For CHI’23 we made significant improvements to the revise and resubmit (R&R) process based on the feedback we received from CHI’22. Our main goals were to allow more authors to go through R&R to improve their papers and respond to the reviews, to reduce the volunteer workload, and to remove holiday working, whilst keeping the benefits of the revise and resubmit process. This post outlines how the new revise and resubmit process looks and how we’ve addressed our goals for this process.
CHI’23 R&R Process
The CHI’23 R&R process will be familiar from previous years. R&R replaces the rebuttal process, which was only 1 week long. In CHI’23, all papers above a threshold based on review recommendations can R&R in a 5 week period before the winter holidays. Then, paper decisions are made at the program committee meeting after the holidays in mid January.
In detail the process will be the following:
- authors submit papers (Paper Deadline: September 15, 2022)
- papers get reviewed by externals and 2AC
- 1AC writes meta review
- reviews are released to authors (November 7, 2022)
- based on the reviews of 1AC, 2AC, and externals, papers will either be rejected or invited to revise and resubmit
- ‘Revise and resubmit’: at least one review ‘revise and resubmit’ (RR) or higher (54% of papers in CHI’22)
- ‘Reject’: all reviewers rated ‘reject’ (XX) or ‘reject/resubmit’ (RR/XX) (46% of papers in CHI’22)
- authors have 5 weeks to update the document source, they then submit a clear markup PDF and write the response letter (December 13, 2022)
- Winter holidays are a non-working period (December 16, 2022 – January 3, 2022)
- 1AC/2AC and externals review the changes/response
- PC meeting to decide on accept or reject (January 11-13, 2023)
- authors of accepted papers submit publication ready version (February 8, 2023)
Benefits of the CHI’23 R&R Process
Allowing More Authors to Respond to Reviews: One of the major drawbacks of the 2022 process was that only a very small number of authors were allowed to respond to the reviews and many authors felt that if they had been given the chance to respond to the reviews they would have been able to clarify misunderstandings or make the changes that reviewers asked for. Thus, in 2023, we will give more authors the opportunity to respond to the reviews in a response letter and to revise their papers. We are expecting that around 50% of submitted papers will be given the opportunity to go through the R&R process in 2023. This also means that only about half of those papers will be accepted due to space constraints and maintaining an acceptance rate between 20-25%*. Papers with higher review scores (e.g., all ‘accept’ or ‘accept/revise’ scores) will have a higher than 50% chance to get accepted, while papers with lower review scores (e.g. all ‘reject’ except for one or two ‘revise’ scores) will have only a low chance of getting accepted.
Improving the Quality of More Papers: While allowing more papers to go through R&R means that more authors will revise their papers and invest additional time, this time is not wasted if the paper does not get accepted at CHI. By going through R&R, authors benefit from improving their paper ready for resubmission to another venue or next year’s CHI if the paper does not get accepted. Going through R&R provides authors with an additional round of feedback from the original reviewers, and allows them to make changes within the cycle of the original submission (i.e., in November/early December) rather than many months after the PC meeting as was the case in previous years. From the reviewers’ point of view, we hope that having more papers go through R&R also makes reviewing more satisfying because reviewers will see the requested changes directly implemented in the revised version. We also know from the review model of journals that giving papers with a clear markup of changes a second look takes significantly less time than writing the initial review.
Remove Holiday Work: In 2022, the deadline to upload revised papers was in early January, which resulted in authors working over the winter holidays. For CHI’23, the deadline to upload revised papers will be on December 13, which is before major winter holidays. To look at the revised papers, reviewers and ACs can either use the remaining days before the winter holidays or use the first week of January before the PC meeting from January 11-13. The date of the PC meeting was chosen to neither interfere with the Western New Year (December 31) nor the Chinese New Year (January 22). Similarly, the camera ready deadline (February 8) was chosen to provide time after Chinese New Year to complete revisions without requiring work during holiday periods.
While no review process is perfect, we hope that the updated R&R process for CHI’23 will allow us to fulfill our goals, i.e. to allow more authors to go through revise and resubmit to improve the quality of their papers and respond to the reviews, to reduce the volunteer workload, and to remove holiday working, whilst keeping the benefits of the revise and resubmit process. More details will be available in the Call for Papers, which will be available on the CHI website soon.
At CHI’22 in New Orleans, the CHI’23 papers chairs will also be present at the Townhall to answer questions related to the new R&R process.
- (virtual) Tuesday, May 3, 7.30 – 8.30am
- (in person) Tuesday, May 3, 12.30 – 2.00pm, New Orleans Theater 3
Best
Stefanie Mueller, Julie R. Williamson, Max L. Wilson
CHI2023 Papers Chairs
* To clarify, CHI does not have fixed limited acceptance rates, and recommends to the PC to accept papers that make it over a bar of acceptance. While CHI does work with some constraints (e.g. room space in the conference venue), we do not place hard limits on acceptance.
