Instructions for Reviewers and PC Members

Attention: These are just some general hints on how to use the ConfTool system. 
Please consider the guidelines of the organizers of your event, as they might prefer a different process.

General

The ConfTool system is used for submitting and reviewing conference contributions. It usually also allows participant registration. You have to obtain a user account to use any facilities of the system.

As a reviewer or member of the program committee (PC member), you will usually get an invitation by e-mail with your login details. The conference organizers will set up the basic account data and your user role for you. Please use this account for all further accesses to the ConfTool system.

Login to ConfTool

After having received your account data, please go to the main ConfTool page and log in with your user name and password under "Registered Users". If you have lost your log-in details, it can be obtained through the links right of the login text fields ("Forgotten your user name?" and "Forgotten your password?").

After first login, please select "Edit User Account Details" to update your personal account details. Please use this opportunity to enter a new password, as you (probably) got the initial password by e-mail. Click "Submit User Data" to save your changes.

Depending on the phase of the submission, review and registration process, you will have different options after logging in (see image 1). If you plan to submit a contribution, please use this account for your submissions as well, as it simplifies to detect conflicts of interest.

For all subsequent operations you have to be logged in.

Select Priority Topics

As reviewer or member of the program committee, you are usually requested to state your areas of expertise. Please use the link "Select Priority Topics" from the overview page to select your main topics of interest. This information will help the conference chairs to assign contributions matching your interests. It is therefore important for the quality of the review process.

Bidding Phase

(Optional, ConfTool Pro only.)

After the submission deadline, you will be contacted by the conference organizers and get the opportunity to "Bid for Contributions".

Please log in and select the corresponding link from the overview page. You see a list of all submitted contributions of the conference (or of the contributions of your conference track). Here you can select submissions you would favor to review and state what submissions are probably not covered well by your areas of expertise.

Please also use this function to state personal "conflicts of interest", i.e., mark those contributions you cannot review objectively (e.g. you were involved in the research project, or you are affiliated to the authors).

It is recommended to take part in the bidding process, as it greatly increases the chance that papers will be assigned for review to you that match your interests. Please consider that you usually cannot refuse a submission assigned for review afterwards.

Reviewer Confidentiality Agreement

Please note that you might have to confirm the "Reviewer Confidentiality Agreement" first, before
you can access the reviews assigned to you for reviewing. You can do so by clicking on the corresponding
link and by confirming the agreement on the following page.

Here you can access the abstracts of the contributions and download the manuscripts. If you want to download several manuscripts in one go, please refer to this manual: Downloading Multiple Files from ConfTool.

After reading the contributions, please enter your review result (using your Web browser) into the provided online forms (see image 3). There are categories to score each contribution. You may use the print option of ConfTool and your Web browser to print out abstracts and review forms. Please note that different submission types (e.g. papers vs. posters) may have different review criteria and forms.

Please save your review in time, since there is a session timeout (usually 2 hours), after which unsaved modifications will be lost. You can update your review at any time before the deadline.

Reviews will not be made visible to authors until the review process is finished and the final acceptance status has been decided by the chairs based on all evaluations.

Program Committee Online Forum

ConfTool Pro also offers an online forum to discuss the contributions and the review results. This forum will usually be made available after the review process. You can leave comments on all contributions and reviews that are still undecided, as they for instance got ambiguous ratings by different experts.

Register for Conference Participation

Reviewers and PC members are expected to attend the conference. Please use your existing ConfTool account to register for conference participation as soon as the registration process has been started.