Review Instructions
We will be using the review instructions from SIGMOD 2021:
All reviewers and authors please check these in detail as they will be used during Review Quality Week and during Authors Rebuttal.
Review Quality
The review quality week is meant to catch cases where reviews need improvement to be in line with the review instructions primarily focusing on reviewing constructively.
The associate chairs review reviews and ask reviewers to improve when appropriate. Typically this will include cases where there is opportunity to provide certain clarifications, making more concrete requests, etc.
This happens before the authors see the reviews. However, if at any point in time during the review process a particular review is found to have certain inconsistencies with respect to the review instructions, the review will need to be fixed accordingly or at least the inconsistencies will be taken into account before a decision is made on the paper.
Rebuttal Process
Authors may use the rebuttal process to provide any input they think may be useful to the reviewers when discussing their paper. The intent is to provide quick answers and clarifications, but if an additional result is available, authors are also welcome to include it. Purposefully, the rebuttal will become available to the reviewers before they have seen the rest of the reviews. This way, no opinions or decisions have been formed already.
The authors will also have the chance to provide feedback about the review quality with respect to the review instructions. This is a separate rebuttal document and is seen only by the associate chairs. This helps with any issues that were missed during the review quality week. Associate chairs will use that input to again work with reviewers to provide high quality constructive feedback and to take into account any issues before making a decision.
Revision Process
We purposely want to encourage reviews that lead to minor changes in the paper to provide a conditional accept decision and not a full revision. Conditional accepts will be checked by the associate chairs, and the authors do not need to prepare a full revision package but rather a short summary of changes and a version of the paper where all changes are indicated, making the process more lightweight on both authors and reviewers.
For the papers that do go under full revision we will enable a co-ordinated shepherding process where the authors will have the chance to ask for clarification questions on the revision requests. This will happen during the week after the notifications have been sent out to the authors. Authors will have a full week to study the requests and come up with specific technical questions. The associate chairs and reviewers will then provide feedback by fine-tuning the revision requests where appropriate. Also, authors only need to address comments listed in the revision request, rather than all the comments.
Conflict of Interest
PC chairs will do diligent checking to avoid PCs reviewing CoI papers. We will use automated tools to identify CoIs, input from authors and ACs. If a reviewer is found to review a CoI paper, his/her reviews will become invalid.
Update on Research Paper Track
We have received 360 submissions in the first round for research papers and we are working on finalizing reviewer assignments now. Stay tune!