February 2023

The reviewing process for full papers follows the Proceedings of the ACM (PACM) model. The submission and review process will take place three times annually, and accepted papers will be published in issues of the PACM on Human-Computer Interaction journal. This document describes the process and upcoming deadlines.

If you have any questions, please contact papers2023@eics.acm.org

All the papers accepted in the following rounds will be considered for presentation at EICS 2023. The deadline dates are presented as follows:

EICS PACM 2023 Round 1

• Submissions: July 22, 2022
• Editorial Board assignments: July 25, 2022
• Reviewer assignments: August 1, 2022
• Reviews: August 29, 2022
• Meta-reviews: September 2, 2022
• Notification of reviews to authors: September 9, 2022
• Deadline for rebuttal: September 16, 2022
• Final meta-review: September 20, 2022
• PC meeting: September 21, 2022
• Final notification: September 23, 2022

EICS PACM 2023 Round 2

• Submissions: October 24, 2022
• Editorial Board assignments: October 27, 2022
• Reviewer assignments: November 1, 2022
• Reviews: November 30, 2022
• Meta-reviews: December 5, 2022
• Notification of reviews to authors: December 8, 2022
• Deadline for rebuttal: December 15, 2022
• Final meta-review: December 19, 2022
• PC meeting: December 21, 2022
• Final notification: December 23, 2022
• Camera-ready: January (day TBD), 2023

EICS PACM 2023 Round 3 (EXTENDED Submission Deadline)

• Submissions: February 24, 2023
• Editorial Board assignments: February 28, 2023
• Reviewer assignments: March 5, 2023
• Reviews: March 23, 2023
• Meta-reviews: March 27, 2023
• Notification of reviews to authors: March 29, 2023
• Deadline for rebuttal: April 3, 2023
• Final meta-review: April 10, 2023
• PC meeting: April 12, 2023
• Final notification: April 14, 2023
• Camera-ready: May (day TBD), 2023

Authors of papers accepted during these three iteration are  expected to present at EICS 2023 which is going to be help in Swansea, Wales, UK, June 27–30, 2023.

To submit papers to PCS (https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions) for this round select SIGCHI, EICS PACM, EICS PACM 2023.

Please note that while we do our best to meet the deadlines for sending out reviews for rebuttal and final decisions, work takes place across many time zones and sometimes circumstances may result in a delay of 1-2 days from the posted dates above.

The structure of the EICS model will be based on the normal conference review process, except iterated multiple times per year. This is in contrast to a pure journal model, where submissions would be accepted at all times of the year and each paper has its own review process schedule.  This means that each iteration of the review process starts at a specific time, all papers (either being new submissions or revisions of previously submitted papers) submitted by the deadline are reviewed simultaneously, and decisions on all papers are made and announced at the same time, following a virtual or physical programme committee meeting. The benefit of this structured iteration is that reviewing effort can be planned for by editorial board members and reviewers in advance of submissions arriving, and the progress of papers through the process is easier to track because all papers have the same set of deadlines. This will also make sure the revision process is quick and predictable for authors (which is not always the case with continuous submissions to journals).

You will note that the iterations are not regularly spaced throughout the year, but arranged to fit within several constraints:

●     The Round 1 deadline is chosen to follow the EICS conference by sufficient time for authors to make modifications based on discussions at the conference. This time is also chosen so that rejection and major revisions papers have time to revise and submit to CHI (possibly to the Sub Committee on Engineering Interactive Systems and Technologies) should they decide to do so.

●     The Round 2 and Round 3 deadlines are set to allow for two rounds of reviewing between the beginning of the year and the conference which takes place annually in June. This would allow a paper submitted in Round 2 (October) that receives a “major revision” decision to be revised and still considered for the conference in the same year.

Note that there is no special process for the conference full papers separate from the PACM process. All full papers will be submitted via and to PACM. All other EICS conference venues, for example LBR papers, will have their own specific processes identified by each venue and described on the EICS website: https://eics.acm.org/2023/.

Submission to EICS PACM should present original and mature research work. High-quality, elaborated case studies and practice reports with generalizable findings will also be considered. See the call for papers at the current EICS web site

The full papers format is the single column template as described here (Section 2). The final outcome format (acm small) is provided here (see Overleaf template).

●     There are neither length restrictions on papers, nor any limit to the number of references that may be included.

●     Papers must be anonymized. Primarily, this means that submissions must remove all author and institutional information from the title and header area of the first page of the paper. Author information should also be removed from submitted supplementary materials, in particular, videos. Submissions that are not anonymized may be rejected without review.

●    Furthermore, all references must remain intact. If you previously published a paper and your current submission builds on that work, the complete reference with the author's name must appear in the references. Authors must refer to their previous work in the third person (e.g., “We build on prior work by Smith et al. [X] but generalize their algorithm to new settings.”) and avoid blank references (e.g., “12. REMOVED FOR REVIEWING”). Further suppression of identity in the body of the paper (for example, in an Acknowledgements section), while encouraged, is left to the authors’ discretion.

●     Submit your papers at http://new.precisionconference.com/.

Each round of reviewing starts with a submission deadline and proceeds similarly to the typical conference process.  The following is a template for the process:

        T+0 Full Paper Submission Deadline (no separate abstract deadline)

        T+0.5 Week. Editorial Board Paper Bidding

        T+1 Weeks. Reviewer Assignments Complete or Desk Rejection

        T+4 Weeks. Reviewing Complete

        T+5 Weeks. Discussion and Meta-Review Complete

        T+5.5 Weeks. Rebuttal Period Complete

        T+6 Weeks. Virtual Editorial Board Meeting

        T+6.5 Weeks. Decision Notifications

Please refer to the section “Upcoming Deadlines” for concrete dates pertaining to the next review Round.

Reviewing Details

We are in the process of appointing an Editorial Board for PACM EICS, equivalent to the Senior Program Committee used for previous conferences, except serving for more than just one cycle.  Editorial Board members will serve as both reviewers and managers of the review process, similar in form to the primary and secondary model used by previous EICS conference review processes.

The primary Editorial Board member for a paper will manage the review process for each paper, inviting 2 reviewers, ensuring their reviews are submitted, leading any discussion, writing a meta-review, and working with their secondary Board member to reach a decision for presentation at the virtual editorial board meeting.

The secondary Editorial Board member will write a regular review of the paper at the same time as the external reviewers are writing reviews.

All reviewing will be essentially double-blind, with papers anonymized and reviewer identities kept confidential.  Similar to the previous conference process, the Editorial Board member serving as primary will be aware of the identities of both authors and reviewers.

An important aspect of the journal reviewing process is good communication between the authors and the Editorial Board member handling the paper. In journals such as TOCHI, the identity of the Editorial Board member is revealed from nearly the beginning, and authors can communicate with their Board member freely. For EICS PACM, the primary Editorial Board member will be anonymous to the authors by default, and anonymous communication between the parties will be enabled through the PCS 2.0 review system.  At the primary Editorial Board member’s discretion, he or she may reveal their identity to the authors for the purposes of discussion, especially for papers requiring revision and between review cycles. (This is similar to how shepherding works for many conferences using PCS today)

A key aspect to the review process is that continuity must be maintained for each paper across multiple deadlines. A revision to a previous submission should be handled by the same Editorial Board members and as many of the same reviewers as possible.

We will not start with a pre-recruited reviewer pool, as was used for the EICS 2016 and 2017 processes, but we may go back to this as the reviewing needs for the PACM process become clearer. Our reasoning is that it may be difficult to recruit reviewers for a long-running continuous process when the potential load is difficult to predict. We expect that recruiting a reviewer pool will be easier once we can promise a certain number of reviews spread across specific timeframes.

Revisions

Revisions must be submitted within 2 quarters (~6 months) of the previous decision to guarantee treatment as a revision (meaning that the same primary and secondary Board Members are assigned, etc.). It is not required for authors to resubmit a revision in the review cycle immediately after receiving a decision. We allow extra time in case the authors need to perform significant new work, such as conducting a new evaluation, before acceptance is possible.

Revisions will be distinguished from original submissions by the authors on the submission form, where there will be fields for the authors to indicate the paper ID and reviewing round in which it was last submitted.

Decisions

There are four decision types in this process:

●     Desk Rejection - An exceptional category for papers that the EiCs judge to not have any chance at acceptance, for instance, because of formal or structural flaws. Desk rejections are processed and decisions are reported to authors within a week following submission.

●     Rejection - The paper is not expected to be acceptable to EICS PACM, even after reasonable effort is spent on revision, and should be submitted to another venue. The authors may choose to revise and resubmit a rejected paper, however there is no guarantee that the same board members or reviewers will be assigned. Repeatedly resubmitted rejected papers may be desk rejected.

●     Major Revisions - The paper is expected to be acceptable to PACM if reasonable effort is spent on revision, however a future revision may be rejected if the authors do not respond to the revision requirements of the Editorial Board.

●     Minor Revisions/Acceptance - The paper has been accepted to EICS PACM and will enter the ACM camera-ready process. The Editorial Board may ask for further small revisions, and authors are expected to comply with such requests. In most rounds, there will be an opportunity for board members to check these revisions, however this will not be the case in all rounds as sometimes the turnaround to the next round is too quick. In these cases, there will be no final check to ensure that required changes are made and papers requiring such a check will be asked to submit to the next round (with the expectation of an easy acceptance, possibly without external review).

Roles

These roles are evolving, and will likely change over time.

Editors-in-Chief / Papers Chairs

Up to three papers chairs are appointed by the conference chair(s) in agreement with the steering committee of the EICS conference. These chairs act as Editors-in-Chief for the three iterations of the review process preceding the upcoming conference.

Editorial Board (also called Associate Chairs)

The equivalent of the current Senior Program Committee. Recruited for at least one year terms, likely without limits. Chaired by the Associate Editors-in-Chief.

Reviewers

Recruited by Editorial Board members for specific papers due to expertise and knowledge of the engineering domain.

The current paper chairs through the EICS PACM 2023 three submission rounds  are:

• Kris Luyten, Hasselt University, Belgium
• Carmen Santoro - ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief

• Jeff Nichols, Apple, Inc. United States Members

Members

• Jose Creissac Campos Universidade do Minho, Portugal
• Andrea Forte, Drexel University, United States
• Mark Hancock, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Regan Mandryk, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
• Helena Mentis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County United States
• Aleksandra Sarcevic, Drexel University, United States
• Julie Williamson, University of Glasgow, Scotland UK

Previous Deadlines

 

Q1 2021

Submission deadline: July 23, 2020
Assignement to ACs: July 24, 2020
Assignement of reviewers by ACs: July 29, 2020
Deadline for reviews: August 28, 2020
Deadline for meta-reviews: September 1, 2020
Notifications of reviews: September 4, 2020
Deadline for rebuttal: September 8, 2020
Deadline for final meta-review: September 10, 2020
Remote PC meeting: September 11, 2020
Final Notifications: September 11, 2020

Camera ready: October 2, 2020

Q2 2021

Submission deadline: October 23, 2020
Assignement to ACs: October 26, 2020
Assignement of reviewers by ACs: October 29, 2020
Deadline for reviews : November 23, 2020
Deadline for meta-reviews: November 26, 2020
Notifications of reviews: November 27, 2020
Deadline for rebuttal: December 3, 2020
Deadline for final meta-review: December 9, 2020
Remote PC meeting: December 17, 2020
Final Notifications: December 18, 2020
Camera ready: January 15, 2021

Q3 2021

Submission deadline: February 19, 2021
Assignement to ACs: February 23, 2021
Assignement of reviewers by ACs: February 26, 2021
Deadline for reviews: March 22, 2021
Deadline for meta-reviews: March 25, 2021
Notifications of reviews: March 26, 2021
Deadline for rebuttal: April 1, 2021
Deadline for final meta-review: April 8, 2021
Remote PC meeting: April 16, 2021
Final Notifications: April 16, 2021
Camera ready: May 2, 2021