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Partial Refereeing Process in SPMS
Contact: Todd Satogata 
(Jefferson Lab)
Partial refereeing of a subset of IPAC proceedings, and a separate publication with IOP, was started as a new initiative by IPAC'17 organizers. We have now successfully refereed, processed, reformatted, and delivered "light peer review" proceedings for IPAC'17 and IPAC'18 to IOP. This talk presents a brief history and background of IPAC light peer review, and highlights of the procedures established in SPMS to support this partial refereeing process.
IPAC'17 and IPAC'18
These conferences have initiated a new light peer review process:
- Intermediate stage between JACoW publication (processed but not refereed), and PR:AB (strongly refereed)
- Designed to generate citations to PR:AB from a peer-reviewed publication to improve PR:AB impact factor
- Published by IOP conferences (see references)
Conference website guidance documents:
This talk is mainly relevant for IPACs but other conferences may follow suit or have their own review process.
Organization
IPAC'18 formalized a Scientific Publication Board, the board charged by the Conference Chair to organize and produce the light peer review proceedings.
The chair of this board leads the light peer review activities.
This includes having an SPMS role:
- coordinating SPC MC leaders
- selecting referees
- assigning papers
- coordinating and resolving multiple blind reviews
- coordinating author reformatting and final submission to IOP
SPB Process
IPAC'18 SPB Chair and OC Chair developed a formal process based on IPAC'17 experience.
Highlights:
- Collect pool of volunteer reviewers; select actual reviewers
- Collect abstracts for papers that are interested in light peer review
- Collect papers at least one week before JACoW submission deadline for light peer review process; hard cutoff.
- Assign papers, collect prompt reviews in SPMS including dot colors
- Only one iteration permitted by author to respond to reviewer comments
Guided tour through IPAC'18 SPMS
Todd gives a guided tour through the IPAC'18 SPMS light peer review module.
- Referee privilege and Referee module
- Experts
- Approval and assignment of reviewers
- Both are very manual, time-consuming processes
- Caution regarding reviewer areas of sub-classification expertise
- Tracking of statistics
Lessons Learned
- Process is very compressed; probably no way around this
- Have volunteers identify areas of sub-classification expertise in some MCs (e.g. MC7)
- Assign papers to reviewers based on MC/sub-classification expertise
- Try to avoid important deadlines and work periods overlapping with weekends
- Workflow very much a work in progress; improve with implementation in Indico-SPMS
- Easy to misunderstand interface; lost day in IPAC'18 figuring out how to send email
- Change dots to different indicators for peer review to avoid confusion
- IPAC'18 SAB Chair accidentally set processing status instead of light peer review status on ~12 papers
References
