The publication process Once you paper is finalized, you have to - - PDF document

30/01/2020 1

The publication process

http://retis.sssup.it/~giorgio/h2d.html

Giorgio Buttazzo

g.buttazzo@sssup.it

Where to publish?

Once you paper is finalized, you have to decide where to publish it.

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It mainly depends on the degree

• f novelty of the achieved results.

Types of publications

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Novel contributions Established material

• Technical Report
• Work‐in‐Progress
• Workshop
• Conference
• Journal
• Magazine
• Book chapter
• Book

importance

Conference ranking

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Acceptance ratio: 25-30% (Hard) 30-50% (Medium) 50-80% (Easy) Type Evaluation Acceptance ratio IEEE Very good 25‐30 ACM Very good 25‐30 International Good‐Medium 40‐60 National Low 60‐80 Workshop Low 80‐90

GII-GREEN-SCIE Conference rating: http://gii-grin-scie-rating.scie.es/

Journal ranking

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Impact factor: index measuring the average number of citations to recent published articles. Type Evaluation Impact Factor IEEE Transactions

• n Computers

Very good 3.131 IEEE Transactions

• n Ind. Informatics

Very Good 7.377 Journal of Systems Architecture Medium 1.159 IEEE Trans. on Sys. Man, and Cyber. Very Good 7.351 Nature Excellent 43.070

Journal ranking

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1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017

• Comput. Theory and Math.

Hardware and Architecture Software Theoretical Computer Science

IEEE Transactions on Computers

Scimago Journal & Country Rank

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Quartile index Q1 to Q4 refer to journal ranking quartiles within a subdiscipline using the SJR citation index. Scimago Journal Rank (SJR indicator) accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance

• f the journals where such citations come from.

30/01/2020 2 Conference organization structure

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Steering Committee Steering Committee Organization Committee (General Chair) Organization Committee (General Chair) Program Committee (Program Chair) Program Committee (Program Chair)

In charge of logistics and finances In charge of the technical program Takes strategic decisions:

• Topics
• Technical Tracks
• Dates
• Location
• General Chair
• Program Chair

Conference Chair

Organization Committee

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• General Chair

in charge of logistics (hotel, lunches, coffee breaks, banquet, social events) and finance (set registrations and budget report);

• Finance Chair

in charge of taking registrations, planning and reporting the budget and making actual payments for services.

• Publicity Chairs

in charge of advertising the conference, send the call for papers and the call for participation.

• Local Organization Chair

in charge of setting conference rooms, signs, facilities, last minute changes, wi‐fi connections, power plugs, pens, paper, etc.

Program Committee (PC)

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• Program Committee Chair (PC Chair)
• chooses the PC members (how many?);
• manages the submission process (choose a suitable tool);
• assigns papers to the PC members (3 reviewers/paper);
• manages the PC meeting;
• sends the review results to the authors;
• makes the conference program, organizing the papers into

a set of sections (based on common topics).

• chooses the Work‐in‐Progress Chair (WiP Chair)
• chooses the Session Chairs

Program Committee (PC)

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• How many PC members

N = R * S K

# reviews per paper estimated # of submissions # reviews per PC member R = 3 reviews per paper S = 100 submissions K = 10

N = 30 PC members



Journal organization structure

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Editorial Board Editorial Board Associate Editors Associate Editors

In charge of the reviewing process

Takes strategic decisions:

• Topics
• Dates
• Associate Editors
• Special Issues

Editor-in-Chief External reviewers

Associate Editor Associate Editor reviewer 1 reviewer 2 reviewer 3 Author EiC EiC

Publication Timing

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Conferences Journals

revised version final result camera ready page proofs submission notification 4-5 m 1 m 1-2 m publication 2 w 1-2 m corrections 3 d 3-5 m 10-15 months 6-8 months submission notification camera ready 2 m 1 m 3 m publication 6 months

30/01/2020 3 The Reviewing Process

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The reviewing process is typically managed by a web tool that allows handling all the different phases:

• Submission:

authors upload their papers;

• Bidding:

PC members select their preferences;

• Assignment:

PC Chair assigns papers to reviewers;

• Review:

PC members submit their reviews;

• PC meeting:

the PC selects the accepted papers;

• Notification:

PC Chair notifies authors;

• Final submission: authors submit the final version.

Submission

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Carefully read the submissions rules

• n

the conference/journal web site (instructions for the authors). Things to pay attention to:

• Page limits
• sometimes they are hard
• are extra pages allowed for appendices
• Submission deadline (sometimes it is hard)
• Format (use the available templates)
• Topics (listed on the web page)

Bidding

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To best match the PC reviewing expertise, after the submission deadline, each PC member is asked to specify his/her preferences. For each paper, the review must select one of the following options:

• I want to review it
• I'm able to review it
• I don't want to review it
• I have a conflict of interest

Conflicts of Interest (COI)

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There is a COI when the reviewer

• is an author of the paper;
• has a relation with one of the authors, such as:

 is relative, a friend, or an enemy;  is from the same institution;  wrote a paper with the author in the last 3 years;  is a partner in a common research project;

Assignment

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Assigning the papers satisfying all constraints and maximizing PC satisfaction is a difficult problem. Web tools use an iterative procedure to produce a tentative assignment that the PC Chair can manually modify to improve the result.

K = R * S N

# reviews per paper # of submissions # of PC members

Finally, each PC member receives K papers to review:

Writing a review

• Summary
• General comments
• Detailed comments
• Typos

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30/01/2020 4 Writing a review

Summary

• Summarize in 4‐6 lines the main contains of the

paper, specifying the main contributions, the assumptions, and the main results.

• No evaluations, just facts.
• This is for the PC members, PC chair, and yourself.

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Writing a review

General Comments

• Judge the paper in general, evaluating organization,

presentation, originality, and technical correctness.

• Is the paper related to the conference/journal?
• Is the title representative of the contain?
• Are there missing references?
• Are experiments complete?
• Explain in one sentence why the paper should be

rejected,

• r

accepted, provided that the main concerns are addressed.

• State positive features first, followed by major issues.

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Writing a review

Detailed Comments

• Express your opinion on specific points, explaining

why they are weak, what is missing, and suggesting how they could be improved.

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For example:

 Section 2: the work by Martin et al. (ECRTS 2011) is related to your work, so it should be cited and compared with your approach.  Figure 2 does not report values on the axis and plots cannot be

• distinguished. Please use larger fonts.

 Section 5: the paper does not explain how system parameters are randomly generated and which distributions were used.

Writing a review

Typos

Reports all writing errors, indicating the exact position where they appear and how should be corrected.

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For example:  page 2, Section 1, left column, line 3 from top: "algoritm" ‐‐> "algorithm"  page 3, Section 2, right column, line 5 from bottom: "the the value" ‐‐> "the value"  page 4, Section 3, right column, line 12 from top: a period is missing at the end of the sentence.

Evaluation summary

• Presentation ……………..
• Originality …………………
• Relevance ………………….
• Technical soundness ….
• Overall evaluation ………
• Reviewer confidence …

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1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 Low Medium High

Program Committee Meeting

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PC members meet in a room for one day to select the papers to be published. Papers are discussed one by one. Handling COI

• You cannot review a paper if you have a COI with one of

the authors.

• You have to leave the meeting room if you have a COI with

the paper being discussed.

30/01/2020 5 Notification

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One or two weeks after the PC meeting authors will receive a notification letter from the PC Chair, announcing the result. The following cases are possible:

Conferences Journals

• Accept
• Reject
• Accept with shepherding
• Accept
• Minor revision
• Major revisions
• Reject

Types of evaluations

• ACCEPT

Congratulations, your paper can be published as it is. Unfortunately, this never happens.

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• ACCEPT AFTER MINOR REVISIONS

Congratulations, your paper can be published provided you make some minor changes. Make the changes and write a letters to notify and report the changes you have made.

Types of evaluations

• ACCEPT AFTER MAJOR REVISIONS

Your paper cannot be accepted as it is, but requires some major changes. The revised paper need to be checked again by the reviewers. In this case, a lot of attention must be done to make the revised version:

• Carefully read each comment.
• Address all the comments in your paper and

highlight each change in your manuscript.

• Make a letter for reporting how you addressed

each comment, for each reviewer. Be nice.

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Types of evaluations

• REJECT

Either you paper deserved so, or the reviewers were

• harsh. Both things happen.

In either cases, what you can do is to revise your paper substantially and submit it again to the same journal

• r to another journal.

After two rejections you should probably give up and start working on something else. Remember, in high quality journals and conferences the acceptance rate is 25% or less.

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Evaluations in conferences

• Decisions are final.
• Even if a review is wrong, or you don't agree, the

decision cannot be changed. The only thing you can do is to write a letter of complain to the PC chair.

• Don't give up. Try the next conference.
• But, don't leave the paper unchanged!
• Address all reviewers' comments, even those you think

are wrong.

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Typical reactions

• "The reviewer is stupid, didn't understand my paper"

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• "The reviewer didn't get the message"

May be, but it's your job to ensure it correctly understand your work. Perhaps some parts were not so clearly explained. It could be, but it's your job to express it well. You can improve the presentation making some things more explicit and highlighting the parts that were not understood.

30/01/2020 6 Preparing the revised version

• Select the comments the require a change in the text;
• Label each comment using an index for the reviewer

and one for the comment:

C3.1 denotes comments 1 from reviewer 3.

• Make a letter for reporting how you addressed each

comment, for each reviewer. Address each comment by

• 1. answering the reviewer's concern;
• 2. indicating where the change has been made;
• 3. describing the change made in the paper.

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Answering reviewers' comments

For instance:

C2.1 "The symbol  is not defined in the paper." A2.1 The reviewer is right, the definition of  has been inserted in Section 2 (System model), and now appears at page 3, left column, third item after Equation (3):

In the paper,  denotes the worst-case delay introduced by the communication protocol.

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Answering reviewers' comments

What to write if you don't agree?

C3.5 "The authors neglected to reference the work done by the Liu and Layland and did not compare with their approach." A3.5

We thank the reviewer for raising this issue. The reason why the work by Liu and Layland was not taken into account is because that approach is based on a different model that applies to a much simpler scenario, which is not considered

• here. To clarify this, the following sentence has been added in

Section 5, right column, line 10 from top: "The approach by the Liu and Layland was not considered in this paper because it applies to a much simpler scenario."

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