Last Updated: August 2026

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.

Area Chair Roles and Responsibilities

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.

Reviewer Recruiter

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.

Reviewing Process Supervisor

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:

• AC Bidding and Initial Review. Once the reviewing process begins, ACs can bid on papers aligned with their areas of expertise. Following bidding, ACs are assigned an initial set of papers. These papers should be reviewed to ensure there are no obvious issues, like fake papers, papers that are blank, papers that blatantly fail to meet the formatting guidelines, and papers that are clearly out of scope for the conference. These papers should be flagged to the Program Chairs for potential desk rejection. ACs are urged to be aggressive in this assessment: when in doubt, please flag!
• Reviewer assignment. ACs are also given an initial assignment of papers to Reviewers. ACs check that they are satisfied with these assignments, and can adjust assignments if needed. ACs also check that there aren’t any conflicts of interest that have not been declared and accounted for in the allocation of papers.
• Progress Tracking. ACs need to be proactive to ensure that Reviewers log in to the system and are aware of their assignment, and send reminders to ensure that reviews are submitted on time. If ACs find that Reviewers are not on time or delinquent, they should be proactive to assign additional Reviewers to ensure that there are at least 3 high-quality reviews per paper. (PCs will share details on how this can be done each year.)
• Review Quality Assessment. Once reviews are provided, ACs check that reviews have a consistent quality and are ready to share with authors. Reviews should not be too short, should not use inappropriate language, should be polite and constructive, and should be fair in the type of feedback and considerations requested. ACs also ensure that there is consistency in the ways Reviewers understand and provide rating and recommendations, and that reviews follow what is included in the Reviewer Guide. ACs can request adjustment to reviews by Reviewers. If there are ethical concerns related to a paper, these should be flagged to the PCs as soon as possible.
• Facilitating Reviewer Discussion. ACs ensure that Reviewers engage in respectful discussions with each other, particularly when there are significant discrepancies in their evaluations and ratings or when certain concerns remain unclear to the AC. ACs should encourage Reviewers to communicate directly in the review system to resolve those disagreements, when possible, or clarify points of concern. If these discussions lead to a change in a Reviewer’s opinion, ACs should request that Reviewers adjust their reviews and ratings accordingly to reflect this change. ACs drive forward Reviewer discussion to calibrate judgments so that they can make consistent recommendations within and across papers.
• Initial Meta-reviews. Area Chairs are subject-matter experts and may bring their own expertise to the assessment of submissions, alongside synthesising the reviewers’ evaluations and discussion. ACs provide an assessment at two stages of the process. Following the initial review and reviewer discussion, the AC writes a preliminary Area Chair summary to help guide authors during the rebuttal stage. The AC then prepares a meta-review that synthesises the reviews, the discussion, and the AC’s own assessment, and makes an initial recommendation of Accept, Revise (minor), Revise (major), or Reject. Where the recommendation is to revise, the meta-review should identify and prioritise the principal issues that the authors will need to address. Program Chairs review meta-reviews and recommendations as part of the initial calibration process. They may discuss particular submissions with ACs, request revisions to a meta-review where appropriate, and make the initial decision. The meta-review and its reasoning are shared with authors. ACs should use the designated confidential fields for comments intended only for the Program Chairs.
• Metareviews for Revisions and Rebuttals. Papers receiving a Revise (minor) or revise (major) decision proceed to revision and rebuttal. The original Reviewers and Area Chair re-review the revised submission and rebuttal, discuss the changes, and update their assessments. The AC then updates the meta-review and makes a final recommendation. In reaching this recommendation, the AC may rely on the judgement of the Senior Area Chair as appropriate. Program Chairs and Senior Area Chairs subsequently review the updated meta-reviews and recommendations during final calibration, before making final decisions of Accept (with minor revisions) or Reject
• Decision-making. ACs provide recommendations on whether the paper should be accepted, rejected, or revised (in the first round) using the evidence from reviews and their own judgment. If the paper receives a Revise decision, ACs should provide a second recommendation on whether the revised paper should be accepted or rejected. ACs also provide nominations for best paper awards, and raise concerns of misconduct of other suspicious activity. See next section on role as a decision-maker.
• Recognizing Service. ACs recognize the exceptional work of their Reviewers who have provided significant value to the reviewing process by nominating them for recognition for exceptional service (Best Reviewer lists). Significant contributions are made by Reviewers who provide detailed reviews that strengthen the work under review, are on time and proactive in reviews, incorporate Reviewer discussion and author responses in their assessments, are measured in their judgments, and support the overall decision-making process. We expect that approximately 15% of Reviewers should be recognised in this way. ACs will be able to nominate Reviewers through the conference review system.

Decision Recommender

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:

• Flag papers for desk rejection (see FAQ below for more details).
• Assess violations of the Code of Ethics, including failure to disclose the use of generative AI. When a paper is flagged, information should be collected, an informed recommendation should be made, and any evidence obtained should be provided (e.g., from the paper, discussion with author and/or Reviewers). Please note the AC recommendation will be non-binding, and any of the flagged papers may be passed to an additional ethics review process for further assessment. Refer to the Raising Ethical Concerns section of the Reviewer Guide for more discussion.
• Make initial recommendations for acceptance, revision, or rejection.
• For revised papers, make a second recommendation for acceptance or rejection.

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.

Role of the Senior Area Chair (Senior AC)

Senior Area Chairs (SACs) act as the primary operational bridge between Program Chairs (PCs) and Area Chairs (ACs) to maintain scientific quality, consistency, and fairness across a conference track.

• Mentorship and Oversight: Monitor assigned ACs to ensure deadlines are met, reviewer discussions are actively moderated, and meta-reviews are thorough, constructive, and well-grounded in reviewer consensus.
• Decision Calibration: Identify borderline, high-variance, or contentious submissions across multiple AC pools, standardizing acceptance thresholds and mitigating individual reviewer or AC bias.
• Conflict and Escalation Management: Step in to resolve AC dropouts, ethics concerns, or severe disagreements between AC and reviewers by providing tie-breaking evaluations or soliciting secondary opinions.
• Final Program Curation: Make high-level recommendations to the Program Chairs.

Timeline

Note that this timeline is subject to change; please use the communications from the Program Committee for the most up-to-date deadlines.

• Paper bidding for reviewers: October 29th - November 5th, 2026
• Review period: November 10th - November 25th, 2026
• Reviews are due by November 25th, 2026
• Initial discussion and calibration period among reviewers, ACs and Senior ACs: November 25th- December 10th, 2026
• Reviews and first round decisions released to authors: December 22nd, 2026
• Revisions and rebuttals due: January 28th, 2027
• Post-revision re-review and discussion (for relevant papers): January 28th-February 22nd, 2027
• Re-reviews due on February 18th
• AC recommendations due on March 4th
• Final calibration period among Senior ACs: March 4th - March 11th, 2027
• Final notification of accept/reject decisions released to authors: March 23rd, 2027

Applicable Policies

Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

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.

Considerations on the use of Artificial Intelligence

ACM’s Policy on Authorship permits the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools and technologies to create content, but requires that this use be fully disclosed in the Work. Generative AI tools—including systems such as ChatGPT—may not be listed as authors, because ACM authors must be identifiable human beings who have made substantial intellectual contributions and who take responsibility for the full content of the published work.

• Authors remain fully responsible for the correctness, originality, integrity, and presentation of all content in their submission, including any text, code, data, tables, graphs, citations, analyses, or other material created or substantially revised using generative AI tools. Individual authors will be considered non-delegably responsible for the content of their submitted papers. This responsibility cannot be transferred to, or shared with, any LLM or AI system. Any lack of veracity in content that is surfaced in the Reviewing Process will be considered grounds for desk rejection.
• Where generative AI has been used substantively to shape or create the content, methodology, analysis, or conclusions of a piece of work or output— for example, generating ideas, drafting argument from scratch or from a human-provided outline, analysing data, or producing findings— authors should disclose this use in the paper, normally in the Acknowledgements section. This kind of substantive use includes instances when an LLM or AI system is deployed to generate text based on author notes, bullet points, or prompts that direct it to synthesise selected articles, links, references, etc.Disclosures should include details of the precise usage (model version and nature of task) and, where applicable, the extent of human review. For example: “Claude Sonnet 5 was used to identify relevant literature followed by human verification of every paper and claim,” “Gemini 3.5 Flash was used to code a subset of the interviews based on a human-constructed codebook; that output was audited by two human reviewers and integrated into the qualitative analysis,” or “GPT 5.6 Sol was used as a brainstorming tool to generate ideas for the discussion section; all authors then discussed the AI generated suggestions and incorporated the model’s framing and recommendations.” Authors should err on the side of disclosure where there is uncertainty.
• The disclosure should enable readers to understand the relevant role of the tool. It need not be treated as a substitute for a substantive assessment of the work’s scholarly contribution, methodological quality, evidential basis, or ethical implications.
• Routine or assistive use of basic word-processing, spelling and grammar-checking, replacement-text, or language-translation systems is generally exempt from ACM’s disclosure requirement.
• Do not assume that polished prose, unfamiliar phrasing, or the absence of a disclosure alone establishes inappropriate use of AI. Review the submission on its merits and raise concerns only where there are specific, material reasons to question the accuracy, provenance, integrity, originality, or disclosure of the work.
• If you identify a potential material concern—for example, apparently fabricated or unreliable citations, unverifiable claims, undisclosed AI-generated substantive content, or content whose provenance raises research-integrity concerns—describe the concern clearly and neutrally in the designated confidential field for the Area Chair and Program Chairs. Reviewers are not expected to investigate or prove misconduct.
• As with other ethical or research-integrity concerns, do not include allegations of misconduct in comments visible to authors. Flag the concern for the Area Chair and Program Chairs, who will determine whether further assessment or action is appropriate.

This guidance concerns the use of AI in submitted work. The conference’s separate policy on the use of generative AI by reviewers—including confidentiality requirements and the prohibition on using LLMs to write reviews—continues to apply. For further details, consult the FAQ section below.

Frequently Asked Questions

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:

• Violations of the submission policies, including non-compliance with the anonymity guidelines, paper formatting instructions, page length guidelines, or generally failures to follow the author guidance.
• Papers that are out of scope for the conference, as described in the CFP, or have poor regard for the conventions and standards expected for FAccT submissions (e.g., whitepapers, advertorials).
• Papers that clearly violate ACM policies, such as the Code of Ethics, AI authorship, and more.
• Papers that are too similar to pre-existing work, or where there are questions of plagiarism, misconduct, computer-generated text, or other academic integrity concerns.
• Duplicate submissions.

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.