Submissions to the journal-track of the ECSCW conference will undergo a fully integrated, continuous review process. The submission and review process will allow authors to develop and refine stronger papers over a longer time period. The review process is single-blind. Each submission is assigned to one of the three ECSCW 2021 Journal Papers Chairs, who is in charge of finding three reviewers, writing a meta-review and making a decision. This decision is transmitted to the Lead Editor of the CSCW Journal in charge of ECSCW contributions, who will transmit the decision to the Editor in Chief of the Journal, and will manage conflicts of interest among the different Journal Papers Chairs if necessary. Authors of the submitted papers will be considered as reviewers for other submissions and may be contacted by the Journal Papers Chairs on this behalf.

Authors are encouraged to submit as soon as they have their manuscripts ready. The system is already open for submissions. Early submissions will allow for multiple Revise & Resubmit cycles and will generally result in earlier publication of the accepted manuscript in the Journal. Papers could take approximately three months between submission and results of the first review cycle, and approximately two months in the subsequent review cycles, but the Journal Papers Chairs are working hard to speed the process up. Papers usually go through at least two review rounds. 

Upon an acceptance notice (status “Accept but incomplete”), the paper will go through production (including proof corrections) and only then will it be published on Springer Online First. To be considered for publication and presentation at ECSCW 2021, papers must reach the status “Accept but incomplete” by the 1st of April 2021. This status differs from a “Minor revisions” recommendation. The former refers to papers which require only minimal formatting amendments, while the latter refers to papers which still require some minor structural or conceptual changes. Early submission makes it more likely to receive reviews in a timely manner and speeds up the process of publication afterwards.

If the paper does not reach the “Accept but incomplete” status by the 1st of April 2021, it will automatically be transferred to the batch of submissions for the subsequent ECSCW conference, unless the submission is withdrawn. With this approach, the authors will not have to restart the submission process. All work completed to this point will be considered for the next edition of the conference. This also means that authors may get their papers accepted shortly after the ECSCW 2021 conference. If this happens, the paper will be published as an Online First manuscript as soon as it goes through the production process; the authors will be invited to present their work at ECSCW 2022.