BYU Paper Review System

The BYU Paper Review System is a conference/workshop paper submission and review management system. Click here for a demo. It is designed to make the job of reviewing papers a little easier to manage. This system is actively under development, and we are in the process of adding additional features. Here is a list of events associated with using this system to manage a conference.

Right now, our system supports the following features:

• Web-based submission of abstracts and papers by authors. The submission is a two-step process -- an abstract must be submitted and the author must choose a password for the paper, and then authors can submit an actual paper. They can modify their submission until the PC Chair disables this feature after the paper submission deadline. After papers have been accepted, the PC Chair can re-enable paper submission and authors can use the same mechanism to replace their original paper with a final version.
• Web-based submission of reviews by program committee members. After submitting a review, a PC member can view and change the review.
• Web-based download of papers by program committee.
• Web-based program committee meeting -- the program committee chair can enable program committee members to read reviews by other committee members at the appropriate time.
• Review progress tracking -- PC Chair can view the status of reviews and see discrepancies between evaluations. Papers can be ordered by reviewer, paper ID, overall rating, or discrepancy of ratings.
• Program committee members can update their personal profiles (name, e-mail, phone, etc.).
• PC Chair can issue ad-hoc SQL queries (select, insert, update, delete -- any SQL operation).
• You can establish multiple categories of program committee members if you wish.
• You can establish research topics related to the conference. If you do, authors will be allowed to select which topics pertain to their paper, and PC members can select topics they are interested in. This enables interest-based matching for assigning papers to review.
• You assign initial user ID's and passwords to the program committee, and they can change their password when they log on. Your initial password is stored in the database in plain text, but when they change their password, it is encrypted.
• Allow PC members to browse abstracts (ordered by best research topic match to the PC member's interest) and indicate preference to review particular papers, or conflict of interest with papers.
• Web-based assignment of papers to program committee for review.
• Send e-mail based on a template and an SQL query. (This feature is currently partially implemented as a stand-alone C program, sendemail, which you can run from the Unix command line. It supports nested queries, but not conditionals, or imperative loops in the templates. Pre-built templates and queries are available to do the following:
  • Notify program committee of the Web site, their user ID, and their password to log on.
  • Notify authors that their paper has been received and is being reviewed.
  • Notify program committee of review assignments.
  • Notify program committee of discrepancies between their review and those of other referees.
  • Remind program committee of reviews that still need to be submitted.
  • Thank program committee for their reviews.
  • Notify authors of accepted papers, send them their anonymous referee comments.
  • Notify authors of rejected papers, send them their anonymous referee comments.
  • Remind authors of camera-ready paper due date.
• Web-based form for PC Chair to update conference deadlines and to set capabilities (e.g., can authors change their paper info?).
• Web-based form for marking papers as accepted or rejected.

Features coming soon (we hope):

• Rewrite C modules as PHP scripts instead (unless efficiency concerns dictate otherwise in one or two cases).
• Frames-based interface with more icons, for improved site navigation.
• Use cookies and session ID management for better security.
• Documentation!

All of these features are implemented using HTML forms and ordinary Web browser techniques. The most exotic feature used is multi-part forms, which is required for uploading papers. We know this system works with Netscape Navigator 3.x and above, or Internet Explorer 4.x and above. Any other browser that handles multi-part forms should also work.

If you agree to the terms of our copyright and license agreement, you may download the source code.

New! A team of students in France has adapted the Paper Review System for use in a journal setting. Their source code is also posted here (look for the IJDAR version).

The Paper Review System is written in PHP (www.php.net) and C (we use GNU gcc and Solaris 2.6 x86), and uses the mySQL database management system. Our Web server of choice is Apache. For help setting up PHP/Apache/mySQL, see The Soothingly Seamless Setup of Apache, SSL, MySQL, and PHP (you can skip the SSL part if you want).

We have not installed these tools on Windows NT, but we see no fundamental reason why they cannot work with other Web servers and operating systems. The database interface is currently written in the mySQL native C API and PHP interface module, so you must either install and use mySQL or port the database-access code.