Activation, phases and deadlines

Activate paper review

Various prerequisites must be met before the review can begin. Some of them are optional or will be important at a later stage. The highlighted notes are crucial for the paper review to work.

Scroll down to the Basic configuration of paper review.

1. Select Allow Reviewing (Fig. 1, point 1). This activates the Abstract Review tab. Please note: This setting can only be changed if Use Abstracts is selected at the top of the page under Allow Abstracts.

2. Define the Review Contact Person from the Program Committee (Fig. 1, point 2). An e-mail address must be entered here, otherwise e-mail delivery in the workflow will not work properly later.

Configure paper review

The review period is set by defining the start and end of the review period (Fig. 2). Reviewers can only review submissions in the frontend during this period.

Message to author/programme committee

Even if messages to authors or the programme committee are allowed, there is no direct exchange, e.g. by email or direct message. Instead, the messages are linked to the contribution and can be viewed in the backend.

The message to an author can also be included in the email notifications for the review results using the placeholder #:ReviewerMessages:#. These can also be deleted or edited in the backend if an inappropriate message has been stored here.

Customising review email templates

As part of the review process, emails can be sent automatically via the workflows to inform the reviewers or authors about the status of the paper. These emails can be customised as desired.

We recommend that you fill all templates with appropriate content or use the defaults, even if you do not want to use the templates.

Changing the responsible actors

Each abstract can only be in one area of responsibility: with the authors, with the reviewers or with the programme committee.

In order for the reviewers to have access and be able to evaluate the papers, the papers must be moved in the workflows from the phase Paper submission with the actor Author to the phase Paper evaluation with the actor Reviewer (Fig. 5, point 1).

Clicking on the arrow to move the articles to the next phase takes you to an intermediate step from which the e-mails can be sent to the reviewers. More information on this is provided in the chapter Starting the review process.

The actor in whose area of responsibility the paper lies can also be changed directly in the paper (Fig. 6). To do this, select the Paper data tab and then select the desired actor at the bottom of the abstract using the edit pen.

This allows individual papers to be moved within the workflows without having to trigger mass actions. This procedure is suitable, for example, for testing the paper evaluation.

In Fig. 7, for example, only paper #538 is released for the reviewer to evaluate (Fig. 7, item 1). All other papers are in the workflows of another area of responsibility and therefore cannot be evaluated in the frontend (Fig. 7, item 2).

Checking Incomplete Papers

Before you start reviewing submissions, you should check whether there are any incomplete submissions. These may be test submissions that have been intentionally left unfinished, or the submitter may have forgotten to complete the submission process by clicking the Submit Submission button in the last step.

The overview in the workflows provides an initial indication of this: In the first phase of the submission process, incomplete abstracts are displayed in red (Fig. 5, point 2).

To find out exactly which submissions these are, the submission overview is filtered to draft (submission) (Fig. 8).

If the entries are obviously tests, incomplete entries can be deleted. Or the submission can be completed in the backend by changing the abstract status in the entry details from Draft to Created (Fig. 9).

Definition of the evaluation criteria

Finally, the evaluation criteria still need to be defined. There are many possibilities in this regard, which will be explained in the following chapter.