Senior Editors

What	How	Who
tribunal	sounding board for intricated review	Tim,Hoa,Greg
social media posts		Tim,Greg
desk rejects		Tim,Greg
alarm clock	monitors for slow review cycles	Tim,Hoa
special issues assessment	reviews special issue proposals (*)	Tim,Hoa
special issue proposals	reaches out to selected SE event organisers to run SIs	Justyna

Special Issues Assessment

Usually handled with a single review rule: do the guest editors have any background publishing in SE venues?

Many papers are not sent on to review for the following four reasons:

Not situated in se domain; e.g. the paper makes no reference to papers from the SE mainstream?
Paper lacks evaluation against some prior state of the art result.
Paper does not have a significant automation component.
- But we are a little light handed with this one since papers might (e.g.) be offering a new result in a previously unexplored area.
Paper does not satisfy the requirements of a (e.g. )technical paper as stated in https://ause-journal.github.io/cfp.html. Paper might be more suitable to resubmit this as a (e.g.) tools paper Note that to do #3 properly we need to know the intent of the authors (what kind of paper they thought they were submitting). Authors can supply that intent in the paper title OR cover letter . Also note that this point might lead to major revision, not rejection.

As to other principles of desk rejects:

Be open to out of the box. Sometimes (ocassionaly) we find gems there that mean we should junk all our rules and take a paper since it is cool.

Includes, but not limited to:

profiles of the editorial board
exciting new papers
upcoming special issues
new of the journal
- new editors
- improvements in our impact factors
- improvements in our “time to first decision”
- educstion about our innovaction call for papers