Redaktum · For reviewers
Your Reviewer Desk
From the invitation to the review and the discussion: one link, no account, and which door opens when — with the reason for each.
- Audience
- Invited reviewers and area chairs
- Reading time
- ~14 minutes
- You need
- The link in your invitation email — not an account
- Sections
- 8 stages + FAQ
Before you begin
Overview
You do not need an account. One link opens your desk, and everything — the papers, the form, the discussion — is on the page it opens.
This guide covers what the screens do not say: which door opens when, and why then.
Your recommendation is not the decision
The committee decides, and it may decide differently from all of you. Redaktum does not score the paper itself and proposes no verdict.
At a glance
Your desk at a glance
- 01
Invitation
Code, title, due date and your link
- 02
Answer
Accepting opens the text, declining ends it
- 03
Reading
The full text and the authors' attachments
- 04
Form
Scores, a recommendation, two comment boxes
- 05
Discussion
The others open the moment you send
- 06
Update
You can change it until the committee decides
Stage 1
The invitation and your link
The conference sends you an email with a paper's reference code, its title, a due date if there is one, and your link. That link is yours: it opens your desk and every paper you have been asked about, not only the one in the letter.
Keep the email. There is no password to reset — if you lose the link, ask the organisers and they can issue a new one.
Stage 2
Accepting or declining
Open a paper and answer. Accepting opens the full text. Declining ends it there, and the committee moves to the next person.
If you do not answer, you will get a reminder — at most one every three days, no matter how many people on the committee press the button.
Stage 3
What you can see, and when
- Before you answer
- Title, topic, keywords and the abstract. Enough to know whether the paper is yours to judge, which is what you are being asked.
- After you accept
- The full text, and any supplementary files the authors attached — data, tables, video. The camera-ready version is not among them: that is a production file, not part of what you are judging.
- After you decline
- The paper closes, abstract included. Being able to keep reading a paper you turned down would make declining meaningless.
- The authors
- Depends on the conference. Under double-blind review you never see them, and they are not sent to your browser at all. The page says which kind of review this conference runs, so an empty author list is never a mystery.
The text you read does not stay for ever: submission files are deleted five years after the conference's end date, while your review and the comments you wrote to the author stay on the record.
Stage 4
Writing the review
The form is the conference's own: the criteria and the scale come from them, and some conferences score nothing at all. What is always there is a recommendation — accept, minor revision, major revision, reject — and two comment boxes.
Nothing is stored until you press Send — and after you send it, the form stays open. You can change a score or a sentence until the committee decides; a locked form would send you to the organisers to correct a typo.
Stage 5
After you send it: the discussion
Two things open on the paper's page the moment your review goes in: the other reviews of the same paper, and a discussion thread with the other reviewers, the area chair and the committee.
They open then and not before, and the reason is the point of the whole step: reading somebody else's judgement before writing your own anchors you to it, and three reviews that are copies of one are worth less than one review.
- You appear to the other reviewers as a number — "Reviewer 2" — and so do they. The committee and the area chair see real names.
- You can see the other reviewers' confidential comments to the committee. Very often that box is exactly what there is to discuss.
- A message from the committee reaches you as "the committee": a named member would become an authority arguing rather than a point being made.
- Messages cannot be edited or deleted afterwards. The reasoning behind the decision is sometimes built in that thread.
- The author never sees any of it, at any stage.
Stage 6 · not in every conference
If the authors respond
Some conferences let authors read the comments addressed to them and write one reply before the decision. If yours does, the reply appears above your form and you are emailed once, when it first arrives.
Nothing is required of you at that point. If the response changes your mind, update your review; if it does not, there is nothing to do.
Stage 7 · not in every conference
Bidding
Some conferences ask their reviewers, after submissions close, to go through every paper and say which ones they want. If yours does, that list is a section on your desk.
Five answers per paper:
- Want it · Willing · Would rather not · Not for me
- These move you up or down the committee's list for that paper. None of them is a promise in either direction: the committee may still ask you, and asking for a paper does not get you it.
- Conflict of interest
- This one is not a preference. It takes the paper off your list and the committee cannot assign it to you. Use it for the things the system cannot know — a former student, a co-author, a shared grant. You are not asked why, and you will not be.
Each answer is saved the moment you give it; there is no Save button to forget after a hundred papers. The counter at the top says how many you have been through, and a filter leaves only the ones you have not answered — going back over a list of two hundred to find the gaps is the part everybody gives up on.
Stage 8 · area chairs only
If you are an area chair
Some conferences put one person in charge of the reviewing on a paper — CMT calls it a meta-reviewer. If you are one, your desk has a second section, papers you are chairing, separate from the papers you are reviewing yourself. They are two different jobs, and the one that is somebody waiting for your review should not get lost under the other.
Opening one of those papers gives you:
- Every review, with the reviewers' names, and their confidential comments. Blinding protects the author, not the people running the review: you cannot chase a late reviewer or tell two contradictory reviews apart without knowing who wrote what. The author's identity is still blinded to you.
- The reviewer suggestions for that paper, and the ability to invite one. The invitation is the same letter the committee would send, and the same conflict rules apply.
- The author's response, if the conference ran that step.
- A summary for the committee: a recommendation and a text saying what the reviews add up to, especially where they disagree. The author never sees it. Once the committee decides, the summary is closed to changes.
Help
Frequently asked
I cannot see the authors' names.
The conference runs double-blind review. The names are not hidden by the interface — they are not sent to your browser at all. The page says which kind of review the conference runs, so an empty author list is not a fault.
I cannot see the other reviews.
Send your own review first; the others and the discussion thread open with it (§05). This is a sequence, not a lock: reading somebody else's view first anchors your own to it.
Can I change a score after sending?
Yes, until the committee decides. The form stays open after you send it.
I put a confidential remark in the author-facing box by mistake.
If the committee has not decided you can fix it: open the form and move the text. If it has, the author-facing comments may already be in the decision letter; tell the organisers.
Does an invitation expire? What if I never answer?
You get at most one reminder every three days. A one-line decline is far more useful than silence: it is what lets the committee pick the next person.
Can I hand back a paper I accepted?
Write to the organisers; only they can cancel an assignment. If you already sent your review it cannot be cancelled — the committee can set it aside, but the record of your work stays.
I said "not for me" in bidding and the paper was still assigned to me.
"Not for me" does not remove you from the list, it puts you at the bottom — a conference short of reviewers has to be able to ask anyway. The answer that removes you for certain is conflict of interest, and that one also blocks the assignment.
There is no bidding section on my desk.
Your conference does not run bidding, or the window is closed. When the window is closed the list is closed too: showing you papers you cannot bid on would be a pointless way of showing you somebody else's work.
I lost my link.
Write to the organisers; they can issue a new one. The old link stops working the moment the new one is issued.
Son · End
End of this guide.
The conference organisers sent you this page. Every question about the paper, the deadline or the conference is theirs — replying to the invitation email is enough.