Conflict management

EasyChair has a special plugin for conflict management. It is especially useful when submissions are anonymous.

Chairs can access the “Conflict management plugin” table via “Administration” → “Configure”. This table can be configured by Chairs to suit the conference's conflict management needs.

Conflict Management options

The conflict of interest plugin contains several options for the advanced management of conflicts of interest. The options are described below:

1. Automatic "same person" conflict registration.  If this option is enabled, whenever an author of a submission is also a program committee member, a conflict of interest between this program committee member and the submission will be registered.
2. Automatic "same organization" conflict registration.  If this option is enabled, whenever an author of a submission has the same organization as a program committee member, a conflict of interest between this program committee member and the submission will be registered. Note that there are many ways of writing the same organization, for example, some users can write "Manchester University" instead of "The University of Manchester" so EasyChair will not necessarily recognize the same organization.
3. Automatic conflict registration applies to chairs.  Some chairs do not want to have any conflicts of interest related to chairs. Disabling this option will also disable any automatic conflict registration when the program committee member is a chair.
4. Authors can declare conflicts of interest. If this option is enabled, authors can (and will be asked to) declare potential conflicts of interest with program committee members. This option is especially helpful for double-blind reviewing, when program committee does not have access to author names and therefore cannot identify conflicts of interest. Conflict declarations by authors are desribed in more detail in the article "Conflict Declarations by Authors".
5. PC members can view conflicts declared by authors against them If this option is on, a PC member can view conflicts declared by authors against her or him. Only the conflicts and their kinds will be shown, any author-provided explanations will not be shown.
6. Reviewers can search for conflicts in the list of authors This option allows reviewers to declare conflicts of interests with authors by viewing the list of authors, without viewing the list of submissions. It is especially useful for double-blind reviewing, when reviewers cannot see submission authors.