Specification Updates, Jan 13, 2021
The following features will be added to the spec on the Home page:
#10. In addition to collecting EDI data from the potential participants who indicate their interest in attending, the data must be collected in an anonymized way, but associated with the proposal. It should be made clear to the user that the information will not be directly associated to their identity, but is collected for statistical purposes. These statistics should be available to the organizers of the proposal, as well as staff and review committees.
#10.5. Some of the fields on the proposal submission form concern the subject matter of the proposal. Submitters will be asked to choose the AMS Subject Classification that their proposal falls under. They are given a primary subject, a secondary subject, and a third, "BIRS Subject", which is our local list of subjects that change often (see Staff Features #11).
BIRS also maintains a list of experts that it calls upon to do proposal reviews. Each "Reviewer" should have subject area expertise associated to them.
After the Proposal Submitter has selected the subjects of their proposal, they should be asked to select which reviewers, from a list of proposal reviewers who's subject area expertise match the selected subject areas of the proposal, would be a good fit for reviewing the proposal. Additionally, the proposal submitter should be able to mark any potential reviewers as "not applicable" for reviewing this proposal. This could be due to conflict of interest, or some other reason. (Nice to have feature: allow them to attach a note to explain why they marked certain reviewers as "not applicable"). There will be further discussion of the "applicability" of reviewers in the Proposal Reviews section, #...
- (nice-to-have) The review form should allow uploads of files (e.g. PDFs), to be associated with the review.
12.5. One committee, the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), should have permission to assign proposals to particular Proposal Reviewers (Staff also have this ability). The relationship between a particular reviewer and the proposal they are assigned should have at least two additional properties: a) The type of reviewer: One particular reviewer will be marked as a "Handling Editor", who is in charge of the reviews for this proposal. b) Each Proposal Reviewer's relationship to their assigned proposal should have an "Objectivity" grade, of say, 1-5.
The system should automatically subtract from a Reviewer's objectivity score if, for example, the Reviewer's university affiliation is the same as the university affiliation of the Organizer who submitted the proposal. Or if the Reviewer is on the list of Potential Participants in the Proposal. There will be a list of conditions that affect a Reviewer's objectivity score. Members of the SAB committee should also be able to adjust the objectivity score of Reviewers, as they relate to particular proposals. The SAB members may have special knowledge of conflicts of interest, for example. The Objectivity Score might be called "Arms Length" score -- check with Director.
In the interface, the objectivity score of a reviewer assigned to a proposal should be colour-coded. For example, green for an objectivity score of 5, and red for a score of 1.
