I’m late doing my ASA session organizing work this year. Ugh. I still the hate the interface. It’s a Saturday, I can’t ask ASA. So questions for experienced Scatterplotters.
(1) Before sending a paper off to another session, I’d like to know whether that session organizer is already done. If they are, there is no way the paper is going to be accepted in that session. But there does not seem to be any way for me to get the list of other session organizers to communicate with them. Is that true?
(2) Apart from the submitter’s 1st and 2nd choices, I notice that when I’m the second choice organizer, down at the bottom of the screen there seems to be an option for me to transfer the paper to another session. Is that right? Can I do that? Can I do it technically and should I do it? (It seems like that is really a bad idea unless I’ve consulted with the session organizer first to see if they want it. See problem #1.)
(3) Do I really have to choose what roundtable to send a rejected paper to? Does not the submitter get to choose? So far I have not rejected anybody, so I actually have not seen that menu yet.
Notes to all you folks out their anxiously awaiting results of ASA submissions: please remember that this is by no means a simple process of ranking all submitted papers by quality because the ratio of submissions to slots varies a lot across areas and part of forming a session is trying to put related papers together. And another part involves dealing with a klunky and unfriendly interface.
And another reminder to those who have submitted. Because the interface is so klunky and unfriendly, a session organizer may mis-handle your paper in some way through inadvertence. As I’ve mentioned often before, the most common problem is that an organizer, once she has done her work of processing papers and creating sessions, typically does not return to the interface to look for papers later “released” to her session and thus fails to forward them to roundtables. You have to keep your own eye on this ball if you want to make sure you end up somewhere on the program. And try not to curse the organizers too much for the mistakes they make.