IEEE Software delegates the chairs of the sponsored event to organize/coordinate to select the best paper award. But the event chairs shall inform and get confirmation from the IEEE Software Awards Chair on the event chairs' proposed procedure for selecting the best paper award (if different from the typical procedure as below).
Typical Procedure for Selecting the Best Paper
Timing constraint: the IEEE Software Awards Chair needs to get the info about the selected best paper at least 1-1.5 month before the conference date to allow enough time for preparing the certificate and mailing the certificate to the conference venue. But the event chairs shall aim to (1) start soliciting the best paper candidates from the PC members within one or two weeks after sending out the acceptance notification given that PC members still have fresh memory on the papers that they reviewed; (2) start soliciting the votes from the PC members within one or two weeks after the camera ready version is due.
Typical steps:
- Step 1. The event chairs identify a few top ranked papers (based on review scores) as best paper candidates.
- Step 2. The event chairs send an email to the event PC members to solicit more paper candidates (if any).
- Step 3. The event chairs collect the camera ready versions of these paper candidates from the authors (alternatively, the event chairs could try to collect the camera ready versions from the proceedings-producing vendor but there could be delay in getting the camera ready versions).
- Step 4. The event chairs share the collected camera ready versions of these paper candidates to the event PC members (e.g., putting on a temp URL or in DropBox, iBox, Google Drive, etc.).
- Step 5. The event chairs send an email to the event PC members to ask them to email back to inform the event chairs their top N (e.g., 3) choices and rank these N choices (note that the event PC members can vote fewer than N choices, and they cannot vote any papers that they have conflict of interest with).
- Step 6. The event chairs calculate the accumulated scores of these paper candidates using some scoring scheme (e.g., the first, second, and third rank get 3, 2, 1 points, respectively, for N as 3), and then the event chairs select the top-choice winner (only one best paper awardee should be selected).
- Step 7. The event chairs send an email to the IEEE Software Awards Chair to list the title and author names of the selected best paper to kick off the procedure of preparing the hardcopy certificate, which will be prepared by the IEEE Software staff and mailed to a contact person (local in the event venue) from the main venue's organizing committee (e.g., the organizing committee of the main conference where a sponsored industry track belongs to).
- Step 8. The event chairs coordinate with the main venue's organizing committee to find a time slot to present the award to the selected best paper's authors. It is up to the main venue's organizing committee whether the list of awards will be announced publicly before the main venue. If so, the event chairs shall send an email to the best paper's authors on informing their winning and congratulating them.
- Step 9. The event chairs pick up the award certificates at the conference venue and give the award in an award presentation slot during the main venue.
- Step 10. The event chairs email the award winners to encourage them to write an article based on their best paper to submit to IEEE Software.