Balisage: The Markup Conference
Paper Selection

We typically receive more submissions for Balisage than we can accommodate on the program. This gives us the opportunity, and the obligation, to select some of them for inclusion on the program and to reject some of the submitted papers.

For consideration for inclusion in the regular program a draft paper must be submitted according to the rules in the Submission Instructions, in XML marked up and valid to the Balisage subset of DocBook.

The papers will be peer reviewed by at least three people, and read by the conference committee. The conference committee will consider the peer reviewer's comments, thier owm impressions of the submission, and the shape of the overall program in selecting papers.

Authors will receive the comments of peer reviewers in time to revise their paper for inclusion in the conference proceedings.

The preliminary version needs to be complete enough that the reviewers know that the authors have something to say and can and will do credible job of it. The reviewers will be asked to respond to the following questions about each submission:

• Overall Impression
• Who is the natural audience for this talk?
• Would you listen to this talk? Why or why not?
• Categories Please rate the submission on each of the following categories, on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is poor, 7 is excellent:
  • Freshness or novelty of topic
  • Freshness or novelty of approach
  • Technical quality
  • Completeness and/or balance
  • Organization
  • Knowledge of field as reflected in submission
  • Acknowledges limitations (as appropriate)
  • Interest
  • Importance
• Do you think Balisage is the appropriate forum for this talk? Why?
• How likely do you think this talk is to be a thinly disguised product promotion or sales talk? Why?
• Do you have any concerns about this proposed talk? Why?
• Do you have any suggestions on how the proposed talk could be improved? This will be sent to the author, who will use it to improve the paper or to understand why the submission was not accepted. Please take time to give good feedback to our authors.
• Do you have any other comments or suggestions for the conference committee relating to the selection or placement of this proposed talk?

Proposals are rarely accepted if the reviewers say that there wasn't enough in the submission to judge, or if they write "this isn't a paper, it is the promise of a paper. We would have to trust the author to do the heavy lifting before submitting the final paper".