How does Ex Ordo allocate submissions to reviewers?

The Ex Ordo system is designed to make the process of matching reviewers to submissions as easy as possible.

We do this using topics. The topics your authors select will mean they will only receive reviewers willing to review those topics. The authors choose their topics in submission. Reviewers can choose their topics when they are added to the system or you can assign topics on their behalf.

The allocation is the automatic process of assigning suitable reviewers to each submission by sorting through topics and available reviewers. Before you start this process, there are a few settings you can use to customize this process for your conference. 

Step 1) Access the settings

These settings are available in the Reviewing and Allocation step in the Reviews hub. 

Step 2) Choose your settings

You can set the allocation process to work the way you need it to.

1. Choose the number of reviewers who need to look at each submission. You can then choose the maximum number of submissions one reviewer can receive i.e. their maximum workload.
2. You can allow or prevent nepotism. If you prevent nepotism the system will not allocate reviewer to a paper with author who has the same email domain as the reviewer (e.g. gmail.com) or to an author who shares their organisation. 
3. Decide about blind review settings, and will you allow reviewers to see the authors name while reviewing.
4. Decide to hide the Decline/Accept option for the reviewers. If you hide this option from the reviewers, the reviewer won't be able to decline any allocated review of specific papers.

Example:

The system will allocate using the information you input as in the above image. In this case, no reviewer will get more than 15 submissions, even if there is an insufficient number of reviewers for that subject area. It also means that if you have too many reviewers for one topic, the system will not allocate to them as it will only allocate one submission twice.  The system will allocate papers to reviewers with the same email domain as one of the authors, and the reviewers will be able to see the authors name while reviewing. The reviewer will have Decline Review option and will be able to Decline the review on a specific paper.