I. Assigning Reviewers

A. Go to ACM's Manuscript Central (http://acm.manuscriptcentral.com) and login.  Be sure to search for an existing account before you create a new account for a reviewer.

B. Choose 'Editor Center' and then click on 'New Manuscripts: Manage Reviewers and Make Decisions.'

C. You will now see a list of your assignments.  Click on 'View Details' to view the submission or assign reviewers.

D. Under 'Editor Actions,' click on Assign/Remove Reviewers.

E. Select 'Assign Reviewer' to add a reviewer's name to the list, and then select 'Invite Reviewer' to send him/her an email. Before creating a new account for a reviewer, please use the reviewer search option in the right pane. This will allow the reviewer to use an existing ACM Manuscript account.

F. After a reviewer has been invited, the reviewer needs to email you back, stating whether or not the assignment will be accepted.

G. Once you hear back from the reviewer, go back into Manuscript Central and into the 'Editor Actions' menu for the proposed submission.  Click on the appropriate action button next to the reviewer's name (i.e. 'Agreed,' 'Declined,' etc).  This will then generate an email out to the reviewer with the link to the submission.  If the reviewer agrees, the submission will not be visible to the reviewer until you hit the 'Agreed' button.

H. Please encourage your reviewers to compose detailed reviews based on TACO's Guidelines for Referees webpage. 

II. Making a Preliminary Decision

A. Once a reviewer completes a review, you will receive an email notification.  When all the reviews are completed, you may then make your preliminary decision that will be sent to the Editors-in-Chief.  This decision should take into consideration your own opinion of the submission as well as the general consensus of the refereeing committee.

B. Under "Editor Actions," click on "Make Decisions," and then click on "Post Decision."

C. Select your decision from the drop down menu. There are four options: Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, and Reject. Please choose Accept only when the submission is perfect and there are no suggestions for improvement (use this sparingly). Use the Minor Revision option when you feel the submission should be accepted after slight revisions. Use Major Revision when you feel the majority of the paper should be redone and then gone through another review process. Use Reject when the submission is not appropriate for TACO publication. Please also post your comments to the Editors-in-Chief in the comment box.

There are five options for classifying a paper: Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, Resubmit, and Reject.

Accept - An Accept with no revision means that the submission is perfect and there are no suggestions for improvement. The paper is ready for publication.

Minor Revision - A Minor revision should only be used for papers that have a clear contribution, and there are only small changes that need to be made to make the paper ready for publication. A minor revision usually means that only textual changes are needed. If changes to the methodology is needed or simulations need to be run, then major revision should probably be given, unless it is felt that the authors probably already have the additional data or the results can be gathered very quickly. For minor revision, only the Editor will need to validate that the revised paper has adequately met the suggested changes.

Major Revision - Major revision means that the submission has a clear contribution and there is enough evidence in the current submission to demonstrate that contribution. Major revision should only be used if the paper excels in (1) relevance and interest to TACO's audience, and (2) the submission has significant contributions and/or is novel, and either technical quality and/or presentation needs major revision. For technical quality, this means that a few experiments or comparisons may be needed to complete the publication to make it journal quality. BUT the evaluation of the contribution of the paper should not be resting upon the outcome of these additional results. If the paper is missing important results to evaluate its contribution, then the paper should be classified as either Resubmit or Reject. A paper classified as major revision is "conditionally accepted" based on adequately making the suggested major revisions. Therefore, there is a very high probability, but not 100%, that the paper will be accepted.

Resubmit - The classification Resubmit is used when a paper shows that it might have a potential contribution and the topic is of interest to TACO, but not enough information is provided in the submission to determine this. Papers in this category often need more comparisons to prior work to determine if the proposed approach advances the state of the art, or needs a major rewrite to allow certain points of the paper to be understood. The resubmission will go through a faster review process to determine if it should be accepted or rejected.

Reject - This rating is used when the submission is off topic for TACO, it is an incremental contribution over prior art, or a more complete submission is needed to better evaluate the ideas presented. The authors can revise, run new experiments, and decide to potentially submit to TACO as a new submission, or to a different conference or journal at a later date. If submitted again to TACO, it will be treated as a new submission.

An Editor suggesting either Major revision or Resubmit needs to provide an itemized list describing exactly what the authors need to address in their revision. When the paper is resubmitted it will be sent to the same Editor and reviewers for evaluation.

Please view the ScholarOne Tutorial for Editors - this will give you step-by-step instructions with screen shots:

• PowerPoint tutorial
• Microsoft Word version

These and other tutorials and FAQs can be found at ScholarOne's Support website.