I don’t usually weigh in here, but, in support of Karen’s (whom I do not know personally) original post: 

You know, when I have a bad time, I sometimes share it with colleagues. So I support hearing about it when another academic had a particularly bad experience. And it certainly doesn’t make up my mind automatically when someone expresses an opinion at me. Nor did I think her comments were particularly rancorous. 

Sharing is caring. Sorry you felt spanked, Chairs of MTSR 2019 Conference, but then your response seemed either overweening, perhaps “chairsplainin’,” and maybe a little Trump-y? Why not apologize if there was a disconnect and then hold out the olive branch? 

Randy
……

Randal Sean Harrison, Ph.D.
Emerging Technologies Librarian

University of Notre Dame
158 Hesburgh Library
Notre Dame, IN 46556

(574) 631-0312
[log in to unmask]
randalseanharrison.com <http://randalseanharrison.com/>

⌖  Map to my office <http://randalseanharrison.com/new_office/map.png>
⌖  Make a meeting <https://randalseanharrison.youcanbook.me/>



> On Aug 22, 2019, at 12:25 PM, Lina Bountouri <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> 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)
>>