Last Updated: December 2025
Area Chairs (ACs) are key decision-makers and central to the quality of the reviewing process at ACM FAccT. ACs are involved in every part of the reviewing process. This guide should be read by all ACs, and provides details of the role of ACs, what decisions they are asked to make, guides on writing meta-reviews, and responses to frequently asked questions. For deadlines related to the submission for any year, and the scope of the conference, please refer to the Call for Papers. ACs will be listed on the conference website (facctconference.org) before the submission deadline.
One way to think of ACs is as acting editors for a journal. They play several key roles in the conference reviewing process. For an overview of how reviews lead to outcomes, see Author Guide.
The interdisciplinary nature of FAcct means that reliable Reviewers are needed from across the broad range of fields that are within the scope of FAccT. ACs are key to helping to ensure a broad Reviewer pool is available, using their networks and visibility of suitable candidates within the fields they work in. This recruitment is done early in the conference planning cycle. Each year, the Program Chairs (PC) will provide a target for the number of Reviewers that are needed across the various disciplines to meet the expected demands of the conference.
Please email program-chairs@facctconference.org with any suggestions for reviewers. Note that the Program Chairs have begun outreach to reviewers. Your help suggesting names and contacts is appreciated, but it is not your sole responsibility to recruit reviewers.
ACs support the PCs to manage the reviewing process for the large number of submissions that are received. ACs are assigned a set of papers at the beginning of the review process and it is their role to ensure that these papers receive a full set of reviews, the reviews are fair, and that the overall review workflow is on track to meet the planned key dates.
Managing this reviewing process means having full oversight of the state of papers at each stage of the reviewing process. As the reviewing period progresses, the management tasks change, and these tasks include:
The principal responsibility of ACs is to provide recommendations of acceptance, revision, or rejection of papers. All recommendations are accompanied by a meta-review that summarizes the reviews and the reasoning. As a top-tier venue, FAccT has a high standard for accepted papers, and ACs are essential to ensuring the high quality of papers that are accepted for inclusion into the proceedings.
Decisions that ACs make include:
ACs can request further information from Reviewers and request adjustment to reviews. This can be done over email or via the reviewing platform. PCs may also request calibration meetings with ACs to discuss borderline and outlier papers to ensure there is consistency and to discuss merits of accepting, revising, or rejecting individual submissions.
Note that this timeline is subject to change; please use the communications from the Program Committee for the most up-to-date deadlines.
Papers are reviewed in alignment with the ACM ethics guidelines. ACs should give thought to whether papers might be in contravention of these guidelines and report those concerns to the Program Chairs.
You should not use LLMs to write reviews. Particularly given FAccT’s academic focus, the spirit of peer review is a dialogue between human reviewers and human authors. Using LLMs to write your review for you is a breach of that implicit contract. Reviewers should refer to the April 2023 ACM Policy on Authorship and use of large language models (LLMs), and the associated SIGCHI blog post, which also apply to reviews and meta-reviews, though please note that FAccT may have more stringent standards than the baseline ACM and SIGCHI policy on LLM usage in reviews.
ACs and Reviewers should not upload the submissions or text fragments to any third-party website (i.e., outside of the review platform), such as an LLM interface or similar, in accordance with the ACM Peer Review Policy, as this may breach the confidentiality of the paper submissions.
However, the use of generative AI tools or software (local or cloud) is permitted (though not encouraged) to check fluency, formatting, grammar, spelling, punctuation, and language translation of the review that you wrote (while still not uploading the paper to be reviewed to any generative AI tool). You should carefully review the text that is returned in these use cases, to ensure that the revised text does not contain spurious additions or hallucinations.
If you believe that Reviewers have used LLMs to write their reviews for them, please remind the Reviewer of FAccT’s and ACM’s policy on the use of LLMs (in the Reviewer Guide) and ask them to revise their review to write it themselves and remove the LLM-generated content, and simultaneously inform to the PC chairs as needed either via the review form’s confidential comments to the committee, or via email (which is faster) at program-chairs@facctconference.org.
What is the policy on preprints (such as ArXiv, SSRN, or others)?
Use of preprints is allowed. Hence, a paper appearing on a preprint server does not automatically fail the new work submission requirement. See the section on Self-Archiving and Posting Rights in the ACM Publication Rights & Licensing Policy.
What is considered contemporaneous work?
It is not uncommon for different groups to be working on the same idea (referred to as contemporaneous work), and for these to appear on preprint repositories. For FAccT, contemporaneous work are papers released 4 months prior to the conference deadline. Hence, lack of awareness, citations, or comparisons to such works is not a basis for rejection of a paper.
Can I overrule the recommendations of Reviewers?
ACs are chosen because they are also experts in their area, and will at times have a view that disagrees with the Reviewers. It is possible for ACs to override the recommendation of Reviewers (and many strong papers have been included in proceedings by diligent ACs who have advocated for papers where Reviewers judged otherwise). But ACs should exercise this option with caution. ACs should seek to add additional Reviewers to gather more evidence, read the paper in detail and provide their own review, discuss the divergence with other Reviewers, and ensure that there is an extremely strong case put forward in the meta-review and discussions with PCs.
For what reasons might a paper be desk rejected?
The decision to desk-reject a paper (i.e., to reject without review) can be made by the Program Chairs (PCs) at any stage of the reviewing process, but is more likely to happen at two times. A first round of desk rejections is undertaken during an initial review of submissions by the PCs. A second round is conducted when ACs and Reviewers flag papers to the PCs for possible desk-rejection. This second phase helps ensure that we capture any papers that do not warrant reviewing time.
There are several reasons for papers to be desk-rejected, and a non-exhaustive list of reasons include:
If you believe a paper hits any of the criteria above, please contact the Program Chairs at program-chairs@facctconference.org.
The PCs reserve the right to desk-reject papers whenever they are identified in the reviewing process, allowing ACs and PCs to highlight concerns throughout the reviewing process.
What should I do if I have a concern about potential plagiarism or other severe research integrity issues?
In such cases, please contact the Program Chairs immediately at program-chairs@facctconference.org.