SPC Responsibilities

Roles

Members of the Senior Program Committee (SPC) participate in the reviewing process in two roles: Primary Area Chair (1AC) and Secondary Area Chair (2AC).

Responsibilities

The SPC responsibilities include:

1. Over the next few weeks, assist with the process of creating the referee pool (i.e., the Program Committee).
2. In January, identify conflicts of interest and bid for papers before full papers are due (see schedule below; we will prompt you to do this).
3. Once paper submissions are closed, we will assign you as the Primary AC to some papers. You will manage 6-8 papers as Primary AC.
4. As Primary AC, you will perform the usual role of supervising the review and discussion process. You provide a meta-review and make a positive or negative recommendation for each paper, based on your own evaluation, a minimum of three first-tier reviews, and the discussion that took place after those reviews were completed.
5. As Primary AC, you will flag the papers that are neither clear accepts, nor clear rejects, which would benefit from additional input to resolve different views. In other words, you flag the papers that are considered borderline.
6. After the borderline papers have been flagged, we will assign you as the Secondary AC to some papers. You will manage 2-4 papers as Secondary AC.
7. As Secondary AC, you write an additional review for each borderline paper, knowing it is borderline, but without access to the original reviews. The objective of the 2AC review is a clear message to steer the discussion in the direction you see fit after making your own assessment of the submission.

The result of a paper’s Review Team (3 first-tier reviewers, 1 Primary AC, and, optionally, 1 Secondary AC) deliberations will be considered as its final recommendation. We expect to receive the Review Team’s final recommendations BEFORE the PC meeting for the vast majority of papers. The recommendations will be different grades of ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ to help with ranking, but there should be very few papers left in the ‘undecided’ category at the time of the PC meeting.

More details about the review process, including guidance about how to construct your reviews as Primary and Secondary AC will be provided when papers are allocated.

PC Meeting

The optional face-to-face PC meeting will be held at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, USA on March 30 - 31 2017 (schedule .pdf). The primary focus of this optional meeting will be to finalize the list of accepted papers, and to discuss issues related to posters, workshops, etc. We will provide some level of teleconferencing to enable remote participation, but the meeting will take place during normal business hours at Redmond local time (UTC-7). SPCs who wish to attend the PC meeting in person will be expected to self-fund their travel and accommodation.

Timeline

The schedule for the review process is as follows (AC activities in Bold):

Task	Responsibility	Start	Stop
Accept invitation to SPC	ACs		September 18
Suggest referees	ACs		October 1
Abstract submissions	Authors		January 17
Bidding, COI declaration	Reviewers, ACs	January 18	January 23
Paper submissions	Authors		January 24
Assignment of papers to reviewers and ACs	PC chairs		January 31
First round reviews due	Reviewers		February 28
Flag papers needing additional review	1ACs	February 28	March 3
Additional 2AC review for 1AC flagged papers	2ACs	March 3	March 13
Discussion; starts irrespective of missing 2AC reviews	1ACs	March 13	March 27
Meta-review and recommendations (1AC)	1ACs		March 27
PC Meeting; in person in Redmond / with online option	PC chairs, ACs	March 30	March 31
Notifications	PC chairs		April 11

Modifications in 2017

SPC invitees who have had prior involvement with SIGIR reviewing will have noticed the two modifications that we have made. First, we will take charge of the reviewer assignments and balancing referee workload instead of coordinating this step through all the 1ACs, aiming to avoid a bottleneck due to depencency on all ACs availability so early in the process. Second, we involve the SPC with actual reviewing to steer the decision process on those papers where a decision is not obvious based on the initial reviewing phase. The objective of this modification is to make better use of your expertise and experience.

Act Now

If you decide to accept the invitation to join the SIGIR 2017 SPC, let us know by accessing the link included in the preamble of the invitation message.

Next, update your EasyChair account in two steps:

1. Review personal details and contact information: EasyChair/My Account
2. Select areas of interest: SIGIR 2017/My Topics

We look forward to working with you!