Contact With Authors
Members of the program committee and external reviewers should not interact with authors of submitted papers directly,
particularly before accept/reject notices have been sent. All interactions with authors should go through the program chair.
This restriction serves two purposes. First, it preserves the anonymity of the reviewers, and second,
it supports greater fairness because authors are interacted with in a more uniform way.
Confidentiality
As a program committee member or external reviewer, you will have access to unpublished works.
The specific goal of the following policy is to limit exposure of these unpublished works to those
individuals that are absolutely necessary to ensure proper review of the submission.
Papers under consideration for publication should not be distributed or disclosed to any individual,
except for the explicit purpose of review. Papers that are accepted should still be considered unpublished
until the actual day of the conference, and should not be discussed outside the program committee without
explicit permission from the authors (through the PC chair).
As necessary, external reviewers of papers may be required, and submissions can be disclosed to such
individuals in these cases. Except in unusual cases, program committee members and external reviewers
should provide written feedback so that the entire program committee and the authors of the paper can benefit
from the direct expression of their opinion. All reviewers must be made aware of the Review Policies as
contained in this document. In particular, reviewers should understand that submissions are unpublished works,
and in no case should they duplicate them, pass them on to other people, or discuss them with people other
than the members of the program committee. The program chair should keep a record of the external reviewers
used to review submissions.
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Objectivity
Reviewers are also faced with issues related to being able to provide an objective review.
In order to protect the integrity of the review process, it is very important that even the
impression of a biased review process be avoided. Specifically, a conflict of interest may
prevent a reviewer from being able to provide an unbiased review. A conflict of interest is
defined as a situation in which the reviewer can be viewed as being able to benefit personally
in the process of reviewing a paper. For example, if a paper was written by a member of your own
group, a current student, your advisor, or a group that you are seen as being in close competition
with, then the outcome of the review process can have direct benefit to your own status. If a
conflict of interest exists, then you should decline to review a paper.
It may also be difficult to render an objective review for personal reasons. For example,
if a paper was written by an employee of the same company, a former student, or a good friend,
then you may or may not feel capable of reviewing it fairly. In any case in which you feel you
may not be able to objectively review a paper, you should discuss the matter with the program chair,
and the two of you should resolve the issue. In addition, the program chair should alert the rest of
the committee to the situation, so that nobody can accuse a reviewer of concealing information
(and so that if your review is substantially different from others, we can at least ask you to justify it).
During the program committee meeting, any committee member who has a conflict of interest
regarding a paper (e.g., you regularly work closely with the author) may be asked to leave
the room for the duration of the discussion. |
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Document History:
Draft of Feb 24, 1999 written by Ben Zorn (benzorn@acm.org).
Adapted from Program Committee notes for USENIX98 written by Fred Douglis.
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