Policies Regarding Review of Conference Papers

Confidentiality

Papers under consideration for publication should not be distributed or disclosed to any individual, except with the explicit authorization of the Program Chair for purpose of review. Accepted papers are considered unpublished until the day of the conference, and should not be discussed outside the program committee without explicit permission from the authors. All reviewers must be made aware that submissions are unpublished works, and in no case should they duplicate them, pass them on to other people, or discuss them with people other than the members of the program committee.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.

Anonymized reviews are the non-exclusive property of the authors of the reviewed paper: they can be made public or attached to resubmissions of the paper. Anonymized reviews can also be analyzed under the auspices of SIGPLAN for research purposes such as evaluation of bias.

Conflicts

A conflict of interest is defined as a situation in which the reviewer can be viewed as being able to benefit personally from the outcome of a review, or in which the reviewer is not able to remain objective for personal reasons. If a conflict of interest exists, then the reviewer should decline to review a paper. During the program committee meeting, any committee member who has a conflict of interest regarding a paper may be asked to leave the room for the duration of the discussion.

Conflicts are typically considered to exist between an advisor and their students, an employer and their employes (for up to two years), an author and their co-authors (for up to two years after publication), people in the same institution (for up to two years; branches of large companies or different location of research institutes are considered to be the same institution). If a reviewer feels unable to render an objective judgement for any reason, he or she should notify the program chair.

Contacts

Reviewers should not interact with authors about their submitted papers. Any interaction should go through the program chair.