What is it?

Pasha is a free, web-based package to handle the paper or abstract reviewing process for scientific conferences.

An Alternative!

The LinguistList folks have provided their own online conference submission system called Easy Abstracts. It's free, it's hosted on their servers, and it has some features Pasha does not. For most setups, this will be the better way to go.

Screenshots

The screen capture on the left (click to enlarge) shows what a typical reviewer would see who was given three papers to review. This reviewer has already assigned scores to two of the three papers. The small PDF file icons on the left of the top table allow the reviewer to download these papers for reading.

The two screen captures on the left (click to enlarge) shows what a conference chair would see who was looking at the general paper summary screen (top), or the detailed information on a single paper (bottom). The latter has the short summary of all reviewers first, followed by more detailed feedback and comments from each reviewer.

How does it work?

In the call for papers for your conference, you direct potential authors to a Pasha web page where they first register and then submit their abstract or paper; i.e. the web page allows them to upload their file. You also collect a list of reviewers and create accounts for them in the Pasha system. When the submission deadline has ended, you assign each abstract or paper to appropriate reviewers. You then send the reviewers an email message with their login information for Pasha. After logging on, each reviewer can download the papers or abstracts which were assigned to them (but no other ones). They can also rate each paper and provide various kinds of feedback depending on which questions you asked. When the reviewing has started, you can access yet another Pasha web page which lets you monitor the entire process: e.g. the number of reviews for each paper as well as its average score; the number of reviews finished by each reviewer as well as his/her average. You can also sort the papers by their score to make it easier to select the ones for the conference. Obviously, you can also check the detailed feedback left by all reviewers about all the papers. (todo) On the basis of the reviews, you mark which papers are accepted for the conference. An email message can then be sent to tell the authors whether their paper got accepted. When the reviewers are done, you can let the authors log on again to see the parts of the reviews which you like. It's probably much better to take a look for yourself at the sample installation on our server.

Technical Information

Pasha is written entirely in Perl and runs as CGI scripts. It uses .htaccess files for authentication, so the Apache web server is a good fit. It is pretty easy to install - see the README file. It is pretty easy to configure - see the sample configuration file.

Download

Pasha can be downloaded and used for free, but commercial use of any kind is prohibited (see the license). The only other restriction is that the image and link to the Pasha home page can not be removed. (The image and link appear in the footer of every web page generated by Pasha.) If you decide to use it, it would be appreciated if you could email me the following: any changes you made to the programs (e.g. to add features), your final pasha_conf.pl configuration file (I'd like to make a library of these available for download so that people can learn from each other's conference questions); and a copy of the proceedings (electronic version preferred; for my own edification). The following versions are currently available for download:

Version Size Date Notes   Pasha 0.75   46kB   15 Oct 2007   Add multi-author submissions, email scripts, minor bug fixes   Pasha 0.72   79kB   3 May 2006   Fix three code system revision bugs   Pasha 0.71   79kB   12 Jan 2006   Add submissions, online reviewers and assignments (BETA!)   Pasha 0.28   36kB   2 Dec 2003   Add code to deal with carriage returns in input files   Pasha 0.27   35kB   13 Nov 2003   Fix compatibility issue with older version of Perl   Pasha 0.26   34kB   25 July 2003   Fix bug in average score calculation for summary screens   Pasha 0.25   34kB   5 Jun 2003   Finish 'finalized' coding and add another sorting option   Pasha 0.22   33kB   16 May 2003   Some minor fixes to feed.cgi and smaller sample PDF files   Pasha 0.20   71kB   13 May 2003   Major code cleanup and reorganization   Pasha 0.10   84kB   18 Apr 2003   Initial release based on WCCFL 22 code

More information about what's been changed between versions can be found in the CHANGES file.

History

The first version of the code was written for WCCFL 22 at the Linguistics Department of the University of California, San Diego. It was written by Ezra Van Everbroeck with a lot of feedback from the WCCFL 22 abstracts committee. Pasha as a distributable package was created after requests from WCCFL 22 reviewers to use it for other conferences. Conferences which have actually used Pasha include: Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD): 28, 29 Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society (NELS): 34, 37 Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL): 34, 35, 36, 38, 39 West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL): 22, 23, 24, 26, 27 Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT): 14, 15?, 16 Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS): 41, 42, 43, 45 Joint meeting of The Hispanic Linguistics Symposium + The Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages: 2005 Sinn und Bedeuting (SuB): 11 Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language (CSDL): 8 Penn Linguistics Colloquium (PLC): 31, 32 Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA): 14 Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS): 33 International Conference on East Asian Linguistics (ICEAL): 2006 Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL): 15 Annual Colloquium of Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW): 30, 31 Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody 2008 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL): 2007 International Congress of Linguistics (CIL) - partial: 18 International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICFG): 5 The current TODO list (out of date!).

Feedback

If you have any questions or suggestions, please direct them to Ezra Van Everbroeck @ ezra@ucsd.edu.