Tracks

Tracks give you fine-grained control over PC member rights. With tracks, PC members can have different rights to see and review submissions, depending on the submissions’ tags.

Tracks generally restrict permissions. For example, when the “PC members can review any submission” setting is off, no PC member can enter an unassigned review, no matter what the track settings say.

Set up tracks on the Settings > Tracks page. “Act as” a member of the PC to see how track permissions affect PC members.

Example: External review committee

An external review committee is a subset of the PC that may bid on submissions to review, and may be assigned reviews (using, for example, the autoassignment tool), but may not self-assign reviews, and may not view reviews for submissions they have not reviewed. To set this up:

• Give external review committee members the “erc” tag.
• On Settings > Tracks, “For submissions not on other tracks,” select “Who can see reviews? > PC members without tag: erc” and “Who can self-assign a review? > PC members without tag: erc”.

Example: PC-paper review committee

A PC-paper review committee is a subset of the PC that reviews papers with PC coauthors. PC-paper review committees are kept separate from the main PC; they only bid on and review PC papers, while the main PC handles all other papers. To set this up:

• Give PC-paper review committee members the “pcrc” tag.
• Give PC papers the “pcrc” tag.
• On Settings > Tracks, add a track for tag “pcrc” and select “Who can see these submissions? > PC members with tag: pcrc”. (Users who can’t see a submission also can’t review it, so there’s no need to explicitly set the other permissions.)
• For submissions not on other tracks, select “Who can see these submissions? > PC members without tag: pcrc”.

Example: Track chair

A track chair is a PC member with full administrative rights over a subset of submissions. To set this up for, say, an “industrial” track:

• Give the industrial track chair(s) the “industrial-chair” tag.
• Give industrial-track submissions the “industrial” tag.
• On Settings > Tracks, add a track for tag “industrial”, and select “Who can administer these submissions? > PC members with tag: industrial-chair”.

Track chairs can run the autoassigner, make assignments, edit submissions, and generally administer all submissions on their tracks. Track chairs cannot modify site settings or change track tags, however.

Example: Restricting submission visibility

Some conferences prefer to restrict submission visibility to assigned reviewers only. To set this up:

• On Settings > Tracks, “For submissions not on other tracks,” select “Who can see these submissions? > Administrators only”. (Assigned reviewers will be able to see their submissions despite this restriction.)