spionski t1_j5ac1t4 wrote on January 21, 2023 at 3:30 PM

Reply to comment by AdMassive9465 in [D] ICLR 2023 results. by East-Beginning9987

This is very interesting to read. For the paper you championed, was that discussion between you and the AC public, i.e. visible to authors? I had a similar experience from an author perspective. We had really constructive discussions with all the reviewers, and were fairly optimistic we'd get in, but then the meta-review was pretty disconnected from all of that. Unfortunately no idea what may have happened between AC and reviewers, so it's a bit of a mystery from our perspective. It's frustrating to have all these in-depth discussions, but then no opportunity to clear up even basic misunderstandings in the meta-review, where it actually matters. Having a discussion period with the AC would have made such a difference, and given the timeline it seems it would totally have been feasible.

AdMassive9465 t1_j5aliqj wrote on January 21, 2023 at 4:35 PM

It was not: in theory, it should have been a discussion that involved "only" the reviewers and the AC. However, none of the reviewers (besides me) participated---thereby resulting in a 1:1 discussion with the AC (whose remarks could not have been addressed in any "revision" of the paper, since this occurred in December).

Interestingly, there is even a "gap" between the Reviewer and AC guidelines:

according to the AC guidelines, the authors could "participate in the discussion" occurring between November 18th and December 12th...
...but this was not stated in the reviewer guidelines, which stated that, after November 18th, the only role of the reviewer was to have the "virtual discussion with the AC for borderline papers".

I was unaware that the authors could still "participate" after November 18th, so I did not even think that it was possible to involve them in the discussion (had I known that the other reviewers would have done nothing, I would have certainly involved the authors)