Authors' Review and Response Period

We propose to enhance the reviewing process by introducing an optional authors' review and response period for all submissions, which will take place June 7–13, 2012.

We hope that this extra step in the process will increase visibility for authors and can provide resolution where the reviewers have questions, need to make requests for clarification, or identify minor omissions in the submissions that could impact acceptance.

The authors' review and response is completely optional for authors. Authors may look at the anonymous reviews from the program committee and decide that no response is necessary.

Author responses should be short (no more than 300 words), should not contain any external URLs (except where such URLs were missing from the submission), attachments, or new draft submissions.

This is truly your chance to clarify points in your submission that were misunderstood or missing during the initial review.

Therefore, the reviewing process will be as follows:

  • Submissions and initial review
    • Authors upload original manuscript
    • Manuscripts are assigned to reviewers
    • Reviewers post their anonymous reviews
  • Authors' review and response period
    • Authors read reviewers' comments
    • Authors post a short response to the reviews to clarify prior to paper and report selection
  • Program committee review of submissions
    • Reviewers read authors' responses and modify reviews as needed
    • Selection of papers and reports for the conference
    • Comments to authors of rejected papers to assist them with future submissions
  • Notification to authors and shepherd assignments
    • Authors are notified and provided comments from the program committee
    • Accepted papers and reports will be assigned shepherds from the program committee

Sometimes submissions that are not accepted into the conference as papers or reports are recommended for the poster session. This usually occurs when the program committee reviews indicate that the research is not ready for the papers or reports tracks.

Questions about the review process should be addressed to the program chair at lisa12chair@usenix.org.

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