In order to fully understand the draft paper and revised draft paper phases, it is important to cover the session chair experience.
This experience is built out entirely in the Extender App. We are assuming that by this time, you have added the sessions and the session chairs have been added to those sessions.
A session chair will have access to a link in their left sidebar called Organizer Tools.
Clicking this will log them into the extender app.
Once logged in, they have two main options: List Abstracts | Emails
If they click Emails, they will find several Email Blast options that they can use to notify the relevant individuals over which they have purview.
If they click List Abstracts, that is where nearly all of the work will take place.
Once loaded, they can view the status, round, how many reviewers assigned and reviewed, click View to actually see the abstract, View Comments to see a full report of what the reviewers have said and done, and actually add / remove reviewers and make a decision. It is a full management panel for all of the abstracts within the sessions they are responsible for.
However, it is important to note that they can only take actions on abstracts that are in particular stages.
– Can only assign reviewers if the abstract is finalized in draft or revised draft paper round
– Can only make a decision on an abstract if the minimum number of reviews have been completed
– Can only make a decision on an abstract in Draft and Revised Draft Paper Rounds
Let’s click Manage on an abstract in a Revised Draft Paper round to explore these options:
What we see here is that the paper had one reviewer assigned to it in Draft Paper round, but it was accepted anyway, for testing purposes. It was then forwarded automatically to Revised Draft Papers and it was finalized there as well.
I can assign Reviewers to the draft paper submissions by clicking Add Reviewer.
I can then tab over to Decision and make a decision on the paper.
There are 3 types of decisions.
Accept – All good to go, gets forwarded to Final Paper round no matter what.
Accept w/ Revisions – Only forwarded to Revised Draft Paper round for one attempt to submit revisions. Not available as a decision in Revised Draft Paper.
Reject – Fully rejected from conference
Those are the key elements to Session Chair review.
Shortcuts for Administrators
As an administrator, you may need to help out session chairs. From the extender app, you can click Abstracts as shown here:
This will take you to a screen that is similar to what session chairs see on their side, by allowing you to View | Manage in the same manner.