Guidelines for External Reviewers (non-TPC members)

IEEE INFOCOM 2008

April 13 - 19, 2008, Phoenix, AZ, USA

Questions? Please email TPC Co-Chairs at @cse.unl.edu.

Summary of Action Items for Reviewers

1. If you are a Designated Reviewer on EDAS, select topics of interest and update Conflicts of Interest by July 1, 2007 (Required)
2. Accept or Decline the Paper Review Invitation (within 2 days of receipt).
3. Review assigned paper(s) by September 8, 2007 (Required)
4. Actively participate in Online TPC Discussion for the assigned paper(s) from September 9 - 22, 2007 (Required)

You can update your conflicts of interest (COI) information by logging into http://www.edas.info using your login email address and your EDAS password. Then click on "My Profile" tab. On the first line, please click on the link listed as "conflicts of interest". In the subsequent screen, you will see a list of individuals with whom you have identified Conflicts-of-Interest. Please note that in EDAS, "Your initial list of conflicts-of-interest consists of individuals having the same email domain, the same name or those that have co-authored EDAS-registered papers with you. You can provide either the name of the organization, the name of an individual, or an email domain, or several of these." Please be sure to identify all individuals with whom you have conflicts of interest, paying particular attention to potential INFOCOM 2008 authors and TPC members. We greatly appreciate your efforts in updating this information in EDAS so that we may avoid unnecessary changes to review assignments later, a time-consuming process.

Please review the INFOCOM 2008 Definition of Conflict of Interest for determining the set of individuals you need to list on EDAS. People/institutions that you are in "conflict of interest" consist of the following:

• Same institution within 4 years (anywhere in your organization or parent company counts); note that this includes your previous or future institution if you have recently changed job, or are in the process of changing job.
• Co-author (or pending) a publication within 4 years, in any technical area, including patents, tech. reports, etc.
• Active or pending grant, proposal, or application of any sort together
• Ph.D, post-doctoral advisor/advisee at any time, current or past
• Close personal friend (or enemy!)
• Any other non-technical bias

A simple way to think about the reviewer duties is to think reciprocally about what you expect as an author of a paper from a peer in the community: a good, substantive review, a decision that is well-founded on the consensus of the reviews and good feedback. This is what we expect from reviewers. The element of randomness in the process cannot be eliminated, but we want to control it while biasing it towards merit and providing good feedback to authors. Providing high quality reviews is by far the most important contribution of a reviewer.

• Basic Quantity/Quality: Reviews of length shorter than 100 words will generate an automated EDAS feedback to you requesting more input.

• Kindly do not cut-and-paste the same information in different categories when this happens: please enter feedback that will be useful to authors.

• In particular, if any of the papers are reviewed with the help of students, we expect the reviewer to provide oversight and clarity and personally enter the reviews into the EDAS system.

• In the TPC meeting, a review having a score of 5 with a short unsubstantiated review will be discounted, and the other dissenting reviews may override the higher score if they are more substantive.

  So, if you want your reviews to matter in TPC discussions, please enter substantive, high quality reviews.

1. How do I accept all of my review assignments?

   When you log in to your EDAS page (http://edas.info) for INFOCOM 2008 (and click on My Reviews tab), you will be shown a list of all the papers you are handling for this conference. Please click on the link at the top of the table which states "You can also accept and decline reviews in a batch." You will be presented with a list of all your review assignments with the status Accepted column marked for each paper. If you have ensured that you do not have a conflict of interest with any of the authors for the papers in this list, please go ahead and click on the "Change" button at the bottom of the page.

2. How do I accept my review assignments one by one?

   When you log in to your EDAS page (http://edas.info) for INFOCOM 2008 (and click on My Reviews tab), you will be shown a list of all the papers you are handling for this conference.

   To accept your regular review assignments: In the second column (marked Type of review), please click on the link marked "review" and then click on the "Accept review" button. Please do this for each of the papers for which you are the regular reviewer.

3. How do I decline my review assignments?

   Please follow the instructions above to view the review assignments and instead of clicking on "Accept review" button, please click on the "Decline review" button. Please decline reviews only when there is a conflict of interest with the authors of the paper.

   We request that you ACCEPT all of your review assignments within a week after receiving the notification emails.

1. Click on the Paper number (after clicking on My reviews tab upon EDAS login).
2. You should be able to view the reviews and at the bottom of the page, there will be a Discussion section.
3. Click on the Discuss bubble icon . You will see a text box in the subsequent screen. Please type in your comments about the paper. The discussion messages will be emailed to all the reviewers and Lead TPC member for that paper. You will also be able to view the discussion messages online.