Responsibility

The Programme Committee (PC) are responsible for maintaining the high standards of the conference. This is one of the most important roles in the peer review process. The process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. Peer review requires the W4A community of accessibility experts, you, to give an impartial quality based review. Impartial review, especially of work in this less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish; and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. It is therefore up to you to give your best to the review process by submitting impartial reviews^{see Footnote 1} of no less than half a page, and to participate in the rebuttal response process, and the advocate discussions regarding the papers under your review.

See Mark Bernstein's excellent 'Reviewing Conference Papers' for how to review and why it needs to be a high quality activity. In addition, you should familiarise yourself with our submission policy so that you can make your reviews as high a quality as possible. You you will be reviewing 3 or 4 papers total. Every paper is sent to three reviewers, although extraordinarily a fourth may be recruited to make a recommendation if the previous reviews are too polarised. You can submit a paper to conference too, it will be sent to others to review and you will not be able to see these.

The W4A is vital, active, and of high quality only through your volunteerism and participation. Thank you again for your help.

Footnote 1

A conflict of interest arises when a reviewer and author have a disproportionate amount of respect (or disrespect) for each other. As an alternative to single-masked and double-masked review, authors and reviewers are encouraged to declare their conflicts of interest when the names of authors and sometimes reviewers are known to the other. When conflicts are reported, the conflicting reviewer is prohibited from reviewing and discussing the manuscript. The incentive for reviewers to declare their conflicts of interest is a matter of professional ethics and individual integrity. While their reviews are not public, these reviews are a matter of record and the reviewer's credibility depends upon how they represent themselves among their peers.

Timeline 2011 (PCom)

All dates are the target FINISH dates.

• 10-Jan-2011 PChair - SUBMISSIONS CLOSED - Reviewers Informed
• 26-Jan-2011 PCom - REVIEW PERIOD ENDS - Your Reviews Are Complete
• 31-Jan-2011 Auth - AUTHOR REBUTTAL PERIOD ENDS
• 04-Feb-2011 PCom - REVIEWER RESPONSES TO REBUTTALS ENDS - Your Rebuttal Responses Are Complete
• 06-Feb-2011 PCom - ADVOCATE PERIOD ENDS - Prepare to Discuss your reviews and rebuttal answers with Advocates and Other Reviewers
• 07-Feb-2011 PChair - DECISIONS - All Technical / Communication Papers