NIME Reviewing and Selecting Submissions

(proposed) guidelines for reviewing and accepting at NIME.

Peer-review, presentation, and the proceedings

The proceedings website states:

All papers have been peer-reviewed (most often by three international experts). Only papers that were presented at the conferences (as presentation, poster or demo) are included.

So all papers that are to appear in the proceedings must be peer-reviewed with reviews recorded in a conference management system and must also be presented at the conference in some form.

Conversely, any submission (presentation, poster, or demo) that has been reviewed, accepted, and presented at NIME should appear in the proceedings.

The calls for all tracks should clearly state whether and how submissions will appear in the proceedings. E.g.,

Accepted submissions for the paper track that are presented in the conference will be published in the NIME proceedings archived on <nime.org> and on Zenodo and have an associated DOI and ISSN.

Similarly, if a track is not planned to be included in the proceedings for whatever reason, this must be made clear to submitters in the call for participation, e.g.:

Late-breaking demo submissions are reviewed by abstract with reviews performed by the demo chairs. Submissions to the late-breaking demo track will appear in the conference program but will not be archived separately in the NIME proceedings.

Types of reviewers

By convention, NIME papers are reviewed by 2--3 international experts and a meta-reviewer summarises the reviews, prompts the reviewers for more information in a discussion phase and provides and overall recommendation to the program chairs.

As a point of fairness to participants, all submissions to reviewed track must receive a minimum of 2 reviews not including a meta-review.

The role of a meta-reviewer should be to summarise and adjudicate reviews providing a recommendation derived from the reviewer's scores. Where reviews are split (often) the meta-reviewer should engage the reviewers in discussion so that more information can be provided to justify scores. If the meta-reviewer feels the reviews are inappropriate they should consult with paper chairs to obtain further independent reviews.

All reviews and meta-reviews must be recorded within the conference management system and returned to authors within the stated timeframe. Where reviews are delayed they should be communicated to authors as soon as possible after the review return date.

Acceptance decisions, revisions, and camera ready papers

The organising committee (paper and program chairs) make acceptance decisions based on reviews and meta-reviews.

Where reviews are split, the arguments and process of the meta-reviewer should be carefully considered to assist in decision making.

In general, acceptance decisions should not be made until all reviews and meta-reviews have been received.

Chairs may request that authors make minor revisions to a paper to make it suitable for NIME presentation. This should only happen where revisions are minor and can be confidently completed within a short timeframe (e.g., two weeks). A "revision" decision, including where the recommendation is to reduce the length of a paper, should be considered as basically as "acceptance".

Camera-ready submissions should be collected from all accepted submissions. The organisers should make sure that all camera-ready papers are collected well in advance of the conference. The organisers should check that all camera-ready submissions use the correct format and match the submission data. It is recommended that presentation in the conference is conditional on receipt of a camera ready file (e.g., do not accept authors at the conference until a camera ready file is obtained).