acm sigcomm

SIGCOMM strives to avoid conflict of interest in its reviewing practices. This page summarizes recommended practices with respect to PC Chairs.

PC chairs should work to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest (COI) with respect to papers that they submit to the conference.  A simple way to do this is to avoid submitting papers while serving as PC chair.  Barring that, a method should be used that avoids explicitly identifying PC chair papers as such during the review process. Ideally, if the reviewing system supports anonymity for individual co-chairs, then it may be possible to manage COI papers within the reviewing system, as long as their status as PC-chair-authored papers is not revealed to reviewers.  Alternately, this can be done by having all papers for which PC chairs have a COI (either because the paper were written by a PC chair or because the paper's authors have COI with a PC chair)  handled as a group by a non-conflicted third party.  Handling the papers as a group helps insure that reviewers do not know whether they are reviewing PC chair papers specifically.