A paperless submission and reviewing system

Ray Ballisti, last update: 26 March 2009

 

  1. Glossary

    Let us agree about some of the shorts used and their meaning:
    • Paper -- A "paper" is a contribution to one of the conference topics.
      This is the fundamental item of the conference tool structure.
    • Contact person -- otherwise called "corresponging author". This is the person who submits the paper(s) and corresponds via e-mail with the conference organisation.
      This person can be one of the authors or, for instance, a secretary.
    • Author(s) -- the person(s) who takes responsability for the content of the submitted paper.
    • TPC -- Technical Programme Committee
      This committee has a steering group of two or three people and comprises all the TC chairmen.
      At the end of the reviewing process there will be a meeting with all TC members and the submitted papers will be divided into accepted and rejected.
      Some of the accepted papers may need some major modification. This will be communicated to the authors.
      The authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit their final (camera ready) version and present the paper at the conference (oral presentation).
    • TPC chairman -- the chairman (or co-chairman) of the TPC and at the same time member of the steering committee.
      The members of the steering committee have to distribute the submitted papers to the TC which best meet the topic discussed in the paper.
    • TC -- Technical Committee
      Usually it collects papers on a specific topic.
    • TC members -- each chairman or co-chairman of a TC
      People who are responsible for some of the topics of the conference.
    • Reviewer -- a person who get a paper assigned to him from a TC chairman and who will enter his/her opinion about the paper into our Reviewing System.
    • Conference session -- or simply session is the meeting at a given time and in a given room of people who will listen to the presentation of the accepted papers assigned to this session.
    • A Special session -- is basically the same as a conference session: the difference is that most of the authors speaking here have been invited by the chairman to submit their contribution.

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  2. Goal and concepts

    The whole system is divided up into three blocks which interact via a common database.

    • The first block is the Submission System
      which will be used by the "contact person" to submit a paper for the conference.
      A "contact person" does not necessarily need to be an author: it can be a secretary or any other person.

    • The second is the Administration System
      In this block we differentiate between the Chairman (and Co-chairmen) of the Technical Programme Committee (TPC) who have more priviledge, and all the other "normal" Technical Committees (TC) chairmen who have access only to data concerning papers assigned to their TC.
      This is why in the picture below those two groups have been separated.

    • The third is the Reviewing System
      which will be used by the reviewers to fetch the papers and enter their reports.

    Data flow for the whole Reviewing system
    (this picture can be downloaded as pdf file).

     

    Each block has its own entry portal:
    (CONFERENCE must be substituted with the appropriate address:
    Example: https://www.emc-zurich.ch/... or https://www.apemc-Beijing.ethz.ch/... )

      System Entry points (portals)
      Submission
      (authors)      		 https://www.CONFERENCE/subm_portal.php
      TC admin
      (TC members)      		 https://www.CONFERENCE/tc-member_portal.php
      Reviewing
      (reviewers)      		 https://www.CONFERENCE/reviewer_portal.php

    For each block, respectively for each portal, one needs a user_name and a password.

    It is important to understand that   the same person can have three different roles  in order to use each of the facilities:
    You can be an author, a TC member and a reviewer at the same time!
     
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  3. Information flow

    Remember: the entity "paper" is the main object.
    In the database we have the following connections:

    database tables
    papers   tc_topics   tc_members
    pp_id    
    assigned_TC----> top_id  
    ... topic  
    ... chairman ----->tcm_id
    ... co-chair_1  fam_name
    ... co-chair_2  ...
    ... co-chair_3  ...

    This means that:

    1. Each paper is assigned to ONE topic (i.e. Technical Committee [short: TC]).
    2. Each topic (i.e. TC) has ONE main (first) chairman.
    3. Technical Committee members can be chairman or co-chairman of more than one topic.


    We can define four steps in the data flow:
    1. Paper submission and recording of data into the database
    2. The TCP Co-Chairmen assign a paper to a TC member for reviewing
    3. Each TC member distribute the papers to reviewers.
    4. Each reviewer fetchs the paper and enter his/her report into the database.

    After this we will have to go the way back (always using the WWW-tools):
    1. The opinion of the reviewers will be read by the TC member in charge who will make up a decision to be given to the TPC Co-Chairmen and eventually discussed at the TPC meeting.
    2. One of the TPC Co-Chairmen will enter the final decision which will be used for building the definitive conference programme and for the proceeding Editor for the layout of the CD-Proceeding.

    Important note

    The TC members will be notified each time that a paper has been assigned to their TC (by the TPC chairman).
    Each TC member has to log-in into the "Administration System" (see above) and
    using the task assign to reviewer  assign each paper to at least two reviewers (he could also be a reviewer himself but as a TC member he have to enter the final judgment anyway ..).
    Each TC member will see only those papers assigned by the Co-Chairmen to his/her TC.

    Using the task tc report he/she can monitor the progress of the reviewing and enter his/her opinion.
    Again only those papers pertinent to the own TC will be shown.
     
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  4. General tasks (TC members only)

    After login you will be presented with a menu page.
    The labels in the menu correspond to the task that can be executed when you click on it.

        
            
               
               
               
             

    The following tasks are of general use:

    • logout terminated the connection with our server.
    • change your password: please, use this selfexplanatory task and change as soon as possible the password that you got by our unencrypted e-mail.
    • show info shows some of the information stored in our database. See below by Access to information.
    • Task View-Edit Data will at first just display some information which you can select yourself from a list.

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  5. Access to information

    The data stored in the database are divided according to the access permissions.

    We consider the following information levels:

    1. TPC Co-Chairmen see and can modify all reports of the reviewers and of the other TC Chairmen.
      They take the responsability for the final decision.
    2. TC members have access only to papers assigned by the TPC Co-chairmen to them.
      TC members just see but cannot modify the reports of the reviewers that they have appointed.
    3. Reviewers: just see the papers which have been assigned to them,
      and have access only to information that they have given themself.
    4. Contact persons: can only modify a limited number of data and this anyway only till the paper has been assigned to a reviewer. After it, no modifications will be allowed.
    Entering the Administration Portal will show you a menu with many tasks.
    Clicking on show info will bring you to another menu which will offer to display the following information:
     
    #What we can show youSelect
     1   all paper with submitting person and affiliation
     2   all Technical Committees with number of assigned papers
     3   Nationality and number of the submitting persons
     4   List of papers whose FINAL VERSION has been delivered
     5   List of papers in the POSTER session (Post Deadline papers)
     6   List of papers with first author as student
     7   List of papers with statement and comment
     
    Go back to the main menu 

    Chose what you want to see by clicking on display on the corresponding line.
    (Not on the picture above, which is just a reproduction of the real one)

    If you think of any useful list to be shown, please send me your suggestion at webmaster@emczurich.ethz.ch.

     


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  6. Tasks for the head of the TPC

    Following tasks are meant to be executed by the TPC Co-Chairmen only.

    After having logged in through the Administration Portal (see Entry points)
    you will be presented with a table of tasks (See General tasks).
    Only the Head of the TPC as the permission to execute those tasks, for the others it is a "read only" access:

    1. Task Enter tc member allows to elect somebody as Technical Committee (TC) member.
      This person will be responsible for a Technical Committee (TC) which will be assigned to him. The procedure will automatically inform the person of the assignement and send the necessary data for the login. Also a link to this Web Page will be given.
      At present we can have four co-chairmen for one TC, however one of the four must be choosen as the first (or main) one. For the functionallity of our tools this does not matter, as all four co-chairmen have the same priviledges on the database.
      This task will mainly be used once at the begin of the reviewing process to enter all TC-chairmen and is not needed any further.
    2. Task assign to TC allows to assign a submitted paper to a TC.
      All co-chairmen will be informed by e-mail of this assignement. TC chairmen will be able to proceed with the reviewing only with those papers which has been assigned to their TC.

     
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  7. Tasks for TC members

    1. Task Enter reviewer allows you to elect a person as reviewer for the current reviewing process.
      The most important entry is the e-mail address of the new reviewer. The procedure will automatically send him an e-mail with the login data and other information.
      It is obviously necessary to run this task before assigning papers for reviewing.
    2. Task assign to reviewer allows the TC member to assign the papers of his/her TC to reviewers of his/her choice. The task will automatically send an e-mail to the choosen reviewer informing ihm/her about the assignement and reminding of the use of the Reviewing Facility to get a copy of the paper (PDF file) and then enter his/her judgment.
      At present we can keep track of 5 reviewers per each paper.
      Each paper should be submitted to at least two reviewers.

      It is very important that the reviewers use the Reviewing Facility because it is the only way that we can store their judgement in our database and use it for the rating of the papers.

    3. Task edit reviewer reports allows to edit the comments given by the reviewers and stored in our database. This is meant to happen only in very special cases where the reviewer is too rude in his formulation. Basically one should respect the opinion of the reviewer and NOT change the comments.
      You will be able to modify reports from papers which belong to your TC only.
    4. Task tc report allows you to view the reviewer's reports and entry your own opinion about the paper in question. Please, do this only at the end of the reviewing, because once you have entered your opinion the status of the paper will be changed and it will not be accessible to the reviewers anymore! Nobody but you will then be able to modify the data.
    5. Task send mails will allow you to selectively send mails to a group of people using the e-mail addresses stored in our database. Many template letters are at your disposition and each can be edited.
      A group of people may be all the accepted papers authors, or all the rejected ones. Otherwise all the authors of papers in a given session or belonging to a specific Technical Committee, etc.
    6. Task paper rating gives an overview about the "rating" of the reviewed papers

    I strongly ask all the TC members to refuse to get reviewer's judgement by e-mail or fax or any other way then the Reviewing facility. Thank you for your understanding!


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  8. Tasks for reviewers

    1. Task reviewer report allows you to:
      • See which papers have been assigned to you for reviewing
      • Download the PDF file of the assigned papers
      • Enter your report about the reviewed paper.
      Please, do NOT send any report by e-mail!!
    2. Task edit data let you correct your personal data in our database.
    3. Task change your password is obvious.

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  9. Invited papers

    Let first ask ourself how many kind of "invited papers" exists:
    1. In the old conception, an invited paper will not be reviewed and is accepted "as it is", because the TC chairman who invited the author shall know that he will do a good job. The TC chairman take the responsibility for the paper.
      Some of the "Keynote" speeches and/or "Plenary talks" are this kind of "invited papers".
    2. In recent times the number of conferences increased to an excessive level, and TC chairmen started to ask people to submit papers, thus "inviting" them to submit a paper. This last category of 'invited papers' should be reviewed and is actually the same as normally submitted papers. But it is still the responsibility of the chairman to do a reviewing or not.
      This kind of "invited papers" usually have to be find in "Special sessions".
    3. Some of the conference sessions starts with an "invited speaker" who have a bit more time at disposition as the others. This paper is also under the responsibility ot the TC chairman, as in special sessions.
    4. We have conference sessions with "invited papers" and conference sessions with "convened papers".
      For the purpose of the database, those papers can be treated as "special sessions" ones.

    Thus, from the point of view of the database, there is no need to specify if a paper has been invited or not: the TC member should inform the TPC steering committe of the invitation, and the person who is in charge to distribute the papers should put it into this specific TC. What the TC chairman does with the paper is left to his own decision.
    Keynote and plenary papers can be assigned to a dedicated TC, which can be called for instance "keynote and plenary papers", all others invited papers should be put into the respective TC (which can also be a special session, a tutorial, a workshop or an Industrial Forum, etc).

    Invited papers should be assigned to a TC as regular ones. In this way they can be assigned to the proper topic. The chairman of this TC must of course know that the paper is an invited one. Usually no reviewing is required (but can be done if requested), and the TC chairman decide what to do with the paper. Using the task tc report the TC chairman enter his judgement about the paper and submit it. In this way the paper change its status to "Reviewing terminated" and his ready to be accepted at the TCP meeting.


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  10. Accepted papers

    Usually the TPC meeting held after the end of the reviewing process decide for each paper if it is accepted or rejected.
    Accepted papers are assigned to a session in the conference programme.

    To be "assigned to a session" is the flag which marks a paper as accepted!

    .
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  11. Rejected papers

    Papers which are not accepted for conference presentation will be put into a special conference session called "Rejected papers".
    This simplify the procedure which send e-mails to "rejected" or "accepted" paper's authors.

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  12. Status and file name of paper's copies

    Each paper has a status number and is stored with a file name which contains the following information:

    xxx-aaa-bbb-ccc-yyyy-mm-dd.pdf

    Where:
     xxx 
    this is a prefix which shows for what the paper has been submitted.
    The status number is related to the prefix as follows: (Jan. 2008)

    statusprefix  meaning
     1 rsc   Regular conference paper - to be reviewed
     2 rsc  Regular conference paper into reviewing process
     3 fsc   Regular conference paper - Reviewing concluded
     4 tmc   Topical Meeting paper - to be reviewed
     5 tmc   Topical Meeting paper into reviewing process
     6 ftm   Topical Meeting paper paper - Reviewing concluded
     13 spe   Special Session papers - to be reviewed
     14 spe   Special Session paper into reviewing process
     15 fsp   Special Session paper - Reviewing concluded
     7 inv   Invited papers
     10 wrk   Workshop papers
     11 tut   Tutorial papers
     12 ifr   Industrial or Topical Forum
     8 pdp   Post Deadline papers
     9 zzz   Rejected papers
     0 xxx   undefined papers

     aaa 
    Integer number corresponding to the ID number of the paper
     bbb 
    Integer number corresponding to the ID number of the contact person
     ccc 
    Integer number corresponding to the ID number of the first author
     yyyy-mm-dd 
    date of uploading of this file
     pdf 
    Suffix showing that this is a file in PDF format


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  13. Conference programme

    Using the task build up sessions the TCP steering committee can insert the conference sessions in the database and thus build a conference programme.
    This is an important step, as we need sessions where to put the accepted papers. This task also allows shifting papers from one session to the other, till the appropriate distribution is found.
    We also have defined some "special" sessions for administrative use, like:
    • Not yet assigned papers (a kind of repository)
    • Rejected papers (useful when sending e-mails with our tool)
    • Papers from deleted sessions (a kind of temporary stack)
    • Papers which are not defined ( a kind of rubbish bin)


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  14. Frequently Asked Questions

    I made a mistake, how can I correct it?

    It depend very much which kind of mistake, but the quickest way is to send an e-mail to webmaster@emcz.ethz.ch (it is me) and I will access our database and correct the mistake.

    How can I have an overview about all submitted papers?

    Enter the Administration Portal (you must be a TC member) and click on the task   show info . You will get a list of objects that we can display for you. Chose one in clicking of the correspondent display button on the same line.
    Have a look of it in the section Access to information

    I wanted to start reviewing but I do not see any papers

    If by using   assign to reviewer   you do not see any papers then it is because no papers have been yet assigned to your TC by the TCP chairmen.
    By the way: please do not start any reviewing before the paper submission deadline is over. The reason: athors can upload a better version of their papers only till the paper has been assigned to a reviewer. After this moment, no update is possible.

    How can I see what my reviewers are doing?

    Enter the Administration Portal (you must be a TC member) and click on the task   tc report . You will get a list of papers for the TCs where you are chairman or co-chairman.
    Then chose the paper you want to look at and click on form.
    The information related to the choosen paper will be displayed.
    WARNING:  do NOT enter your judgment about the paper BEFORE all reviewers have finished their work. If you enter your judgment and click "submit" then the status of the paper will be changed to "reviewing terminated" and you and your reviewers will not have access to the data for this paper anymore!

    I want to send an e-mail to the authors of a paper, how?

    Please enter the "Administration portal" (you must be a TC member): and log in with your user_name and password.
    Click on   send mails   (bottom left). You will get a new web page which is divided in two halfs.
    On the left side select the first way of choosing the recipient of your e-mail:
      "contact persons of papers from a session or TC"
    and select your Technical Committee in the pull down menu.
    Select "Papers not selected (and you can still select some)".

    In the right half of the web page enter your e-mail address in the Sender section.
    Select a given item as Subject or, if you prefer, enter your own subject line.
    Keep the Blank message selection for the Mail template section.
    Select "send me a copy of the e-mail" so that you will see what the system have sent.

    And finally click on next to go further.

    On the new web page which will be displayed you will have at first to select the paper in question.
    The e-mail will be sent to the contact person who submitted the paper (we do NOT correspond to single authors: it is our politics that each paper have one contact person who will be our correspondent for all questions related to this paper).

    Then write the text you want. The following strings will be replaced with the correct values from our database:
    XXCONTACTXX ---> Prof. Dr. First_name Family_name
    XXPPTITLEXX ---> This is your paper title
    XXNNXX ---> This is the paper ID number (from the database)

    At the end of the page click on send to send the message. You too will get a copy of the message sent.


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  15. Security considerations

    The whole system works using encrypted transmission (https).
    In this way the sending of password cannot be intercepted.
    The code of the procedures cannot be viewed by anybody and reside on the server.
    The database reside on the www server where the php procedures run, thus all database enquiries happen localy.
    Only the resulting html code is sended to the clients using the SSL connection (encripted).
     
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  16. Implementation

    In November 2007 we were using
    • php 5.1.6 with
    • apache 2.0.61 and
    • mysql Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.45
    • Solaris 10 on a SUN server

    Our site has been certified by RapidSSL.com (EMC 2007) and by Cybertrust (2008 EMC ASIA-PACIFIC and EMC Zurich 2009)
     
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