Decisions, rebuttals & meta-reviews

The Decisions area is where chairs turn reviews into outcomes.

The decision queue

Each submission shows its reviews, score spread, and controls to record a decision (accept, minor/major revision, reject, or your custom decision types) with a letter to the author and internal committee notes.

AI help for chairs

When AI is enabled, each submission offers:

• Summarize reviews — a balanced synthesis plus a ready-to-edit draft decision letter and internal notes (drop them straight into the fields).
• Summarize rebuttal — maps the author's rebuttal onto the reviewers' concerns (addressed / partial / disputed), lists what's left unanswered, and flags new information.
• Rewrite with AI on the letter and notes.

All AI output is a draft — you edit and decide. Reviewer identities are never sent to the model.

Rebuttals

You can open a rebuttal phase where authors respond to their reviews before the final decision. The window and on/off state live in the review settings; the author's response appears alongside the reviews in the queue.

Meta-reviews & rounds

For multi-round events, a meta-reviewer can write a summary recommendation, and you can advance the round to collect another set of reviews.

Releasing decisions

When decisions are finalized, releasing them notifies authors using your decision email templates (see Emails). Authors see the outcome and feedback under their submissions.

Related: Reviewing · Emails · AI features