TCB Guidelines for Action Editors
This document provides instructions for action editors (AE). Before reading this section, make sure to also read and be familiar with the Editorial Policies, the Acceptance Criteria, the Reviewer Guidelines, the Ethics Guidelines, and the Code of Conduct.
Action Editor Responsibilities
As an AE, you are responsible for the following aspects of the review process.
Annual Quota. AE assignments are given on a rolling basis, as submissions are received. The default quota is 12 papers per year, but it is possible to change it through the OpenReview console, as well as to mark yourself temporarily unavailable for periods such as illness, vacation, or work leave. You are generally expected to accept all AE requests of submissions that fall within your expertise and quota. Acceptable exceptions are a conflict of interest with one of the authors.
Desk rejection of inappropriate submissions. The first step following an AE assignment is to determine (within 1 week) whether or not the submitted preprint is appropriate for TCB and respects our submission guidelines. Clear cases of desk rejection include:
- Submissions that are clearly out of scope (not related to computational biology).
- Submissions that do not use the TCB stylefile.
- Submissions that clearly overlap with work already published in proceedings or currently under review for publication elsewhere.
- Submissions that lack any source code (unless an exemption has been requested and justified).
- Submissions that make no novel contribution (e.g., pure replications without added value, straightforward applications of off-the-shelf methods to a new dataset).
Assignment of reviewers. Once confirmed that a submission is appropriate for TCB, you should assign it for review to 3 reviewers. You must make the initial assignment within one week of accepting a paper's assignment. Avoid reviewers who have already filled their annual quota or have an unsubmitted review for another TCB submission. By default, reviewers are asked to submit their review within 2 weeks of their assignment (or 4 weeks for submissions over 12 pages).
Post-review discussion. Once the third review has been submitted, the authors are given a chance to respond to reviewers' feedback, answer questions, and update their manuscript accordingly. You are responsible for making sure reviewers engage actively in this discussion. You may also participate yourself by asking questions directly to the authors or starting private conversations via OpenReview involving only the reviewers to try to reach a consensus.
Our Ethics Guidelines describe TCB's ethical principles. If you or any of the reviewers have concerns around the ethical implications of the submission, check whether the authors address the concerns in a Broader Impact Statement. If you would like an additional reviewer with ethics expertise, or if you suspect that no statement would make the work ethically acceptable, reach out to the Editors-in-Chief.
Based on their discussion with the authors, reviewers will submit their own recommendation no sooner than 2 weeks and no later than 4 weeks after the submission of the third review.
Decision and certification. Once all 3 reviewer decision recommendations have been submitted, you should aim to submit your decision proposal within 1 week. Your decision proposal should therefore be submitted within 5 weeks of the beginning of the discussion between authors and reviewers.
There are 3 possible outcomes: Accept, Accept with minor revision, and Reject (see Editorial Policies). As described in the Acceptance Criteria page, acceptance decisions should be based on four criteria:
- Are the claims made in the submission supported by accurate, convincing and clear evidence?
- Does the submission make a novel contribution to computational biology?
- Does the submission include openly available source code?
- Would at least some individuals in TCB's audience be interested in the findings of this paper?
In addition to a decision, for accepted papers you may also recommend a certification if you think the paper deserves additional recognition. See the Reviewer Guidelines for the list of available certifications.
Final verification of camera-ready submission. As your final task for an accepted paper, you are asked to quickly verify that the camera-ready manuscript complies with the TCB stylefile, with all author information inserted in the manuscript, the link to the OpenReview page, and a publicly accessible code repository URL.
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