Thank you for volunteering your time to review for ACM Multimedia 2025! Your time and expertise directly contribute to maintaining the high quality of the conference and strengthening the multimedia research community.
As a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member, we expect that you are already experienced with writing excellent reviews. However, in practice we find that guidelines can help streamline the process. ACM Multimedia will be announcing awards for outstanding reviewers of the conference. The guidelines also serve as a basis for the best reviewer decisions.
The Golden Rule of reviewing: Write a review that you would like to receive yourself. A review should be helpful to the authors, even if the review recommends the rejection of the paper. The reviews are anonymous, but please make sure that you deliver your best work, and that you write reviews that you would be proud to associate with your name.
The ACM Multimedia 2025 Review/Meta-Review Timeline
- Abstract submission for regular papers: 04.04.2025
- Regular paper submission: 11.04.2025
- Papers Assigned to Reviewers / (Senior) Area Chairs: 25.04.2025
- Reviews due: 19.05.2025
- Area Chairs check the reviews & write an initial meta-review in preparation for the rebuttal: 19.05.2025 – 09.06.2025
- Rebuttal & comments phase (with authors): 09.06.2025 – 19.06.2025
- Area Chairs write and update their meta-reviews: 09.06.2025 – 27.06.2025
- Discussion between Area Chairs and Senior Area Chairs: 23.06.2025 – 27.06.2025
- Senior Area Chairs discuss decisions with Technical Program Chairs: 27.06.2025 – 03.07.2025
- Notification for Regular Papers: 04.07.2025
Check the paper topic:
- Confirm that the paper that you are reviewing falls into the topical scope of ACM Multimedia, as defined by the Call for Papers. Eventually, we rely on your judgment and the collective wisdom with your peers to decide if the paper aligns with multimedia topics.
- Remember that the problem addressed by an ACM Multimedia paper ideally involves multi-modal data, or is expected to be related to the challenge of how people interpret and use multimedia. Papers that focus on a narrow aspect of a single modality beyond the interest of the multimedia community, and also fail to contribute new knowledge on human use of multimedia, may be rejected as out of scope for the conference.
- Although many submissions to ACM Multimedia make a technical contribution in the form of a new algorithm/technique, not all do, nor is it a requirement of ACM Multimedia. Do not give less value to papers that carry out studies of new multimedia problems because they do not make a novel algorithmic contribution. Instead, judge these papers by the novelty of their insights and the value these insights could have for the community.
Support your statements:
- Reviews should not just state, “It is well known that…”, but rather, they should include solid argumentation backed by the references.
- Reviews should not just state, “Important references are missing…”, but rather, they should include examples; Reviewers should list their own references only in very rare cases that these are indeed the most relevant references for the authors to refer to.
- Reviews should not just state, “Authors should compare to the state of the art…”, but rather, they cite specific work (i.e., peer-reviewed references) that they feel the authors should have considered and why.
- Remember that the authors appreciate if reviewers are generous and detailed with their feedback.
Respect the authors:
- Reviews should critique “the paper”, and not the authors.
- Reviews should try not address the authors directly, esp. not as “you”. (A direct address can be interpreted as an affront by the reader).
Double-blind reviewing
- The reviewing process will be double blind at the level of reviewers and ACs (i.e., reviewers and ACs cannot see author identities).
- Authors are responsible for anonymizing their submissions. In particular, they should not include author names, author affiliations, or acknowledgements in their submissions and they should avoid providing any other identifying information (even in the supplementary material).
- If you are assigned a submission that is not adequately anonymized (e.g., includes author names, author affiliations, acknowledgements, or other identifying information) then please contact the corresponding AC.
- Under no circumstances should you attempt to find out the identities of the authors for any of your assigned submissions (e.g., by using a conversational agent or by searching on Google or arXiv).
- If you accidentally find out, please do not divulge the identities to anyone. You should not let the authors’ identities influence your decision in any way.
Please include in your review:
- Statement of novelty: What does the paper contribute? Is that contribution valuable for the multimedia research community? Evaluate whether the paper covers all the relevant related work and explain how its contribution builds on the related work.
- Statement of scientific rigor: Are the experiments well designed? Are the experiments sufficient to support the claims made by the paper? Are they reproducible? Have the authors released a resource, such as a data set or code?
- Fixes that the authors should make for the camera ready. We can trust the authors to correct minor errors. Authors generally also will state their commitment to correcting minor errors found during the review process during the rebuttal. However, major flaws must lead to rejection, since it is not possible to confirm that the authors have actually corrected major flaws successfully (i.e., the paper does not go back to the reviewers for checking).
Ensuring review quality:
- When you finish a review, and before you submit it, please check it again to make sure that it follows these guidelines. Checking your review is good practice and will also save the ACs the effort of contacting you for corrections and amendments.
- Note that high-quality, accurate reviews will also ensure that the authors do not request your review to be referred to the Authors’ Advocate.
Discussion:
- Reviewers should not ask for new results or experiments to be included in the rebuttals. The final recommendations should be based on the results in the original papers. Any new results (e.g., new experiments) produced during a (short) rebuttal period should not be considered.
- If you would like the authors to clarify something during the author response phase, please articulate this clearly in your review.
- When the authors provide their rebuttals, please read them carefully. Remember that the authors invested a significant effort in writing the rebuttals.
- Engage proactively in the discussion with the authors during the rebuttal & comments phase, and then in the internal discussion with the rest of the technical program committee.
- Take the rebuttal into consideration by updating your review or otherwise responding to requests of the AC.
Policy on arXiv papers:
In accordance with ACM guidelines, all SIGMM-sponsored conferences adhere to the following policy regarding arXiv papers:
- We define a publication as a written piece documenting scientific work that was submitted for review by peers for either acceptance or rejection, and, after review, has been accepted.
- Documentation of scientific work that is published in a not-for-profit archive without any form of peer-review (departmental Technical Report, arXiv.org, etc.) is not considered a publication. However, this definition of publication does include peer-reviewed workshop papers, even if they do not appear in formal proceedings.
- Any submission to ACM Multimedia must not have substantial overlap with prior publications or other work currently undergoing peer review anywhere.
- Note that documents published on website archives are subject to change. Citing such documents is discouraged.
- Furthermore, ACM Multimedia will review the documents formally submitted and any additional information in a web archive version will not affect the review.
Responsibilities of Area Chairs:
- The ACs take charge of summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of each paper, and making a recommendation.
- There will be a rebuttal & comments phase with the authors, and then an internal discussion phase with the members of the technical program committee. ACs are expected to encourage discussion, especially when divergent reviews are obtained. One of ACs responsibilities is to clear potential misunderstandings.
- Area Chairs should be actively involved in discussion with their Senior Area Chairs in case of any doubt when finalizing their meta-reviews.
- Senior Area Chairs will discuss the Area Chairs’ decision with Technical Program Chairs before they are finalized and released to the authors.
If you have any questions about the guidelines, please contact the Technical Program Chairs: tpc@acmmm2025.org