Reviewers

Reviewer Duties

Once you get the reviewing assignment, please go through papers assigned and check:

1. There is no conflict of interest
2. The paper falls within your field of expertise

If either of these issues arise, please contact Associate Editor / Program Chair as soon as possible to solve them.

Please familiarize yourself with the different plagiarism and submission policies, and if you identify that the paper does not comply with any of these, communicate with the Program Chair, in the meantime proceed to the revision of the same, while the problem is being solved.

How to proceed with the review

Each accepted paper must be technically sound and make a contribution to the field. Contribution to the field includes novelty of approach or breaking concept as well as strong experimental results. However, a fresh new vision or approach can be a contribution even if it does not improve on state-of-the-art (SOTA) and less than SOTA performance should not be used for rejection on its own. Similarly, minor errors that are easily corrected are not reasons to reject an article.

Writing the review report

The reviewer has to identify the most relevant aspects of the article in a specific and detailed way by identifying the manuscript strengths and weaknesses. Although bullet points may be used, these must be explained in an appropriate manner, they must help the AE to make a final decision about the article. Remember that the AE will make the decision based mainly on your comments, rather than the assigned grade, so it must be properly argued. In addition, the review should provide sufficient feedback to authors to revise the paper for future submissions.

In reference to the review of the state-of-the-art, specific publications should be included rather than vague references such as “this is well known” or “it has been used before”.

Please see the note below for treatment of arXiv and supplementary works.

Ethical Considerations

Confidentiality

It is responsibility of the IV reviewers to respect and protect the confidentiality of the papers assigned. The papers submitted to IV are not published, thus the work is proprietary of the authors. As it is possible that it is not accepted, it can be further refined or submitted to another conference or journal. Furthermore, in some organizations and companies, it can still be considered confidential/proprietary. For all this the confidentiality of the papers under review means:

• It is not allowed to show the article (including results, videos, images, code or any other supplementary material) to anyone, unless they have been included in the review process (AE or reviewers).
• You should not use the ideas or code from the articles for your own benefit (articles, proposals, or code) until it has been published.
• Upon completion of the review, all copies and materials related to the article must be deleted, including any supplementary materials.

Conflict of Interest

It is vital for the conference that conflicts of interest are avoided, so it is important that there is no doubt about the impartiality of the reviewers. Although the organizers make an effort to avoid these cases, sometimes they can occur. If you have been assigned a paper with a potential conflict of interest, you should contact the assigning Associate Editor or Program Chair as soon as possible to resolve the issue. Conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to):

• You work at the same institution as one of the authors.
• If you’ve been involved in any way in the work presented, e.g. as thesis advisor, member of the committee, as an external advisor…
• You have collaborated with one of the authors in the recent years (3 to 5 years). The definition of collaboration is broad; it is left to the reviewer’s judgment to determine this degree.
• If you were thesis advisor or advisee of one of the authors. This type of relationship is generally associated with a lifelong conflict of interest. Again, it is left to the reviewer’s discretion to identify the degree of conflict.
• If it may be perceived by others as conflict of interest.

The Report

Derogatory comments are not welcome in peer reviews. It is important that the comments help in the decision-making process and that they allow authors to understand the shortcomings of their work for improvement it in the future. The good reviewer should write gentle, incisive and helpful comments that allow the AE to immediately identify the merits (advantages and disadvantages) of an article, rather than rely solely on the summary score given. Keep in mind that the reviews are read by colleagues (other reviewers and AEs), thus being a helpful reviewer will be benefit you in the research community.

Here there are some helpful tips for reviewers

• A good review should not be done in a hurry. It is recommended to take several days from the reading of the article and the completion of the report.
• Short reviews are not useful, neither for authors nor for AE, the acceptance of the review of an article entails sufficient dedication to write a properly substantiated review.
• Reviewers are requested to be specific; when they indicate that certain parts of an article require revision or are not clear enough, indications and suggestions on how to clarify them should be given.
• It is not recommended to give clues about your identity, indicating that articles of your own authorship should be cited
• Likewise, when referring to the novelties of an article, claims such as “this has been done before” or “it is well known” should be accompanied by references that justify this statement. Positive indications must also be accompanied by details.
• Articles should not be rejected for the simple reason that they do not contain citations or comparisons with un-reviewed published articles, such as arXiv.
• If you feel that the topic is unrelated to the congress, please explain it concisely in the review, and suggest alternative conferences or journals. In any case, it is advisable to keep an open mind in this regard, as articles that broaden the spectrum of action of the congress are welcome.
• Always be constructive in your reviews, using assertive and respectful language. Your colleagues will appreciate it and will accept criticism in a more positive way.

Papercept Instructions

Once you’ve been notified by email that papers have been assigned to you, please log into the Papercept site (https://its.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl), Log in, and choose the “Reviewer”, and follow the steps below.

1. Download your papers.

To download individual papers, you can click the links Download for the corresponding paper in the Reviewer’s Workspace. It will give you access to the download menu, where you can select to download the paper (“First submission”) or any other supplementary file to the paper that will be available in this menu.

2. Check for possible conflict or submission rule violations.

Contact the Program Chairs immediately if:

1. You think you are conflicted with the paper.
2. You think the paper violates submission rules regarding plagiarism. In the meantime, go ahead and review the paper as if there is no violation. The Program Chairs will follow up, but it may take a bit of time.

3. Review papers and assign rating.

For a paper, under the review column, click “Review” in the Reviewers Workspace to get to the review form. Proceed with the review and save it to continue in the future, or click submit once the form is ready.

About arXiv

Authors should cite all the sources that have inspired their work, although it is not reasonable to ask for a review, inclusion or comparison of the work presented with an article published in preprint format, that has not been subjected to peer review (such as arXiv) or that one that has only recently appeared/published before the submission deadline. Similarly, it is not advisable to discourage ideas that have been developed in parallel and independently to these publications. Reviewers are therefore recommended to follow the following guidelines.

• The reviewer should not require a paper to be compared to, or discuss another paper recently published in ArXiv or similar. However, it is acceptable to indicate to the author the existence of something published in these repositories, either because of its similar or for its interest in the subject.
• Authors should cite the work they have been inspired by, even if it appears in an arXiv-style repository.
• Not citing an article in arXiv or similar IS NOT a reason for rejection. Please indicate the reference to the authors.
• It is not a reason for rejection that there is an article with similar ideas in an arXiv-style repository. If there are doubts about plagiarism, the reviewer should contact the Program Chair to resolve this issue.