Status Labels

Once the program committee has reached its decision, papers are marked as accepted or rejected via Reviews:Accept/reject papers. On that page, papers can be rejected by score or by checking of individual papers in a long list. Chairs can also click on the status label (e.g., 'active') on the paper page to change papers individually.

There is also the "published" label. Some conferences manually label papers that have passed formatting or revision requirements as "published", but EDAS also automatically moves all accepted papers from "accepted" to "published" after the end of the conference.

Finally, some conferences need to track 'no-show' papers, i.e., papers where none of the authors delivered the presentation at the conference. EDAS supports this process by defining a 'noshow' status, with a set of decisions, excused, error (erroneous declaration as no-show) and dontpublish (do not publish paper in digital library).

Score-Based Decisions

For score-based rejection, the chairs specify a lower and upper bound for the average weighted review score. Only papers that are active or pending are marked as accepted or rejected; all other papers retain their status. Once the function has been performed, the chair can change the paper status by checking off individual papers in the list or re-activating all papers, by following the "revert" link on the page.

Shepherds

If desired, some papers can be assigned a "shepherd", a member of the technical program committee that works with the authors to ensure that the authors of the paper incorporate the review comments into the final version. For accepted papers, the shepherd name can be edited by the chair on each paper page and is visible to the authors after the acceptance notification has been emailed. The shepherd communicates openly with the authors, outside of EDAS. If you want to include special text into the accept notification for shepherded papers, you can define these papers as a conference-specific status such as "minor revision", and use the custom template for that status.

Notifying Authors

Authors are notified whether their paper was accepted or not via the Reviews:Notify authors function. You can include track-specific or category-specific text, defined in the track and category configuration. Notifications are sent in batches, roughly every hour. Authors can always check the status of their paper on their EDAS homepage. The chair can also resend a notification for one paper via the paper status page (mailbox icon next to status indication).

Authors can only see the reviews and the paper status after notification. Thus, all authors need to be notified.

Only one notification can be pending. Do not modify the email templates for paper decisions while a notification is pending.

The email templates for accept and reject notices are defined in Conference:Email, web and visa letter templates. The same template is used for all papers within a conference, but you can customize the text by including track- and category specific information via the {trackdescription} {track}, {accepted} (track) and {categorydescription} (category) variables. These variables cannot contain variables themselves, i.e., they are included literally. An example of an acceptance template with both a track- and category-specific text is shown below; this template can be used for all accept decisions, such as "minor revision":

Dear {title} {givenname} {surname}:
              
Congratulations - your paper #{paper} ('{papertitle}') for {shortname}
has been accepted and will be presented in the session titled
{sessiontitle}.

{categorydescription}
{accepted}

{sessionnotification}

The reviews are below or can be found at {PAPER}.

{reviews}

Regards,
{chairs}

You can test the email message by checking off the Only show messages, without sending them option in Reviews:Notify authors.

Authors can only see paper reviews on the EDAS web page once the email notification has gone out. Email notifications are not sent immediately, but rather are sent out in batches, roughly once per hour; thus, it may take an hour or two before authors receive their notification. Until authors have been notified, their paper will show a status of "active" and will show the original paper deadline instead of the final manuscript deadline, to avoid giving away the true paper status before all decisions have been made.

No-Show Papers

The no-show process consists of three phases: First, the chair designates the no-show papers, using the normal status change mechanisms for papers, as in designating papers as accepted or rejected. Using Reviews:Notify authors, the authors receive an email alert that typically invites them to explain the situation and includes a link to a form where the author can offer their excuse or explanation. The no-show disposition can then be entered for each paper, again via the status change link, or all such papers can be set to don't-publish in Reviews:Accept/Reject. In the third step, authors are notified immediately if the status is changed paper-by-paper, or separately via Reviews:Notify authors if the status change was made in bulk.