanded from plagiarism to more extensive cases of compromised reviewing, broken confidentiality and bullying, Davidson steered the Publications Board through challenging investigations and related policy changes. Among the efforts to adopt more inclusive publications policies during Davidson’s tenure, ACM instituted a new author name change policy, which applies to transgender authors as well as authors who change their names for reasons of religion or marriage.

Davidson is also credited with expanding ACM’s publications portfolio with the addition of interdisciplinary journals, a new line of Research and Practice Journals, as well as the new Proceedings of the ACM series. To advance replication and replicability, he also built on earlier efforts to establish standards and badging for the evaluation of artifacts and effects.