Last August, our community faced a serious ethics violation that led to the rejection of three conditionally accepted papers in the last round. The issue arose when a program committee (PC) member, serving as the primary reviewer for all three papers, failed to disclose a significant conflict of interest: one of the authors was their former Ph.D. advisor, a lifetime conflict in our field. We now want to update the community on the outcome of this matter and use it to sound a cautionary note for us all.
Over the past few months, both IEEE VIS leadership and IEEE itself have been addressing this issue. While we have little insight into the IEEE side, we wanted to let you all know that the IEEE VIS Steering Committee (VSC) has now agreed on disciplinary action for the offending PC member. This person—whose identity has been protected from all but the VIS OPCs, the TVCG EiC, and the VSC chairs—has been barred from publishing at or reviewing for VIS for two years, starting with VIS 2025. This includes not being allowed to present TVCG papers at the conference. The person has been notified of this penalty by the VSC chairs. After the end of two years, the slate will be wiped clean.
We hope that this decision will bring closure to both the authors of the three rejected papers, who were blameless in all of this, as well as the community as a whole.
Let this outcome also serve as a cautionary tale for all members of the VIS community to take conflicts of interest very seriously. Our rules, which are captured in the IEEE VGTC Reviewer Ethics Guidelines, are very clear, but we will nevertheless reproduce them here.
You have a conflict with a paper if:
- You are a co-author of the work.
- You have a strong affiliation with the same institution as one of the authors. This includes, but not limited to your current employment as a professor, adjunct professor, visiting professor, or similar position, in the role of a consulting or advisory arrangement, previous employment with the institution within the last 12 months, being considered for employment at the institution, any role as an officer, governing board membership, or relevant committee, or the current enrollment as a student.
- You have been directly involved in the work and will be receiving credit in some way. If you’re a member of the author’s thesis committee, and the paper is about his or her thesis work, then you were involved.
- You suspect that others might see a conflict of interest in your involvement. For example, even though Microsoft Research in Seattle and Beijing are in some ways more distant than Berkeley and MIT, there is likely to be a perception that they are “both Microsoft” and folks from one should not review papers from the other.
- You have collaborated with one of the authors in the past three years (more or less). Collaboration is usually defined as having written a paper, book or grant proposal together, although you should use your judgement.
- You were the MS/PhD advisor of one of the authors or the MS/PhD advisee of one of the authors. Funding agencies typically consider advisees to represent a lifetime conflict of interest.
- You are related to one of the co-authors. This includes, but not limited to spouse, child, sibling, or parent, as well as any affiliation or relationship of your spouse, of your minor child, of a relative living in your immediate household or of anyone who is legally your partner that you are aware of.
- Other relationships, such as close personal friendship, that you think might tend to affect your judgement or be seen as doing so by a reasonable person familiar with the relationship.
Note that these rules were last changed in May of 2009. In other words, they have remained unchanged for more than 15 years. Any claim of ignorance of the rules is moot and cannot be used as a defense.
We also want to communicate to the authors and the community as a whole that we, the IEEE VIS leadership, take these concerns with the utmost gravity and will pursue transgressions diligently. Please keep this in mind as the review requests begin to trickle in this spring.