An ACM TOCE Associate Editor (AE) has three responsibilities:

1. Editing submissions assigned by the EiC
2. Contributing to new and revised journal policy
3. Helping attract submissions and disseminate published work

Most of the role's effort goes to #1. However, #2 and #3, while requiring less time, can be quite important to the broader mission of the journal. Below we discuss how to do each well.

What are the journal's reviewing standards?

All academic communities have evolving standards about rigor. The best way to understand the standards we try to uphold for ACM TOCE is to read two things:

• The Author Guidelines. Read these to understand how we communicate our expectations to authors. These evolve over time as the board discusses and debates new standards.
• The Reviewer Guidelines. Read these to understand how reviewers are guided to work with you and conduct their review.
• The Reviewing Criteria. Read these to understand the judgments we expect you and reviewers to make about research submissions. These are mirrored in the author guidelines.

When you first join as an AE, read these carefully. But they will change over time, so be sure to participate in discussions about changes, and refer back for the latest guidance.

Why was I assigned as Associate Editor for this paper?

A common question that AEs have is why they were assigned a particular paper (especially when they feel like they're being assigned too much!). Balancing AE availability, expertise, and editing commitments against submission volume is far from a science. This is how the EiC tries to balance these things for each monthly submission cycle:

• First, the EiC desk rejects all papers out of scope, so we have a clean list of papers needing AE assignments
• Next, the EiC identifies all AEs who have 3 or fewer active assignments. (Assignments can go on for months, depending on how long it is taking to get reviews, but we aspire to ensure you aren't managing more than 3 at any given time).
• The EiC sorts this list first by the total number of submissions each AE has managed over the past 12 months, removing any AEs that have managed more than 12 from consideration. Within each group of number of submissions in the past 12 months, the EiC sorts from fewest active submissions to most.
• Going through each submission needing assignment, in order of submission, the EiC scans the sorted AE list for the first available AE with suitable expertise and without apparent conflicts of interest.
• After all submissions are tentatively assigned, the EiC sends assignments, with rationale for the assignment.

This whole process takes about 2 hours, for the roughly 12-20 submissions we receive each month, about 5-7 minutes per submission.

If there are not enough AEs for the number of submissions needing AEs, or there are not enough AEs with expertise on a topic, the EiC begs AEs with 3 current assignments to take a 4th, and then begins another surge of AE recruiting efforts to try to address the gap.

How does Reciprocal Reviews fit in?

ACM TOCE compensates review and editing labor through Reciprocal Reviews. Submissions entering the review cycle from the 1 November 2026 deadline onward are paid for in review tokens; earlier submissions are not. Authors spend tokens to submit; reviewers, Associate Editors, and the EiC earn them. Current amounts, and the reasoning behind each, are on the venue page — that page is authoritative, so this guide does not repeat the numbers.

Two things to understand before your first assignment:

• Peer review still happens entirely in Manuscript Central. Reciprocal Reviews never receives a manuscript or a review. It records that the work happened and moves tokens.
• Nothing is automatic. No one is paid because a review arrived. Authors follow a link to pay; you follow links to credit your reviewers and to be credited yourself. If you skip these steps, your reviewers simply do not get paid, so it is your responsibility to follow through. Reviewers can request compensation if they believe you've forgotten.
• No submission receives an Associate Editor until they have paid. The Editor-in-Chief will verify payment before assigning.

Your part is small but key:

1. Press Assign on a reviewer's row when they accept (Step 4).
2. Press Complete when their review meets our quality bar (Step 6).
3. Request compensation for your own editing (below). The Editor-in-Chief will do this after your recommendation is processed.

[!IMPORTANT]
Volunteer for the Associate Editor role at our venue signing in with your ORCID. The form you use to request compensation for your own editing only appears to scholars who hold a role at the venue. If you have never volunteered, you will not be able to ask to be compensated.

[!IMPORTANT]
Only a venue administrator, the Editor-in-Chief on the submission, or the holder of the role that approves reviewers can press Assign or Complete. The usual reason those buttons are missing is that no editor has claimed the submission yet — until one has, no assignment on it can be approved and it cannot be marked done. The page says so when that is the case. Write the EiC and ask them to claim it, rather than assuming the reviewer has already been paid.

What is the Associate Editor's process?

This is the core job of an AE and builds upon an understanding of the journal's reviewing standards. It generally involves the following steps:

1. Note the submission category
2. Read the paper
3. Decide whether to review
4. Invite reviewers
5. Remind reviewers
6. Review reviews
7. Make a recommendation
8. Handle revisions

Steps 1-7 above should ideally take no more than 90 days.

Each of these contains some important steps. Note: feel free to reach out to the EiC at any time for guidance on any of these steps (Discord or email). It's better that we collaborate on this process than do it alone.

Step 1. Note the submission category

While most of our papers are research papers, some are book reviews, and we may have more categories in the future. We follow roughly the same process below, with minor deviations that we note below.

Step 2. Read the paper

When you first receive an assignment from the EiC, log in to Manuscript Central:

Click the Associate Editor Center link:

Look for the "Awaiting Referee Selection" link in the Associate Editor list:

Find the View Submission link under the paper title to see the submission's PDF:

You want to first verify a few things:

• Do you have a conflict of interest with the authors? If you do, it's important to write back to the EiC as soon as you can to let them know, so they can assign a different AE to manage the submission. ACM details what counts as a conflict of interest in its detailed policy.

• Do you have the expertise to edit? You don't have to be the world's foremost expert on the paper's topic, but you should have enough expertise to be aware of the literature, and know who the world's foremost experts are. Skim the paper to see what methods it uses and what literature it cites. If you aren't at all sure who might review, write the EiC back and see if there's an AE available with more expertise. If there's not, the EiC may have you review it anyway, or they may try to recruit a new AE that does.

• Are you available to edit? As an AE, you should commit to editing assignments from the EiC, but there are many reasons why you might not be available. Don't hesitate to reply to the EiC and explain the situation; burnout is the last thing we want to drive a peer review process.

Step 3. Decide whether to review

Assuming you're eligible, available, and sufficiently expert, you'll next decide whether the paper should go out for peer review at all. There are three decisions available to you before review begins: Unsubmit, Reject without Review, and Reject.

One possible first decision is to Unsubmit. Reasons to unsubmit are:

• The paper is not sufficiently anonymized. (See the author guide on what "sufficient" means.)
• The paper's PDF is untagged or otherwise not accessible to screen readers. (See the author guide's accessibility requirements; authors may be asked to submit a tagged version before peer review.)
• There are notable errors that seem fixable and that would streamline peer review and ensure a better peer review outcome.

If you believe a paper needs to be unsubmitted, write the Editor to consult and they will unsubmit. (Note that if an unsubmitted paper is resubmitted, Manuscript Central may not notify you, so make sure to check for updates.)

The second possible decision is Reject without Review. The EiC is supposed to catch these prior to assigning an AE, but sometimes the case is ambiguous and they will assign an AE to get a second opinion. These are reasons you might reject without review:

• The paper seems out of scope.
• The paper is not research, based on the definition we provide in the journal scope.
• The paper is so incoherent that no reviewer will understand it.
• The paper appears to have a plagiarism issue within the scope of ACM plagiarism policy; Manuscript Central provides a report of potential plagiarism that might help detect some issues.
• The paper includes numerous, egregious fabricated references. (The author guide's Generative AI policy is the canonical statement of how fabricated references are handled at each stage of review.)
• The paper is an extension of prior work that does not meet requirements for extensions.

If you see one of these issues, consult with the EiC within one week of being assigned when possible. If they agree with the issue, they will unassign you from the paper and reject it without review, explaining the rationale to the authors. (In the case of fixable problems like anonymity, we may "unsubmit", giving authors a chance to repair the issue).

The third possible decision is Reject. This is different from Reject without Review in that you will solicit a review from a second AE or external reviewer, and so it is technically reviewed, but only by one other person, to get at least one more opinion on your judgement. These are reasons you might choose to Reject:

• Unjustified length. (There is no set limit, but there are a variety of reasons why something might be appropriate, including verbosity, or something being the wrong genre, like a book or dissertation. Note that qualitative work is always longer than quantitative work, and thus its extra length is justified).
• The paper is missing essential, relevant discourses (e.g., missing entire communities of work, as opposed to one or two references).
• The paper is missing major details essential for evaluating the work (e.g., no methods, no results).
• The paper starts from premises that have been deeply, unequivocally refuted by a consensus of prior work (e.g., the Earth is flat).

If you choose to Reject, think of the review process as the same as with any other submission, but instead of finding three reviews, you're finding one, and instead of recruiting from the broader community, you're recruiting an Associate Editor from the editorial board. Once you get a review from another AE, you'll submit a recommendation to the Editor as normal, and the Editor will make the official Reject decision. Authors will see your recommendation, the AE review you solicited, and the Editor's decision letter.

To do this, your first step is to invite an AE to review. Review the editorial board for a list. Use Manuscript Central's person search to find the secondary AE (email is the most reliable query):

Once you've found them, assign them as a reviewer by clicking the checkbox next to their result and pressing the add button:

Set the “# reviews needed to make decision" to “1”:

Find the referee list at the top of the page and press the invite button to invite the second AE. A popup window will appear with a draft email; modify it to state that you are seeking a second opinion on the paper to decide whether it is suitable for peer review. Request that the opinion be returned within 14 days. When you receive the secondary AE's opinion, submit the recommendation to the EiC for review and they will approve the recommendation.

If you do not believe you need a second opinion, you may submit a recommendation with zero other reviews. Only do this when you believe the grounds for rejection are unambiguous and extremely unlikely to be judged differently by another editor. In this case, skip the reviewer invitation described above, but note that Manuscript Central will not let you submit a recommendation until the number of completed reviews meets the number required. Therefore, before you can submit, you must set the “# reviews needed to make decision" control to “0”:

Once it is set to “0”, the option to submit a recommendation will appear, and you can write and submit your Reject recommendation to the EiC as normal.

Two notes on tokens. First, a Reject without Review does not return the author's tokens; we do not refund. The author paid for this reading and it is all they will get, so be correspondingly generous with constructive critique. Second, if you solicit a second opinion from another AE, that is a reviewer assignment in Reciprocal Reviews and is compensated like any other review. Assign and complete them exactly as you would an external reviewer.

Remember that when we desk reject, the author is only receiving feedback from the Editor and Associate Editor. This puts a bigger burden on you to offer constructive critique, since you will not have external reviewers doing that work for you. Be thoughtful, kind, and helpful, offering authors concrete guidance on what they could have done differently.

If neither of the above decisions are appropriate, then you'll start a peer review process.

Step 4. Invite reviewers

If you've decided to review a paper, your first job is to solicit three high quality reviews within 1 month of our monthly submission deadline (the 1st of each month; assignments go out in the first week). The goal is to find reviewers that can offer expert opinions on the work and do not have a conflict of interest with the author. Ideally, all three reviewers would be experts on the topic (though this is frequently not possible; it is okay to have a less experienced reviewer, such as a Ph.D. student). The expectation of three reviews comes from the ACM Publications Board.

[!IMPORTANT]
Before you invite anyone, check that the submission is fully paid in Reciprocal Reviews: https://reciprocal.reviews/venue/acmtoce/submissions?filter=<manuscript ID>. Nothing in Manuscript Central blocks an unpaid paper, and a submission can sit part-paid while co-authors approve their shares. If it is not paid, write the EiC rather than starting review.

[!IMPORTANT]
How many reviews you need depends on the submission type:

• Research articles: three.
• Book reviews: two.
• Opinions and editorials: none; the EiC evaluates these directly.
• Special issues: guest editors may set their own number.

If you have made a genuine effort and cannot find a third reviewer, and the two reviews you have are in agreement, write to the EiC and you may proceed with two. See Step 5 for how to change the # reviews required to make decision control.

To begin, start by making a list of at least 6 potential reviewers, ideally more, as some might be conflicts and some might decline. Construct your list entirely in Manuscript Central so that if someone else needs to take over your work, they have access to the research you've done to find potential reviewers.

You can identify reviewers in many ways:

• Your own network
• Suggested reviewers from the authors, which might be available in Manuscript Central
• Authors cited in the submission
• Suggestions from other AEs, which you can solicit on the journal's Discord #board channel
• Our Reciprocal Reviews volunteer list, which shows everyone who has volunteered to review for TOCE, their stated expertise, how many papers they are willing to take at a time, and whether they are still active. It replaces the reviewer pool spreadsheet as of November 2026. Check scholars' reviewing status to see who might be most likely to accept.
• Bids on this submission. Our reviewer role is open for bidding, so volunteers browse TOCE's submissions and bid on papers they want to review, seeing only the title and the expertise the authors said was needed. Open your submission in Reciprocal Reviews and check the Assignments table before you build your list. A bid is the strongest availability signal you will get. Bidders are still subject to every check below. A volunteer may also press Declare conflict, which removes the submission from their list; treat that as a decline and do not invite them.
• Doing a lightweight literature review to understand the important work on the research topic
• A senior doctoral student you advise — but only if you commit to mentoring and guiding them on their review, you are careful not to coerce them into it (intentionally or unintentionally — be mindful of your power), and you do so only occasionally.

Once you have a list of potential reviewers, verify a few things for each one:

• They do not have an institutional conflict with an author
• They are not a TOCE AE (AEs are not expected to review, though they can if expertise is scarce)
• The group of reviewers cover the necessary expertise for evaluating the work (literature, methods, phenomena)
• They are not already reviewing more than 1 or 2 papers for the journal and have not reviewed more than 12 articles in the past year
• They have not submitted a review in the past few weeks (User Search > REF history)

[!IMPORTANT]
Bidding closes automatically once a submission has as many assignments as the reviewer role's target count, so bids stop arriving after you have assigned enough reviewers. If you unassign someone later, check for bids again.

You can quickly check whether someone has been recently invited to review by selecting the magnifying glass icon next to their name in the reviewer invite list:

Rank the list by expertise, and then assign the top invites on your list in Manuscript Central. The assignment process in the system is a bit odd:

• First you must find the reviewer in the system by their name or email address
• If they don't exist in the system, you must create an account for them using their email address
• Once you've found them, you add them to the "Referee List"
• Once added to the list, you must press the "Invite" button, which will create a popup and a draft email. Revise the email, personalizing it if you know the reviewer, and send when you're ready.
• Once the reviewer accepts, open the submission in Reciprocal Reviews and press Assign on their row. Do this even though you have not yet seen the review: Complete stays disabled until the assignment is approved, so skipping this step means you cannot pay them later.

Send all email through Manuscript Central. This ensures that if anyone needs to manage the paper other than you, they have a record of communication with reviewers that they can refer to before writing them again.

After sending out three invitations, your task is done until you hear back from reviewers.

• If someone declines, invite the next person on your ranked list as soon as you are able. Ask for suggestions if you run out of people on your list.
• If someone accepts, thank them and say that you're looking forward to their review.
• If someone asks for more time, it is okay to grant it. It's more important that we get reviews on a timeline compatible with reviewers' lives than that we get it after a precise time period.
• If someone does not reply within a week, reach out again and see if you can get an answer either way.

If you run out of potential reviewers, and everyone is declining, there are a few options:

• Invite an expert AE to review. Explain the situation, and see if they are willing.
• Invite the EiC to review. If they have sufficient expertise, it is ultimately their responsibility to evaluate submissions, and so are one possible fallback.

If you cannot find a third review, and you've met the following conditions, it is acceptable to submit a recommendation with only two reviews:

• The two reviews are of adequate quality AND
• The two reviews are mostly in agreement AND
• The AE is willing to write a more substantial recommendation that is essentially a review and recommendation combined

This policy balances expediency with fairness, and is alignment with the ACM Publications Board's policy, indicating that fewer than three reviews are acceptable on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief. You can, but are not required to, consult with the EiC before submitting a recommendation with two reviews, but if you don’t the EiC may bounce the recommendation back. Sometimes the EiC will ask authors for their preference as well.

Step 5. Remind reviewers

Ideally, reviewers would return reviews within 30 days. This allows the journal to make a recommendation within about 2 months of submission. There are three reminders sent automatically by the system:

• due in 1 week
• overdue by 1 week
• overdue by 2 weeks

However, these automated reminders frequently do not help. If a reviewer is more than 2 weeks late, write the reviewer through Manuscript Central and see if they need an extension. It is okay to negotiate a new date; you can use the Grant an Extension link in the Referee List, so that Manuscript Central sends reminders at the appropriate time.

If they don't reply or submit a review within a month of when they first agreed, consider inviting another reviewer from your list, assuming that they will not ultimately submit a review.

If a substantial amount of time has passed and an AE has received two thoughtful reviews, it is acceptable to make a recommendation based on only those two reviews, provided that the two reviews are in good agreement. To make a recommendation with fewer than 3 reviewers, find the "# reviews required to make decision" field, change it to 2, and then submit a recommendation to the EiC.

If in the middle of the review process, you or an author notices an issue that should have been identified before inviting reviewers (plagiarism, anonymity), consult with the EiC about whether to continue the review process or whether the EiC needs to coordinate with the authors to potentially withdraw the paper from review. In general, anonymity issues not caught prior to review, while introducing some potential for bias toward or against the authors, is on the editorial board, not the authors, and so the paper will remain in review. This avoids punishing authors for the board's oversight.

Step 6. Review reviews

When a review arrives, hold it against the criteria we publish to reviewers in Understand review quality. A review must meet all of these to be acceptable, and a review that misses any one of them is unacceptable by our own published standard:

• Is accurate with respect to the paper's contents
• Evaluates the manuscript against all reviewing criteria, or soundly explains reasons for omission
• Substantiates critiques with argumentation, citations, or other evidence
• Is constructive, offering concrete suggestions for improvement
• Provides full citations of overlooked scholarship
• Written about the manuscript, not the authors
• Written by the reviewer, not a surrogate or generative AI

If a review fails any of these, write the reviewer, name the criterion it missed, and ask for a revision before you credit the review. Reviewers are told to expect exactly this, so it is not an imposition.

A review that meets two or more of the excellent criteria in that same section is worth naming in your recommendation; a note of specific praise is the only feedback most reviewers ever receive.

Then check the remaining mechanics:

• Ensure the review has a justification for its recommendation (short, vague, or empty reviews are unacceptable).
• Ensure it uses the review form integrated into the Manuscript Central System. If reviewers ignored certain criteria, write them back and ask them to complete the review.
• Ensure it is free of major spelling and grammar errors.
• Generative AI use for reviewers is only permitted for improving readability, and only if identifiable information is not submitted to third party tools. If you suspect usage outside these bounds, write the reviewer with a generic statement asking for confirmation that they have complied with these rules (e.g., "Thank you again for your review. Whenever we receive a review that appears to have machine-generated writing, we routinely check with reviewers to verify it is in line with ACM policy (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/peer-review). Can you confirm that you either did not use generative AI, or if you did, only used it to improve readability of a written review, and did not submit any identifiable information to third party generative AI services?")

Reviewers receive an automatic thank you email when they submit, but you're welcome to write them personally if you like as well. They also receive a notification when a paper decision goes out, so they can see the other reviews and your recommendation.

[!IMPORTANT]
Book reviews have different criteria than research submissions.

Don't hesitate to write reviewers back and ask for revisions; it can be hard to get reviews at all, let alone high quality reviews, given the weak incentives to review, but it is our duty to ensure that reviews are sufficient, fair, and clear, so that authors see ACM TOCE, and our community in general, as a source of highly insightful, constructive, and fair critique.

Note that there is a difference between reviews that could be improved, and reviews that are harmful to authors. Examples of harm include:

• Personal attacks on authors' identities, expertise, knowledge, or choices (as compared to critiques on a manuscript)
• Racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist rationales for rejecting research

We should not share such reviews unfiltered — reviewers do not have a right to have their voice heard if it is ultimately destructive to our research community. That said, making judgements about such content is not always easy. Consult with the EiC if you have questions about ideas, statements, or phrasing of reviews. We can identify an appropriate remedy, including asking the reviewer to revise their review, discarding the review, or sharing the review with editorial caveats.

Compensate the reviewer

Once you have decided a review meets the acceptable criteria above, credit the reviewer in Reciprocal Reviews:

1. Open the submission at https://reciprocal.reviews/venue/acmtoce/submissions?filter=<manuscript ID>, or follow the Reciprocal Reviews link in the email you received when you were assigned.
2. Find the reviewer's row in the Assignments table.
3. If you have not already pressed Assign on that row, press it now. Complete stays disabled until the assignment is approved.
4. Press Complete. It is labelled Mark complete and pay and asks you to confirm twice. Confirming transfers the tokens to the reviewer.

If the venue is short of tokens, Reciprocal Reviews will say so and propose a mint for a minter to approve; try again once they have.

[!IMPORTANT]
Reciprocal Reviews does not judge whether a review was any good. Pressing Complete is the journal's statement that it met our bar, and it is the only quality gate in the system. There is no refund and no undo: once a compensation transaction is approved it is permanent. Do not complete an assignment for a review you would not be willing to send to the authors — ask for the revision first, then complete it.

A reviewer you recruited entirely outside Reciprocal Reviews will not appear in the Assignments table until they have volunteered at the venue. If you cannot find someone's row, ask them to volunteer at https://reciprocal.reviews/venue/acmtoce#roles, then add the assignment.

Step 7. Recommend

Once you receive all three reviews, within 1 week, re-read the paper and the reviews and write a meta-review, along with a recommendation to the EiC for publication. Your meta review should include:

• A summary of the reviews, including both strengths and weaknesses of the submission against the evaluation criteria.
• Your own opinion of the submission relative to the evaluation criteria, if you have sufficient expertise to weigh in.
• If you are recommending revisions, a clear enumeration of the revisions you believe are necessary to make the work acceptable.
• A recommendation to the EiC and rationale for the recommendation, linked to the reviews and your opinion. It is not necessary for every paper to satisfy all criteria. However, if some criterion is weak or overlooked, there should be a good reason, and there should be significant strengths elsewhere.
• If the paper is accepted, and you believe it deserves broader visibility by being presented at the next SIGCSE Technical Symposium, give a rationale for why. The EiC will use these nominations to select invited authors.

Recommendations must meet all of these criteria to be considered acceptable:

• Clearly summarizes the reviews’ key praise and critiques
• Explicitly enumerates any revisions necessary for publication
• Communicates explicit rationale for recommendation
• Written about the manuscript, not the authors
• Written by the Associate Editor, not a surrogate or generative AI

Any recommendation that does not meet all minimum requirements is considered unacceptable.

Any recommendation that meets two or more of the criteria below is considered excellent:

• Offers detailed and constructive suggestions for addressing critiques in revisions
• Empowers authors to make their own judgements about how to best address feedback
• Insightfully articulates a manuscript’s merits in a way that goes beyond the manuscript’s articulation
• Receives explicit author praise indicating any of the above

Aim for excellent!

Possible recommendations include:

• Accept. You think the paper is ready to publish, without revision. You might recommend minor changes to fix typographical errors or improve clarity. This decision type is extremely rare on the first try, but is possible, especially for a paper that might have been a resubmission from a conference or different journal. Once a paper receives an Accept decision, it is eligible for the ACM TOCE Distinguished Paper Award. Read the criteria, and if you believe it should be awarded, include a nomination statement in the confidential comments to the editor field.

• Accept with Revisions. There are some revisions you think are necessary and would like to review them before publication, but not send them out again for review. Authors are given up to 60 days to resubmit a new version of the paper that incorporates the revisions recommended by the editors and reviewers. That 60 days is a guideline rather than a hard limit; authors may always ask for an extension, and we grant them. Because the revisions to the paper are minor, the revised manuscript is not sent out for a second round of peer review. Instead, the associate editor evaluates the changes and renders a decision. A paper may receive Accept with Revisions more than once. If the revision does not yet address the feedback, it is entirely appropriate to ask for another round rather than reject, as long as you believe the paper is on track to Accept. Each of those rounds stays with you: an Accept with Revisions revision is never sent back out for peer review.

• Revise and Resubmit. Revisions could make the submission acceptable, but they should be reviewed again, ideally by the same reviewers, before publishing. This leaves open the possibility that the revisions do not make the submission acceptable, and that it might therefore be rejected. The authors may choose to submit a revised manuscript that addresses these issues. The revised manuscript will be sent out for a second round of peer review, preferably using the same reviewers who reviewed the original manuscript. Authors generally have up to a year, stated in the decision letter; this too is a guideline, and authors may ask for an extension at any point before the date passes. If the date passes with no revision and no request for more time, the submission is withdrawn, and the authors are welcome to submit the work later as a new submission. Whether to choose Revise and Resubmit is ultimately a prediction. If the paper has a chance of becoming publishable, based on what you know now, we think it’s worth giving authors that chance. But if everything you know about a manuscript suggests that it either a) wouldn’t be publishable, or b) can’t be judged without seeing a substantial revision, then it’s okay to reject the paper. That sends a strong signal that the paper would have to be very different to be considered for publication.

  • Note: submissions generally receive only one round of Revise and Resubmit. If the revised manuscript fails to receive a decision of Accept with Revisions or Accept after that second round of review, you should generally reject it. We limit rounds this way because reviewers are rarely willing or able to read and evaluate a manuscript a third time, and asking them to do so risks both long delays for authors and losing reviewers’ expertise on future submissions.
  • One exception: if everything standing between the manuscript and acceptance is a single, narrowly-scoped issue that you do not have the expertise to verify yourself (for example, confirming a corrected analysis or a revised methodological claim) you may issue a second Revise and Resubmit and ask one reviewer, ideally the one who raised the issue, to spot check that specific concern rather than re-review the whole manuscript. Only do this when you believe the paper will be publishable if that issue is resolved, and say explicitly in your recommendation and decision letter what the spot check will cover, so that authors and the reviewer both know the scope is narrow. If the remaining concerns are broad enough that the full set of reviewers would need to weigh in again, reject instead.

• Reject. The submission will not be acceptable without substantial revision, and should not be further reviewed.

Use Manuscript Central to enter your meta-review and recommendation. Be sure to address your recommendation to the EiC, and to write about the manuscript rather than about the authors. You'll submit the recommendation to the EiC for review and approval. The EiC makes a final decision on the paper, based on the reviews and the meta-review, generally within one week of receipt of the AE’s recommendation. The EiC ultimately communicates this decision to the authors, along with the reviews and AE meta-review. If the EiC disagrees, they will engage in a discussion with you about the decision.

Your recommendation is compensated, as is the EiC's decision. You do not credit yourself: the EiC releases your compensation, and releases their own with Mark done on the submission, which is blocked until every reviewer assignment has been completed and cannot be undone. Completing your reviewers' assignments in Step 6 is therefore also what unblocks your own payment. If it does not arrive, see How am I compensated for editing?.

Step 8. Manage revisions

If the authors decide to make revisions, they submit a revised manuscript along with a detailed cover letter that summarizes changes and responds to the points raised in the reviews and meta-review. Read the cover letter, review the summary of changes, and repeat the process above, defaulting to the original AE and reviewers, until either the author does not return with a satisfactory revision or the paper is accepted. Keep in mind the limit described above: a submission generally gets one round of Revise and Resubmit, with the sole exception of a single reviewer spot checking one narrow issue in a third round. If you need to recruit a new reviewer, return to your ranked list of potential reviewers for ideas.

A revision is a separate submission in Reciprocal Reviews, under the new manuscript ID that Manuscript Central assigns it, linked to the original. A revision costs the author tokens too, though less than a new submission. Assign and complete re-reviewers against the revision — pressing Complete on the original's rows credits nothing. If the author has not yet paid for the revision, ask them to before you invite re-reviewers, or your re-reviewers cannot be compensated.

How am I compensated for editing?

Editing is review labor, and Reciprocal Reviews compensates it: you earn tokens for each recommendation you submit to the EiC. Current amounts are on the venue page. Nothing about this is automatic — someone has to release it, and if nobody does, you have to ask.

[!IMPORTANT]
You must already be a volunteer at the TOCE venue for the request form to appear. It is only shown to scholars who hold a role there. If you have never volunteered, go to https://reciprocal.reviews/venue/acmtoce#roles first, sign in with your ORCID, and volunteer for the associate editor role. Do that when you join the board, not on the day you want to be paid.

To request compensation:

1. Go to the venue page and scroll to the Roles section. The Reciprocal Reviews link in the decision email takes you there with the manuscript ID already filled in.
2. Enter the Manuscript Central ID — it is in the subject line of the decision email.
3. Choose the associate editor role.
4. Add a note if there is anything the approver should know.
5. Submit. Reciprocal Reviews emails everyone who can approve it: a venue administrator, the EiC on that submission, and the holder of the role that approves associate editors. One of them will Assign and then Complete your assignment, releasing the tokens. If no editor has claimed the submission, that list is shorter than it looks — say so in your note, so whoever picks it up claims the paper first.

This applies to desk rejects too. If you read a paper and recommended Reject without Review, you did editorial work and should request compensation for it.

Associate Editors are welcome to submit to TOCE, and pay for their submissions like everyone else; the tokens you earn editing are yours to spend.

How can I contribute to journal policy?

There are countless ideas about how to make peer review better; we've captured many of these priorities in this repository's issue tracker. The EiC captures, prioritizes, and works through these issues through a lightweight change process that involves feedback from the editorial board and the broader community.

Part of your role as an AE is responding to change proposals brought forth by the EiC. If a change proposal is particularly exciting to you, volunteer to collaborate with the EiC to help shape, revise, and implement the change.

How can I help make the journal visible?

On occasion, the EiC will ask the board to help share the journal to the computing education research community and also share work published in the journal. This might include:

• Sharing calls for submissions
• Sharing events and content related to published articles or issues
• Amplifying tweets by the @acmtoce Twitter account

Not everyone is active on social media, but if you are, your help in disseminating the journal's activities and work is greatly appreciated!