The AutomotiveUI Conference Reviewing Policy

When an author makes a submission to AutomotiveUI, a confidential review process is initiated. The aim of the review process is to make an appropriate and timely decision on whether a submission should be published. Such decisions are based on proper review by well-qualified and impartial reviewers in accordance with standards of high-quality peer review.

The purpose of the AutomotiveUI Submissions and Reviewing Policy is to provide a frame within which the AutomotiveUI conference Venue Chair(s) will design and implement their submissions and reviewing processes. It is intended to be a policy document, not a process document, and it supplements the ACM Submission and Review Policy. Proceedings for SIGCHI conferences are published by the ACM, so all SIGCHI authors should adhere to those policies.

The AutomotiveUI reviewing process should take the reviewing process of the ACM SIGCHI flagship conference series ‘ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems’ as a reference (see for example the CHI2022 selection process), and adapt it to the special requirements of the AutomotiveUI community and to the smaller size of the conference. In this regard, each conference and paper chair shall consult current SIGCHI best practices when defining the review process.

  • Categories of Publications

    AutomotiveUI follows the SIGCHI distinction and definitions of refereed, juried and curated content:

    Refereed content is rigorously reviewed by members of the program committee and peer experts. Submitters can expect to receive formal feedback from reviewers. The program committee may ask authors for specific changes as a condition of publication. The AutomotiveUI Papers category entails refereed content.

    Juried content is reviewed by a committee in a less rigorous process than is conducted in refereed content. Juried content does not generally have the same level of lasting and significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding as refereed content. Authors who submit to juried tracks may expect to receive light feedback of up to a few paragraphs in length. In recent years, the following tracks of AutomotiveUI have contained juried content: Work in Progress, Interactive Demos, and Doctoral Colloquium.

    Curated content is highly selective but does not necessarily follow a reviewing process by a committee. Curated content may be selected from submissions or invited by the track chairs. Authors who submit to curated tracks should not expect to receive formal feedback on their submission other than the selection decision. Typically, tracks such as Panels, Tutorials, Workshops and Videos contain curated content.

  • Republishability of Contributions

    Also, the republishability policy follows the SIGCHI definition (compare the respective description for CHI2022). Refereed content is published in the main Conference Proceedings and appears in the ACM Digital Library. Authors must assign copyright of the content or assign an exclusive license to distribute to ACM, which restricts reuse of the content according to the ACM Copyright Policy. Authors do retain some rights for reuse of the material. Alternatively, authors may pay an upfront fee to ACM for Open Access.

    The AutomotiveUI Extended Abstracts are considered a semi-archival publication, as they contain juried and curated content. They are accessible through the ACM Digital Library. Copyright of content in the Extended Abstracts is retained by the authors and not assigned to the ACM.

  • Originality of the work

    In general, content from archival submissions, such as the AutomotiveUI main conference proceedings, should not be republished. However, authors can submit a substantially revised version of a published AutomotiveUI paper to another venue. When submitting such a substantially revised document to an ACM venue, they must follow the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submission. When submitting to a non-ACM venue, authors must (a) follow that venue’s policies/guidelines on prior publishing, and (b) make sure that at least 25% of the new document is material that was not previously published at AutomotiveUI.

    For ACM conferences, including AutomotiveUI, material that has been published in a semi-archival, widely disseminated publication such as the CHI Extended Abstracts, should not be republished unless the work has been “significantly” revised. Guidelines for determining “significance” of a revision are stated in the ACM Policy on Pre-Publication Evaluation and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions. Roughly, a significant revision would contain at least 25% unpublished material and significantly amplify or clarify the original material. These are subjective measures left to the interpretation of the reviewers and committee members – authors are wise to revise well beyond the Policy guidelines.

    Whenever submitting material that has partially appeared in a widely disseminated publication, it is good practice to cite the prior publication in accordance with the ACM’s Plagiarism Policy and explicitly state the differences between the new and prior material.

  • Roles and Responsibilities

    AutomotiveUI follows the ACM’s Policy on Roles and Responsibilities in Publishing for authors, reviewers, committee members, and ACM. In addition to these regulations, the following is specified:

    The respective track chairs are responsible for setting up the program committee and the reviewers for the refereed tracks. Program committee members and reviewers should be selected such that they can meet the high standards of AutomotiveUI, both in terms of responsiveness and competence. The program track chairs should explicitly and clearly brief the program committee members and the reviewers about their duties and their required activities, such that a consistent review process can be guaranteed. Track chairs are responsible for all acceptance decisions, based on recommendations made by program committee members.

    Program committee members are appointed to coordinate the review of several papers and to make recommendations to the track chairs on acceptance decisions. It is recommended that for each paper two program committee members are assigned as associate chairs: AC1 and AC2. AC1 will have two responsibilities. First, AC1 makes an acceptance recommendation. The recommendation is based on the reviews by AC2 and the two external reviewers, as well as AC1’s critical assessment of these reviews and the paper. Second, AC1 writes a meta-review to both summarize all of the reviews and to justify the acceptance recommendation. It is expected that in most cases the acceptance decision will be consistent with the overall picture of the reviews and scores for the respective paper.

    Steering Committee members review and approve the call for papers and proposed review process for the AutomotiveUI conference prior to posting. In order to facilitate this, the draft review process for a conference needs to be communicated already at conference proposal submission stage, and the final review process at least 2 months before the publication of the call for papers. If there is no approval, the conference needs to implement last year’s review policy.

  • Ethics and Conduct

    Track chairs, program committee members, and reviewers must familiarize themselves with and follow the ACM and SIGCHI policies on ethics and conduct. Note that these policies extend to all efforts that are connected to the AutomotiveUI conference, from email, to personal conversations, to text in reviews, to online or in-person meetings, to events at the conference. In general, if a member of the AutomotiveUI community has questions about ethics and conduct, they should carefully review the above policies and/or ask for guidance from track chairs, steering committee members, SIGCHI officers, or the ACM. During the review process, any ethics issues that may arise should be brought to the attention of the papers chairs, who can make a final determination (possibly over-ruling an individual reviewer).

  • Calculation of acceptance rates

    Acceptance rates will be calculated for the papers track. The formula to be applied is as follows: rate = accepted / (reviewed + desk rejected). Papers should not be reviewed nor counted as reviewed if they were withdrawn before the submission deadline, or if the submission was incomplete.