Explaining administrator roles

When you need to add your fellow administrators you will see that there are several different roles that you can choose from. This article will explain the difference between these roles and what each one actually means in terms of the access and powers within the system.

Chairs and Assistants

Chairs and assistants both have complete control over the dates and settings of the system and can also edit submissions (or add them at any point), add reviewers, allocate and edit reviews, and send messages from the communication system. 

The only difference between the two is that if you use the '[[ChairNames]]' macro in an email it would list the chairs, but not assistants. You can learn more about using macros in the Communication Centre here.

Track Chairs

Track chairs are limited to just the track(s) that they are added to so they can only contact reviewers and authors on their track, or make changes to submissions on their track. They cannot view or affect anything outside of their own track.

Only conferences which are running tracks (mini-conferences within the overall conference, not topics or themes) can add track chairs. You can find out more about tracks here and there is also an article with more information about what track chairs can actually do.

Data Viewers

Data viewers can see everything that you can see, but they cannot make any changes to the system. Functionally, they are otherwise the same as basic users, and can submit up to the deadline (but not after, and cannot affect others' submissions), and can also be added as reviewers like all other users/admins.

Review Group Chairs

Using review groups, a conference chair can delegate the responsibility of managing the peer review process to individual review group chairs. This would be a specific set-up where lots of submissions are expected.

A review group chair is responsible for:

1. Inviting reviewers.
2. Allocating reviewers to submissions.
3. Re-assigning declined reviews to other reviewers.
4. Reminding reviewers to complete their reviews.
5. Submitting a final recommendation/report for each submission.

Essentially, the review group chair manages the peer review process for a given set of submissions and then submits a final report to the general chair, track chair or committee chair (depending on how the system is configured). They cannot affect anything outside their assigned set of submissions.