Having the different criteria weights and values, the conference management system calculates the so called summarized review rating. This is the overall rating from a single review, calculated as a liner weighted sum of the individual evaluation components.
As each paper is evaluated by 3 independent reviewers, the conference management system summarizes the ratings from the individual reviews and calculates the overall paper rating. Obviously if a paper's overall rating is high the paper is accepted. If the rating is low the paper is rejected. Papers whose ratings lie around the "Neutral" are typically subject of further reviewing by PC chairs. However due to a number of accusations by authors that decision making for these "neutrally-ranked" papers is not transparent and allows intentional unfair judgment, PC chairs decided not to intervene that process at all. Instead they rely completely on reviewers’ opinion and consensus reached during the discussion phase.
It is not unusual for a paper having mostly "Neutral" ratings and a few "Accepts" and "Rejects" to be rejected. As evaluation criteria have different weights, it all depends on where these accepts and rejects appear. For example a "Reject" rating on originality or significance has much more impact than "Accept" on presentation.
Paper's scope
During review submission each PC member is required to specify how much the paper is related to the field of Information Technologies. The appropriate option is selected from a drop down menu and could be one of the following:
The paper is entirely related to the field of Information Technologies
Multidisciplinary paper, most contributions are in the field of IT
Multidisciplinary paper, most contributions are OUTSIDE the field of IT
The paper is completely outside the CompSysTech conference scope
If 2 of 3 reviewers specify that most of the paper's contributions are outside the field of IT then the paper may be rejected regardless the other evaluation ratings.
Plagiarism / self-plagiarism
Since 2007 CompSysTech’s proceedings are published by
ACM Inc. and indexed in both
SCOPUS and
DBLP. It obligates us to maintain high quality of publication and comply with all academic ethical standards. Thus we strictly follow
ACM’s policy on plagiarism.
During the review process, papers are usually checked for plagiarism (or self-plagiarism) by reviewers and/or PC chairs. In case there are evidences that large portions of a paper are previously published (no matter if it is by the same or different authors), the paper is rejected.
Authors of papers, rejected due to (self) plagiarism should be very grateful to the Programme Committee for rejecting the paper at reviewing stage. If we do not reject it, it gets published and ACM notice that, there will be much more "painful" consequences for the authors. In this case ACM keeps the paper within the ACM Digital Library, but warns visitors that it has been plagiarized and its authors are plagiarist. Of course search engines like Google index this event and from that moment it is world-widely known that the corresponding authors are plagiarists. Additionally ACM notifies the employers of those authors that they violate academic ethics. So rejecting the paper at reviewing stage is actually best for the authors as there are no any other consequences.
Additions and amendments:
A1 (pub.: 24 May 2015; type of addition: explanatory/specifying). Discussion phase and virtual PC meeting: At the end of the review process PC members assigned to a paper are allowed to anonymously discuss it and decide together whether to accept or reject it. During this discussion reviewers may change their initial opinion and vote for paper rejection even if they do not explicitly state that in their reviews.
CompSysTech’s Programme Committee reserves the right to change the acceptance criteria described above. All signifficant changes (for example in the set of evaluation criteria, their weights and etc.) will be published here in advance and will apply for the next issue of CompSysTech series of conference.
Date of first publication: 1 June 2014.
Date of last change: 24 May 2015.
