DFRWS TPC Conflict of Interest Policy

The Technical Program Committee (TPC) co-chairs require cooperation from both authors and TPC members to prevent submissions from being evaluated by reviewers who have a conflict of interest. During the submission process, we will ask authors to identify members of the program committee with whom they share a conflict of interest. This may include: (1) anyone who shares an institutional affiliation with an author at the time of submission, (2) anyone who was the advisor or advisee of an author at any time in the past, (3) anyone the author has collaborated or published within the prior two years, (4) anyone who is serving as the sponsor or administrator of a grant that funds your research, or (5) close personal friendships. For other forms of conflict, authors must contact the chairs and explain the perceived conflict.

TPC members who are conflicts of interest with a paper, including program co-chairs, will be excluded from both online and in-person evaluation and discussion of the paper by default.  The TPC co-chairs may submit papers, as long as there is one chair who is not an author of the submission. The program co-chair who is not the author of the paper will be responsible for managing the other TPC co-chair’s paper.

Adapted from 25th Usenix Security (2015): Submitting Papers | USENIX

and the 31st Usenix Security (2022): USENIX Security ’22 | USENIX

Revised: 2022–02-17 by DFRWS BoD.

Approved: Feb 17, 2022 by DFRWS BoD.