| http://cvpr.ai.mit.edu/oct/ |
This guide list instructions for using OCT at each stage of the paper submission process.
1. Getting Started 2. Staying Out of Trouble 3. Accepting Papers 4. Assigning Reviews 5. Accepting Reviews 6. Deciding on Acceptance 7. Extending OCT
Setting up requires editing a few files. You should edit all files as the octadmin user. When you login as "octadmin", the directory, aolserver/servers/oct contains subdirectories named tcl and pages. The "pages" directory contains the actual Web pages (or the tcl scripts that directly generate them). The "tcl" directory contains more tcl scripts that contain general utilities used by scripts in the "pages" directory. Changes made to files in the "pages" directory appear immediately, but changes made to files in the "tcl" directory do not appear until you kill (which automatically restarts) the Web server software by going to the "aolserver" directory and typing:
Note that killing the server would interrupt any file uploads or downloads in progress, so it's not a good idea to do it an hour before your paper submission deadline!./kill
Edit the pages/index.adp file with author instructions for your conference. This is the first page that visitors to your site will see. Typically, the Program Chair would edit this file using the HTML editor of his/her choice.
The file isn't actually an HTML file, it's an ADP file, which means that it's an HTML file with 2 additional lines at the top and bottom that generate the page's header and footer. Depending on the Chair's editor, you may need to delete these 2 lines and rename the file as "index.html" before editing it. When finished, remove any HTML headers and footers that the Chair's editor may have added, and replace them with the original 2 lines, which are:
<%=[Header Instructions]%> <%=[Footer]%>
Edit the configuration files in pages/admin/config:
Visit the Web site and register yourself. Because you included your email in the "admins.txt" file, it will automatically promote you to admin and you will have an "Admin" link in the right margin that isn't visible to other users. Go there to see your command and control center.
Under the "Setup Menu", click "Create Areas" to create the topic areas you listed in your "areas.txt" file. If you add another area to this file, you'll need to rerun this script.
Invite all the reviewers and Area Chairs to register, and ask the reviewers to click on "My Reviews" to select their area preferences.
When reviewers register with different addresses than you had in your reviewers.txt file, you'll need to replace their email address in the file, and click on "Promote Reviewers" under the "Setup Menu" on the "Admin" page.
The installation process protected your Web site from software failures (if it hangs, it will be automatically restarted), but not hardware failures (power or network outage). If you want to be notified when your machine goes down, use the free service at http://uptime.arsdigita.com/uptime/
If something ever did go wrong, so that you needed to restore a dump:pg_dump octdb > filename
See the PostgreSQL Administrator's Guide for more information.psql octdb < filename
The PDF and supplementary files need to be backed up separately, and you'll find them in the directories:
The Web server keeps 2 types of logs. The Access Log reports every Web page access, and you can view the results from the "Admin" page under the "Access Logs" menu. This is useful when a user complains of a problem and you want to see his/her click trail to determine where the mistake was made.
The other type of log records all errors that occur. Almost all errors will result in serving an error message page to the user and sending an email to the admin. The admin should then read the location of the error from the log, which is appended chronologically. The best way to access it is to go to the aolserver directory and open the log with the command
Then use the ">" key to jump to the end of the file (where the recent entries are), and use the "b" and "f" keys to page back and forth.less log/oct.log
When an author successfully uploads a PDF, then automatically receive a confirmation email. To change the contents of the email, edit pages/papers/post.tcl.
If you need to make an announcement that appears in bold red on the "My Papers" page, edit the tcl/init.tcl file to change the value of the "announcements" config variable. (See instructions under "Getting Started" for applying changes to the "tcl/init.tcl" file).
When your paper submission deadline passes, edit the tcl/init.tcl file to change the value of the submitStage config variable from "submit" to "closed". (See instructions under "Getting Started" for applying changes to the "tcl/init.tcl" file).
If some authors need to email or ftp their PDF files to you, you can submit them by placing them in the admin/manual directory and clicking "Submit PDFs Manually" under the "Maintenence Menu" on the "Admin" page.
Click "See Submission Stats" on the "Admin" page.
Two very useful links are "Users" under the "Maintenance Menu" and "Lookup Paper/Author" under the "Paper Reports" menu on the "Admin" page.
In parallel with the paper submission stage, reviewers should have been registering with the Web site and entering their preferences on the "My Reviews" page. YOU MAY NOT PROCEED UNTIL ALL REVIEWERS HAVE REGISTERED.
You can view reports of their results on under the "Reviewer Reports" menu of the "Admin" page. From the "Preferences by Area" and "Preferences by Reviewer" reports, the Program Chair decides and informs the Area Chairs which reviewers will be assigned to which areas.
Before entering the review process, you MUST clean up from the submission process. The "Maintenance Menu" on the "Admin" page lists serveral utilities for this:
Inform the Chairs to go to the "Chairs" page and assign 3 reviewers to each of the papers in their area.
If the admin ever needs to assign a review on the fly (such as to get around a conflict of interest that is discovered later), there is a "Assign a Review" utility under the "Maintenance Menu" on the "Admin" page.
When the Chairs have finished assigning reviews (you can monitor their progress from the "See Submission Stats" link under the "Paper Reports" menu on the "Admin" page), edit the tcl/init.tcl file to change the value of the reviewStage config variable from "assign" to "submit". Type "./kill" in the "aolserver" directory to cause your change to take effect (as explained above under "Getting Started").
If the Admin ever needs to enter a review on behalf of someone else (such as a reviewer without Web access who emailed in his review), go to the reviews/edit.tcl?pid=PID&uid=UID Web page. But when you type that into your browser, substitute "PID" with the paper ID, and "UID" with the user_id of the reviewer (which you can find on the "Users" link under the "Maintenance Menu" on the "Admin" page.
When the reviewStage has progressed from "assign" to "submit" (see above), the Chairs section will grant the Area Chairs the ability to read the reviews and make recommendations on acceptance. The emails of reviewers are listed so the chairs can prod late reviewers to get their reviews in.
When all the recommendations have been made, the Program Chair checks the reports listed under the "Final Answer" menu of the "Admin" page and distributes them to the members of the committee as he/she desires (they could be emailed or printed for a committee meeeting).
To enter the committee's decisions on paper acceptance into the database, edit the files in the pages/admin/config directory named oral, poster, and reject. Each file must contain a list, one per line, of paper IDs. When finised editing, click "Update Acceptance" on the "Final Answer" menu of the "Admin" page to update the database.
Edit the tcl/init.tcl file to change the value of the submitStage config variable from "closed" to "results". (See instructions under "Getting Started" for applying changes to the "tcl/init.tcl" file).
Click "Author Mail List" under the "Maintenance Menu" menu of the "Admin" page to obtain a list of emails of all authors. Notify them that the committee has decided on acceptance, and authors can view the results, as well as read the reviews of their papers by going to the "My Papers" page.
Click "Accepted Mail List" under the "Final Answer" menu of the "Admin" page to obtain a list of emails of authors with accepted papers. Give this list to the publisher of the conference proceedings.
To add your own reports to the "Admin" page:
You may need to perform operations that don't have a handy dandy tool on the "Admin" page. To access the database directly, enter the interactive terminal by typing the following as the octadmin user:
psql octdb
If you change the data model (such as by adding columns to a table), also update the pages/admin/sql/model.sql file to maintain a reference of your model.
Here are some useful examples of database queries you may want to run:
Get an email list of Area Chairs:
select email from oct_users where clearance = 3;
Delete a review of paper #30 by reviewer #45 (because a reviewer discovered that they would be partial):
delete from oct_reviews where paper_id = 30 and reviewer_id = 45;
Assign a review (even though there is a tool on the "Admins" page) to paper #100 by user #50:
insert into oct_users (paper_id, reviewer_id) values (100, 50);
Add name of institution to the users table:
alter table oct_users add institution varchar(100);
Delete paper #200 and all of its reviews. Be sure to include the "where..." clause or you will delete ALL papers! (It's a good idea to do a database dump beforehand in case you mess up).
delete from oct_reviews where paper_id = 200; delete from oct_papers where paper_id = 200;