ISSAC Paper Review Process
The paper review process is conducted by the Program Committee (PC) together with external reviewers ("subreviewers") chosen by the PC members to review individual submissions based on their expertise.
It consists in several steps, detailed below.
The Review Process
- Paper Bidding and Assignment:
This takes place in the week between abstract submission and full submission, and the week following. PC members bid for papers, after which the PC Chairs assign each paper to two PC members. In exceptional circumstances a paper may be rejected at this stage. For example, if the paper:- is clearly off-topic for ISSAC;
- substantially exceeds the page limit;
- has been submitted simultaneously to another conference or journal;
- contains material already known to be published;
- has no evaluation via proof, experiment, or analysis.
- Conflict of Interests
During the bidding period, a PC member should choose "Conflict of Interest" for a submitted paper if there are non-technical factors that can bias her/his judgement, either positively or negatively, and hence compromise objectivity. When in doubt, the PC member should consult the PC Chairs for a decision. The following situations are always considered conflicts of interest:- is relative or spouse, or in a personal or professional relationship, of one of the authors;
- is student or advisor, presently or in the past, of one of the authors;
- presently works at the same university or research unit as one of the authors;
- has been collaborating presently or during the past 5 years with one of the authors (or plans to in the immediate future).
If the PC Chairs have papers with conflict of interests, they should declare conflict of interests to these papers and ask a PC member to oversee the review procedure for them. - Paper Reviewing:
Unless rejected in stage 1, each paper should receive at least two, and ideally three, reviews. The PC members may choose to write a review of the paper themselves and / or to ask external reviewers who are experts in the field of the paper to do so. PC members who are not assigned the paper may also choose to write or obtain reviews. - Selective Rebuttal:
After all reviews are complete, responses from the authors may be asked.- Rebuttals are asked for those papers where satisfactory answers to specific questions in the preliminary reviews can lead to a change of the evaluation of the paper.
- The program committee decides for each paper whether it needs a rebuttal.
- The PC Chairs will send these authors the reviews (including the scores) that raise those specific questions and the authors have seven days to answer questions and respond to comments of the reviewers.
- The rebuttal should be precise and self-contained, and is confined to one page in length. The rebuttal is for addressing specific questions or factual errors in the reviews, not for getting revised text or new results into the review process. Any such novel material will be ignored by the referees.
- There is only one round of rebuttal.
- Recommendation:
The PC members assigned the paper will, after reading external reviews, prepare a recommendation to either accept, reject or have further discussion on the paper with the whole PC. - Discussion and Decision:
Based on the recommendations, the PC Chairs will create 3 groups: accept, reject, discuss. PC members are allowed to request papers to move from the accept or reject group to the discuss group. If a paper is in the discuss group, all PC members, except those with conflict of interests, will be invited to comment and discuss the paper. These discussions will not be returned to the authors. In exceptional cases further reviews may be prepared. Finally, all PC members, except those in conflict of interest, will vote on whether to accept or reject each paper. The PC Chairs will make the final decision based on the results of the votes. - Notification:
E-mail notifications of the PC's decisions will be sent by the PC Chairs to the corresponding authors, along with all reviews of the paper, provided anonymously. There is no further rebuttal or appeal stage for rejected papers. Those papers that are not uploaded in final form by the deadline for camera ready copies will be rejected.