Reviewers are central to the success of the RSECon26 programme. Being part of this process is an excellent opportunity to give back to the RSE community by sharing your time and your expertise. It is valuable professional development as it strengthens your critical assessment skills by evaluating submissions objectively and offering constructive feedback to both the submitters and the programme team. Whether you are new to peer review or have reviewed before, we encourage you to consider signing up as a reviewer for RSECon26 and contributing a few hours of your time.
Providing constructive feedback is essential to the preparation of the RSECon26 programme. Each year, the conference committee receives a large amount of submissions, and our role is to give each and every one of them a fair chance to enter the programme. To this end, we are recruiting a broad pool of reviewers who reflect the diversity of the RSE community across skills, career stage, and experience levels. This diversity helps us build a programme that represents the interests of the community.
What to Expect
If you sign up to be a reviewer, you will be assigned a selection of submissions across different formats, including talks, walkthroughs, posters, and workshops/Birds of a Feather. You will receive an email with a link to access the review platform, and can proceed in the order of your choice. Each submission will be composed of an abstract and additional information relevant to its format. The programme team will provide you with clear guidance to support your evaluation. We expect each review to take approximately 5 to 15 minutes.
This review process is double-blind: reviewers’ and submitters’ identities are hidden from one another. Nevertheless, it may happen that for some submissions, the anonymity may be limited (for example, for well-known projects or software). If you feel that you are unable to provide an impartial review for any reason, do not hesitate to contact us (sending a mail to [email protected]), and we will reassign the submission to another reviewer. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers, and the combined feedback will inform the committee’s final decisions. Differences of opinion are expected and more than welcome, as it strengthens the review process.
To make the process as open and accessible as possible, we are hosting a webinar on the 10th of March to explain the submission and review workflow. We will demonstrate the platform used to manage submissions (Oxford Abstracts, as in the previous years) and answer any questions you may have. If you would like to attend, please register to receive the webinar details. A recording will be shared after the event.
Your Responsibilities as a Reviewer
As a reviewer, you engage yourself in:
- giving each submission a fair and professional consideration
- assessing its suitability for the proposed format and length
- providing a clear recommendation (accept or reject) along with a justification
- offering constructive and respectful feedback to authors
We will also ask you to communicate promptly. Inform the programme team if you are unable to complete a review due to conflicts of interest or workload constraints.
Our Responsibilities as the Programme Team
As the conference programme team, we commit to supporting reviewers by providing:
Guidance
We will provide you with guidance on how to review submissions and be available to assist with any questions during the review period.
Communication
You will receive updates regarding:
- review deadlines, including a reminder email on day 10 of the review period (20th of May)
- whether we require additional help - we may ask if you’re able to complete more reviews, but we understand if that’s not possible
Pragmatism
We acknowledge you are volunteering your time for free, and will not apply undue pressure to complete your allocation of reviews if circumstances arise that prevent you from doing so. We do however ask that you inform us promptly if you will be unable to complete your reviews in time.
Assessment
We will:
- moderate the review comments before they are passed to the submission authors
- take your reviews into account when deciding which submissions are accepted into the conference programme
Data Management and Privacy
We use professional academic conference software (Oxford Abstracts) to handle our abstract management and reviews. This platform provides a simple and clean interface to complete your reviews, and facilitates the double blind review process. This ensures that authors of submissions and reviews are anonymous to each other; however, identifying information may be found in other free text fields, such as a submission’s abstract.