Chair for submission: Simon simon@newcastle.edu.au
Submission of papers is managed through EasyChair, a comprehensive conference paper management system. Detailed instructions are at the foot of this page.
Submission deadline
The submission deadline is Monday, April 14, 2014 at 11:59pm US Pacific Daylight Time.
We offer a re-submission slack of exactly one week. This means that an almost complete version of papers must be submitted by the 14 April deadline, but it will be possible to upload updated versions of papers until 21st April. Papers that are not submitted by 14 April will not be considered.
Formatting
Papers should be no more than eight pages long. Note ICER is only accepting research papers this year.
Templates for submissions can be found at the ACM SIG Proceedings website. LaTeX users should use option #2 (tighter alternate style) when formatting their documents.
Papers that do not conform to the author guidelines will not be accepted for review: the authors will be notified and invited to try again.
Please note that very poor writing is enough in itself to ensure a paper’s rejection. Authors are advised not to rely on the reviewers to do their editing, but to do it, and do it properly, before submitting their paper for review.
Double-Blind Reviewing Requirements
It is standard practice that identities of the reviewers are not made known to authors. The double-blind review process extends this principle so that reviewers do not know the identity of authors. This process requires authors to refrain from identifying themselves in their own paper. In some cases, no effort will stop a determined reviewer from finding out who has written a paper: what we are asking is that you take steps to hide this information from reviewers who are willing to work double blind.
In place of the usual author and address details, put “Author details suppressed”. Refrain from references to your university or campus by name. If you feel that a description of your university is in some way salient to the paper, use generalities. For example, write “A Large Metropolitan University (ALMU)” rather than “Auckland University of Technology (AUT)”.
Avoid citing a large number of your own papers. Cite the minimal number of those papers that will provide the reader with the necessary background, just as you would if those papers were written by someone else. Do not cite papers that have not yet been published.
Avoid expressions like “In earlier work we …” followed by a citation of a paper authored by yourself.
If your paper is one in a series, such as “Commonsense computing”, do not indicate this in the title or text of the paper submitted for review. You will have the opportunity to change the title if the paper is accepted.
If you have an acknowledgements section, please omit it for the blind submission.
In general, please apply good judgement when preparing your submission, to maintain the integrity of the double-blind process. Submissions that allow the author to be identified may be returned to you for editing, or may even be edited by the program chairs to remove the specific identifying material.
Once you have a PDF copy of your paper, see how well it is blinded. Some PDF creation software includes in the document properties such details as author name, name of the document this one was created from, and so on. Then some operating systems, such as Windows XP, show these details in a tool tip when the cursor hovers over the file name. A PDF document can hardly be called blind if its author’s name appears on the screen when the cursor hovers over it, or even if its author’s name is hidden in its properties. If your operating system does not show a document’s properties in a tool tip, please be especially careful to disguise these properties, as they will show in other systems. Please take document blinding seriously!
If you feel that you are being disadvantaged by the double-blind requirements, then you may consider making an aside to the reviewer in this version of the paper. Such a reference would be removed from the final version of an accepted paper.
Submission process
To submit a paper …
- Ensure that it is a suitably anonymised PDF document.
- Go to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icer2014.
- Unless you already have an EasyChair account, follow the prompts to create an account, taking note of the secret word that you provide.
- When you receive a confirmation email, go to the link given in that email, repeat your secret word, complete your account details, and login to EasyChair. If you do not receive a confirmation email, it is likely that your email system has filtered it out as suspected SPAM, in which case we ask you to try again using a more forgiving email system.
- Select New Submission and follow the prompts.
- Submit the paper.
Reviewing Process
Papers will be double-blind reviewed by a minimum of Program Committee members. The list of PC members will appear shortly on the Committees page.
Once the reviews are in, we will use Associate Chairs to assist the three Chairs in the selection of papers. Associate Chairs are used in other ACM conferences to carry out what is essentially a meta-reviewing process. The Associate Chairs are listed on the Committees page. Our reasoning for this is as follows:
ICER originally had relatively small numbers of submissions, and the three chairs could comfortably look over all submissions, along with the reviews, and make a sensible choice of papers for the programme. With 68 submissions last year, and maybe more this year, even if each paper was looked over by 2 of the 3 chairs, that would be over 40 each. By calling on a slightly larger, and publicised, meta-reviewing group – three chairs and two associate chairs – we make the final choice of papers a more manageable process, reading less than 30 papers each.
This is all predicated on the fact that, even with the best efforts of all the reviewers, we sometimes have a wide variation in the reviewer recommendations. Different reviewers bring different perspectives and backgrounds to the process, which is good, but it means that going purely by the numbers will not always reflect the quality of the submissions.
The meta-reviewing process will work as follows. Each paper is read by 2 of the meta-reviewers along with the reviews of those papers. The meta-reviewers will then have 2-3 long Skype sessions where all papers are considered, using input from the meta-reviewers to interpret and supplement the reviewers’ reports. And on this basis, the final decisions will be made.