When a paper is submitted, the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) first ‘desk reviews’ it for suitability. The EiC rejects some at this point, some are sent back to the author to re-work, and some are advanced for peer review.

When the EiC selects you to be the Editor for a paper, the system sends you an assignment email that identifies which EiC or Associate Editor-in-Chief (AEiC) has assigned the new submission to you. That assignment letter contains important guidance for you. Your assignment email includes a direct link to that assigned paper, but you can always view all your assignments and copies of your assignment emails in your dashboard (Figure 1). To access your dashboard, log in at http://My.InformingScience.org . From your dashboard, you can even locate the authors’ names and email addresses

Figure 1. You can always find your assignments in your dashboard by logging in at http://My.InformingScience.org

Figure 2. How to obtain the authors’ names and email addresses

As the paper’s Editor, you chair the ad hoc paper review committee that also includes the paper’s reviewers. Typically, by the time you receive the assignment email, the EiC has already assigned reviewers to the paper. The EiC selects reviewers for your paper based on a large number of criteria which includes similarity of topical interest and current workload of the reviewer. Your role is to act as Chair of this paper’s ad hoc review committee. You will have a different ad hoc paper reviewer committee for each paper assigned to you.