Reviewing Call for Papers submissions

If you chair or review a session in a Call for Papers, this is how to read the submissions and record your decisions. You do not need to email authors: the organizers do that once decisions are in.

Sign in

The organizers send you an invite email. Follow its link to set a password, then sign in at the usual sign-in page. You land on Reviews, which lists the shows you review for with your progress. If you review for one show only, it opens straight away. Open reviews opens a show's queue.

You only ever see the submissions in your own sessions. If you are also a speaker at the show, your speaker profile is still under My Profiles.

Read and decide

The queue lists your submissions under To decide, Decided and All. Your sessions at the top shows the sessions you chair or review, and Please decide by shows the organizers' deadline.

Select a submission to read its abstract, authors, keywords and any uploaded paper (Download paper). If the author changed it after review started, a note says so, and Show previous version shows what it said before.

If you chair the session:

1. Choose Accept or Decline. When accepting, Accept as lets you pick the presentation type, for example a poster instead of a talk.
2. Optionally add a Note to the author, which goes into the decision email the organizers send, and an Internal note, which only the organizers and other chairs see.
3. Select Save decision. The next submission waiting for a decision opens automatically.

The organizers are told about your decision; the author is not emailed until the organizers send decisions. Several people can chair one session, and the latest decision stands; History shows who decided what. Change decision and Reset to pending let you revise it.

If you are a reviewer rather than a chair for a session, you can read its submissions but not decide them.

On a computer, J and K move through the list, A and D choose Accept or Decline, and 1 to 5 set a score.

Scores

If the organizers turned on scoring, Your review appears on each submission. Give it a score from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), choose Recommend accept, Recommend decline or Unsure, add a Comment for the chairs if you like, and select Save review. Only the organizers and the session's chairs see reviews. With scoring on, the queue's tabs are To do, Done and All, and a Reviewed badge marks what you have reviewed. Chairs see everyone's scores and the average before deciding, and can score too; the decision is still the chair's.

If the call uses blind review, author names, affiliations and file names are hidden from you.

Reminders

If something is still waiting on you as the review deadline gets close, you will get a reminder email, and another on the day and after it. Once your work is done, the reminders stop.

A submission in the wrong session

If a submission belongs elsewhere, select Not my session, choose Which session should it go to? (or Not sure), add a note if it helps, and select Send to the organizers. They will move it.