Reviewer Guidelines

Thank you once again for agreeing to review for CCN! As a Reviewer, you carry the important responsibility of evaluating submissions, thereby identifying work that should be included and highlighted at CCN as well as giving the feedback to other’s work that is vital to the scientific process. In order to create a review process that yields the highest quality, as a grass-roots organization, we have adopted a system that is more common at machine learning conferences. As this is the first CCN Proceedings track, the timeline and guidelines may evolve. We appreciate your understanding and patience as we develop this new process for CCN. This is a living document and we will update it when necessary.

Each submission to the CCN 2025 Proceedings will receive at least 3 high-quality reviews from Reviewers like yourself. After the review period concludes, the Authors can respond to the reviews and sustain discussion with the Reviewers. Your work and that of your fellow Reviewers will be supported by an Area Chair (AC). The AC will write a meta-review that summarizes the reviews and discussions and makes a recommendation for acceptance. Your area chair will in turn be supervised by a Senior Area Chair (SAC). Your communications with authors, other reviewers and area chairs will take place via OpenReview.

Other guidelines

For reviewers and (senior) area chairs:\ Reviewer guidelines (This document!)\ Area chair (AC) guidelines\ Senior area chair (SAC) guidelines

For authors:\ Submission guidelines\ Author response guidelines

Assignment

We have done our best to match reviewers with the most appropriate submissions. However, if you find that a manuscript assigned to you is too far outside of your area of expertise, or if you recognize a potential conflict of interest; please let your AC or the TPC know straight away so that we can re-assign the manuscript. A conflict of interest arises when an author on one of your assigned submissions is a current or former advisor, family or a close personal relationship, a current or recent collaborator; or someone who works in your current or recent immediate organization, or when you have a financial interest in the work.

reviews-due, 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth (AoE), is the reviewing deadline. We are counting on you to submit your review(s) on or before this date so that we can move onto the next step of the process. As stated in the submission guidelines, if you are a Reciprocal Reviewer (reviewing as part of a proceedings submission) and do not submit all assigned reviews by the author response stage, the relevant submissions may be desk-rejected and may not be considered for Contributed Talk when converted to the Extended Abstracts track.

OpenReview

• The reviewer console provides an overview of all papers assigned to you.

• By posting comments you can contact your Area Chair (see below).

Review

Things to look out for

If you note any of the below, please flag them with your AC or with the TPC.

• Breaches of anonymity: If you find that the identity of the authors is revealed, through, names, affiliations, can be found in the text, in included or linked supplementary material

• Ethical Concerns: This includes for instance harm, injury, or unfair bias

• Dual submission: Submissions that are identical or substantially similar to papers that are under review, have been accepted to, or have been published in other archival conferences and journals should be deemed dual submissions.

Content

• Title: Briefly summarize your perspective on this manuscript

• Rate the submission on the following criteria (details on the scales in the review form):

• Interest: To what extent is this relevant to the CCN community? Is this relevant to a specific subfield or of general interest to a broad audience? What is the contribution and novelty of the findings?

• Soundness: Does the evidence support the claims? Are the right methods used?

• Clarity: Is this clearly communicated? Are the methods explained in a way that facilitates reproducibility?

• Confidence: How familiar are you with the relevant literature? Is your knowledge sufficient to understand the manuscript?

• Comments: This is a long text field where you can write your review.

• You can incorporate Markdown and Latex into the comments section.

• Summarize the manuscript’s claims and approach.

• List strengths and limitations of the manuscript

• Be sure to cover the dimensions above (Interest, Soundness, Clarity) and motivate your rating. It can also be helpful to explain why you don’t believe a higher or lower rating is appropriate.

• Note any questions you have for the authors, or requests to clarify something, so that minor issues can be addressed during the author discussion period.

• Make suggestions for improvement of the work.

Discussion

After reviews are in, authors will be given the opportunity to respond to their reviews, and then a conversation follows. Engage with the authors regardless of your evaluation of the manuscript.

After this, please update your review and explain how and why the author’s response has or hasn’t affected your evaluation. Based on your review, the AC and SAC will come to a recommendation on whether the manuscript is accepted for publication in the CCN proceedings. The program committee will also use these to determine which submissions will be asked to present the work in the form of a talk.

General guidelines

• Confidentiality; do not discuss, distribute or use ideas, content or code of the submissions you review. (Except for discussions with the author or AC of the submission). Reviews are double-blind; authors and other reviewers do not know your identity, but ACs do.

• The use of LLMs or other automated tools for text generation are prohibited during the review process. Inputting a paper submission into such a tool is a violation of confidentiality.

• Abide by the CCN Code of Conduct (https://2025.ccneuro.org/code-of-conduct/).

• Take part in an active, polite and constructive manner.

• Interdisciplinarity: Keep in mind that a submission may have greater affinity with a domain other than yours.

• Please note that all reviews and meta-reviews of accepted papers will be made public.

Lastly, despite our best efforts to plan this year’s process, this is very much a new endeavour and therefore the timeline and guidelines may shift now and then. So please keep an eye on our communications and we ask for your understanding and patience as we keep developing CCN.

Contact Info

If you encounter a situation that you are unable to resolve on your own, please contact the Technical Program Committee (TPC) at tpc@ccneuro.org.

If the issue is related to OpenReview technical issues, email the OpenReview support team directly at info@openreview.net.