Academic journals and conferences are important media for researchers to share research ideas and findings, and provide studying resources for researchers to enter a new research domain. Many research groups and publishers published their own journals and conferences for specific research topics. For example, IEEE society [11]
published many journals and conferences for technology domain, journals of ACM [12] focus on computer science research. According to the amount of call-for-paper, as shown in Figure 1.1, academic journals and conferences showed a trend of increasing over years. All these journals and conferences have a paper-review process, controlling a procedure of submitting, reviewing, and publishing articles. The processes may be complicated and varied for policies of various research groups, so manually managing a paper-review process is time consuming and costly. Thus, many research groups construct paper-review systems to automatically manage their paper-review processes.
Figure 1.1: The trend of number of call-for-paper from 2005 to 2009, which was collected from ACM [12]
Maintainability of an online paper-review system is important because the paper-review process of a conference or a journal might be changed for various requirements or varied scale of the conference or journal. Many studies [1][2][3][13]
proposed paper-review systems for specific paper review processes. However, reliability of these paper-review systems might be low because these systems were frequently reconstructed for new requirements. Besides, modifying processes in these hard-coded systems for new requirements was time-consuming and costly. Some studies [4][14][15][16] proposed template-based paper-review systems, where
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research groups could build a paper review system for specific requirements by just setting templates. The reusable templates could reduce the constructing cost and improve reliability after frequently reusing. However, the paper-review processes were limited to these predefined templates.
Both traditional and template-based paper-review systems are independent each other. However, a lot of the functionalities of them are similar. If different research groups just hold their own process configuration and share the same functionalities in the paper-review system, the reusability can be improved.
On the other hand, since many functionalities in the paper-review system are shared each other, bugs can be detected and fixed rapidly compared with traditional independent paper review systems. Thus, the reliability can be improved.
Thus, this thesis proposed a reconfigurable paper review system, where different research groups could define their own paper-review processes and then automatically generate paper-review systems for their specific requirements. In order to satisfy various requirements of paper-review processes, constructing a reconfigurable paper review system was difficult to extract the implicit knowledge of paper-review process from the program logic of systems.
To specify our discussion, this thesis defined the term “user” as the user who defined her/his paper-review process in the system, and the term “end-user” as the user who used the output paper-review system.
This thesis used a knowledge-based approach to construct the reconfigurable paper-review system because this approach was suitable for modeling highly dynamic processes. Firstly, paper-review process configuration was acquired from a user, and the acquired knowledge was represented using a proposed model. The acquired paper-review process configuration could be modified in the future. The proposed model, named process description model, consisting of frame-based knowledge representation and rule-based process control logic, was the approach to modeling a paper-review process. Since actions, users’ roles, and delivered files were all stereotyped in various paper-review processes, the frame-based representation was used to represent the actions and resources of these processes. Besides, these processes contain constraints and principles of managing the actions and resources, so rule-based representation was used to express the control logic.
The actions of end-users and the anonymity setting during paper reviewing vary across different paper-review processes. Thus, this thesis introduced the role-based access control model (RBAC) [7][8] to control the actions in the process and the
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Based on the process description model, a paper-review process authoring tool was provided to assist users in constructing desired paper-review processes. In order to evaluate the expressive power and modifiability of the proposed system, functions used in current existing paper-review processes and criteria of modifiability were collected. The comparison among the proposed system, traditional, and template-based paper-review systems was provided and the result showed that the proposed system could support the most functions and was the most modifiable among the compared systems.
In Chapter 2, some related works about the paper-review system construction and the authoring approaches are introduced. Chapter 3 describes the proposed paper-review process description model. Chapter 4 introduces the role-based access control model to solve the access control problem in the paper-review system. Chapter 5 introduces the paper-review process authoring tool and the system generating methodology. The implementation for the reconfigurable paper-review system generator and experiment are discussed in Chapter 6. Finally, Chapter 7 gives the conclusions and future works.
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