Dear Johan, Johan, and Susanne, I am sorry that you feel that the the oral presentation selection process for FEniCS '15 has not met your expectations. I will try to provide some insight into the process, although without making public statements about individual abstracts.
First, you are correct that the reviews were conducted by the scientific committee. This is entirely normal for workshops and conferences (CS conferences with papers attached are a somewhat different story, although even there the reviews are typically conducted by the programme committee). Note however that the scientific committee was deliberately chosen from different institutions and different parts of the project. The FEniCS book is a scientific publication, the review process for which is justifiably more intensive. The criteria which came up in the reviewing process were novelty, and relevance to the audience as a whole, and scientific significance. These were not publicly discussed, or even formally laid out. However since they are the usual criteria applied to talk selection, it is not clear that they needed to be the subject of debate. * Novelty was an issue for some abstracts which appeared very similar to those submitted at last year's workshop. There were also some abstracts which seemed quite incremental with respect to existing work. * Relevance to the audience essentially means that the abstracts need to say something interesting about the development of the technology, or a new way of applying the technology. This was mostly an issue for some abstracts which were more application focussed and had little or nothing to say about the simulation technology. Some abstracts were also marked up because they seemed to offer interesting perspectives from people outside the core developers of any of the streams of development. * Scientific significance was not a great distinguishing feature in most cases, because happily this is not a community in which there is much work of low quality. There were, however, a small number of abstracts where the work seemed to be very preliminary and this counted against those abstracts. Conversely, there were some abstracts which seemed both conceptually deep and contained significant technological development, and these scored very well indeed. In response to your direct accusations, proximity to the work of members of the scientific committee was not a criterion for selection. As part of that, direct conflicts of interest were also avoided by members not reviewing their own work. More importantly, if you look at the list of talks, it is apparent that they span a very wide range of code paths, numerics, and applications, in particular covering several strands of development in which the scientific committee is not at all involved. Regards, David On Fri, 15 May 2015 at 10:50 Johan Jansson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > From what we understand the review of the abstracts was carried out by the > scientific committee of the workshop, not by external reviewers or by the > authors of other abstracts in the workshop (as done e.g. for the FEniCS > book). From the review comments it's clear that one of the primary criteria > is how well connected the work is to one of the software branches that the > members of the review panel are working on, and not scientific quality. > Given that FEniCS is a community project and FEniCS'15 is the only meeting > of the year for developers, a public discussion of the review criteria > would have been natural. > > We understand that rescheduling of the presentations might be too > difficult at this point for FEniCS 15, but we hope that we can agree on a > more constructive and balanced review procedure for the future. > > Despite the problems with the review process, we decided to participate in > the workshop and we hope to contribute to a fun meeting in the spirit of > scientific advancement. > > Johan Hoffman, Johan Jansson, Susanne Claus > >
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