On behalf of the Chairs of MTSR 2019 Conference

------------------------------

Dear list members,

We apologise for the long email.

We apologize also that we have to reply to an email of a member in the
list, but this is not about saying that “we are right, you are wrong”, or
talk about why an author felt that the reviewers were “nasty” to a paper,
but about giving the facts about this issue, and protect the MTSR Community
(http://www.mtsr-conf.org/).

MTSR is an inter-disciplinary conference, which brings together academics,
researchers, practitioners, librarians, etc. in the specialized fields of
metadata, ontologies and semantics research. Professionals from more than
40 countries are involved. We feel that the comments of Karen Coyle insult
us personally and professionally and we have to reply by giving only facts.

Conferences are vibrant events and no one says that mistakes never happen.
But If an author has any problem with a conference, a conference track or a
review process, the professional way to solve or discuss about it is
firstly to directly contact the Conference, try to find a solution or get a
proper explanation, and then, if s/he is not happy and go publicly to any
professional list.

The International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR) goes
back to 2005. Since then the community has grown and become strong.
Proceedings have been published by the Springer's CCIS (Communications in
Computer and Information Science) Series. The acceptance rate of full
research papers for both the general session and tracks was 24.6% for MTSR
2018. The rate of downloads of the proceedings and chapters is very high
according to Bookmetrix.

When an author submits a paper to a conference is very important to read
the CfP and to read carefully also the Track CfP. Choosing the wrong Track
could lead to rejection. Authors that do not follow the required standards
set by the Conference and the Publisher could lead to rejection. Authors
that do not follow the instructions to authors, namely page length,
Publisher’s template, references, etc. could lead to rejection. In this
case, the author submitted a paper about FRBR in Jun 15, 19:23 in the track
“Knowledge IT Artifacts (KITA) in professional communities and
aggregations”. The paper was submitted anonymously, went through a blind
peer-reviewed process, and we had an outcome.

After the review process an independent committee went through all the
procedures in order to check that the conference quality criteria have been
implemented during the review process. In case of this paper all the
procedures that followed were accurate. Nevertheless, the committee decided
to send the paper for a second round of review in the light of the comments
made by the reviewers. Two experts in the field did the second round of
reviews. In total the paper had 4 reviews.

We always, as MTSR community, value the work of all authors. By sending
this paper after receiving two rejections to a second group of expert
reviewers for a second round of reviews, shows that MTSR Conference takes
seriously the review process and values the work of researchers. MTSR
evaluates all papers on their timeliness and novelty; significance to the
field and potential impact on the course of future work in the area;
document structure; clarity; quality of text; relevance to MTSR Conference
and methodology.

Two final points:

a) When an author submits a paper to a conference or a journal s/he expects
that her/his work is to be evaluated.

b) MTSR will continue to work closely with the Community, PC members and
reviewers in order to improve further the quality of reviews, keeping the
high standards in the review process and the independent voice of reviewers.

We will not respond to any other email concerning this issue. If you want
to have a vibrant experience with MTSR Community and Conference, we suggest
that you attend a conference or submit in the future your research work.

Karen, we invite you to attend an MTSR Conference, and we are sure that you
will change your opinion about it. We feel that this is not fair for all
parties.

We are looking forward to working with you.

With best regards,

Chairs of MTSR 2019 Conference


On Wed, 21 Aug 2019, 18:34 Karen Coyle, <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> Folks,
>
> I made the terrible mistake of submitting to this conference, so I
> wanted to let others know about my experience. The "review" that I
> received consisted of a 25-point nastygram, dripping sarcasm. I was
> utterly shocked, to say the least. This is without a doubt a conference
> that needs a Code of Conduct, but I'm not holding out hope for it.
>
> Clearly one that I will avoid in the future, and I regret having had
> contact with this community. The contrast with Code4Lib is like 0 to 1.
> Oh, boy, and I glad to be here!
>
> kc
>
>
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] 1st C4P - SPECIAL TRACK on METADATA & SEMANTICS for
> CULTURAL COLLECTIONS & APPLICATIONS
> Date: Thu, 9 May 2019 08:39:16 +0200
> From: Lina Bountouri <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> 1st Call for Papers, apologies for cross-posting
> ------------------------------
>
> SPECIAL TRACK on METADATA & SEMANTICS for CULTURAL COLLECTIONS &
> APPLICATIONS <http://www.ionio.gr/labs/dbis/mtsr2019/>
>
> Part of the 13th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics
> Research (MTSR 2019) <http://mtsr-conf.org/home>
> October 28 – 31 2019, Rome, Italy
>
> *Submission deadline: June 16th, 2019*
> Proceedings will be published in *Springer CCIS series
> <http://www.springer.com/series/7899>*
>
> AIM AND SCOPE
> Cultural Heritage collections are essential knowledge infrastructures that
> provide a solid
> representation of the historical background of human communities. These
> knowledge infrastructures
> are constructed from and integrate cultural information derived from
> diverse memory institutions,
> mainly libraries, archives and museums. Each individual community has spent
> a lot of effort
> in order to develop, support and promote its own systems, tools and
> metadata for the management
> of cultural information, mainly related to its particular resources and
> use.
>
> In this framework, the management of the cultural information has to deal
> with challenges related to
> (i) metadata modeling, specification, standardization, extraction,
> (semantic) enrichment, mapping,
> integration, effective use, and evaluation, (ii) knowledge representation
> as conceptualization to
> provide the context for unambiguously interpreting metadata, and (iii)
> information integration from
> different contexts for the provision of integrated access, reuse and
> advanced services to users.
>
> At the same time, there are also inter-domain efforts targeted to
> semantically align data (research
> data, educational data, public sector information etc.) to cultural
> information. New challenges are
> also emerged from the need to incorporate cultural information into the new
> publication paradigms,
> where a variety of resources (data, metadata, processes, results, etc) are
> linked and integrated,
> providing better shareability and reusability. Currently, Linked (Open)
> Data, as part of the
> Semantic Web Technology, is having a major role in modernizing cultural
> heritage collections.
> Providing to users the possibility to re-use and integrate data into their
> own systems is currently
> more than a need, given that transparency and access to information is a
> prerequisite. A critical
> factor to the effectiveness of many aspects of all the above efforts is the
> quality of metadata,
> as interpreted by its context and use and evaluated by the proper measures
> and methods. Many
> institutions and aggregate infrastructures are dealing with the poor
> quality of metadata that
> inevitably results in poor integration, search and reuse, while their
> enrichment, in terms of
> contextualization, co-referencing, alignment, etc, is really challenging.
>
> The aim of this Special Track is to maintain a dialogue where researchers
> and practitioners working
> on all the aspects of the cultural information will come together and
> exchange ideas about open issues
> at all stages of the cultural heritage information life cycle. The track
> also welcomes works related to
> semantics and applications for new approaches to cultural information
> publication and sharing, as well
> as to interlinking to other datasets published in the Semantic Web
> universe.
>
>
> TOPICS
> The papers in this special track should be original and of high quality,
> addressing issues in areas
> such as:
> * Cultural Heritage metadata models, standards, ontologies, knowledge
> organization and representation systems
> * Cultural Heritage information integration, interoperability and mappings
> * Automated extraction of metadata, entities, and patterns from Cultural
> Heritage resources
> * Metadata manual or automated (Semantic) enrichment and search
> * Metadata quality metrics, tools and services
> * Linked Open Data approaches in the Cultural Heritage domain
> * Publication, linking and citation of Cultural Heritage information and
> resources
> * Large volume content management
> * 3D models-indexing, storage and retrieval approaches
> * Infrastructures for sharing content
> * Digital Curation workflows and models
> * Provenance and preservation metadata for Cultural Heritage digital
> resources
>
> SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
> Authors can submit either full papers (12 pages) or short papers (6 pages).
> Submitted papers have to
> follow the LNCS proceedings formatting style and guidelines
> <
> https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines?countryChanged=true
> >
> .
>
> Submissions should be original and not previously submitted, published and
> under review to other
> Conferences or Journals.The submitted papers will undergo the same peer
> review as the submissions
> for MTSR 2019 and accepted contributions will be published in the MTSR 2019
> proceedings (Springer CCIS series <http://www.springer.com/series/7899>).
> Authors of accepted papers will be asked to register to the Conference and
> present their work.
>
> Selected papers might be considered for a revised and extended version to
> be published in a range of
> international journals, including the International Journal of Metadata,
> Semantics and Ontologies
> <https://www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=ijmso>
> (Inderscience), and Data Technologies and Applications
> <
> http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=dta
> >
> (previously published as Program, Emerald).
> More information on submission can be found at the MTSR 2019 call for
> papers web page <http://mtsr-conf.org/call-for-papers>.
>
>
> IMPORTANT DATES
> June 16th, 2019: Submission deadline
> July 28th, 2019: Notification of decision (Acceptance/Rejection)
> August 25th, 2019: Camera-ready papers due
> October 28th – October 31st, 2019: Conference at the Marconi University in
> Rome, Italy
>
>
> SPECIAL TRACK CHAIRS
> * Michalis Sfakakis, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian
> University, Corfu, Greece ([log in to unmask])
> * Lina Bountouri, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian
> University, Corfu, Greece and NATO HQ, Brussels, Belgium (
> [log in to unmask],
> [log in to unmask])
>
>
> PROGRAM COMMITTEE (TBA)
>