OzCHI 2026 Reviewer Guide

Long Paper Track

The OzCHI 2026 Long Paper track introduces a Program Committee (PC) for the first time. In response to a growing number of submissions, this structure has been adopted to ensure review quality is maintained as the conference scales. PC members are drawn from a diverse mix of the HCI research community, including senior PhD researchers, early-career researchers, and faculty members.

Each submitted paper will be assigned to two PC members. The primary reviewer (1PC) additionally responsible for inviting one external reviewer from the HCI research community, bringing diverse perspectives to each submission. If you have received and accepted an invitation, please refer to the reviewing guidelines below.

LBW Track: How To Volunteer?

The OzCHI community relies on volunteer reviewers to provide high quality reviews on submissions. OzCHI welcomes and encourages researchers at any stage of their career, including early-career and PhD researchers, to both author and review submissions.

To volunteer as a reviewer for the LBW track, please follow these steps:

1. Visit PCS.
2. Navigate to Reviews and click "Volunteer to review".
3. Select OzCHI Society and OzCHI 2026 from the dropdown menu.
4. Indicate the number of papers you are willing to review.

Important Tips: To increase the likelihood of being assigned papers relevant to your expertise, go to Reviews in PCS and provide your areas of expertise and sample publications. Please also update your conflicts of interest under "Manage conflicts".

How To Review? (Applicable for both Long Paper and LBW tracks) 

(This text is adapted from the CHI 2023, 2024, and 2025 reviewing guides to suit the needs of OzCHI.)

Your primary criterion for judging a paper is: Does this submission provide a strong contribution to the field of HCI? Remember that there are many ways a paper can make a contribution to HCI, and you should review the paper accordingly.

Reviewers make an overall recommendation (a 5-1 rating from 'Definite Accept' to 'Definite Reject') on each submission, and provide a written appraisal that matches their recommendation.

A high-quality review is typically about a page of written text. Very short reviews are frustrating for authors, tend to be less constructive, and do not adequately support the review process. Always put yourself in the author's position: what level of detailed feedback would you like to see for your own work?

We encourage supervisors to mentor students who are new to reviewing.

All reviewers are encouraged to read Ken Hinckley's essay on reviewing in HCI.

There are many online tools reviewers might use for editing and proofreading their reviews. Such use is not prohibited but must be used with care. To maintain the integrity of the review process, reviewers should avoid sharing content from unpublished papers with any online tools that may store or process the data in ways that could compromise confidentiality – it is the reviewer’s responsibility to understand the implications of the use of any such tool and abide accordingly. Tools based on LLMs demonstrate greater commitment to prompt completion rather than accuracy. Reviewers must ensure accuracy and relevance of their reviews and take care after using such tools for editing and proofreading.

Maintaining confidentiality is crucial in the review process. Quoting or disclosing papers under review must be avoided. Copying and pasting content from a manuscript into an online LLM risks breaching confidentiality.

Review Criteria

Please address the following in your review:

• Originality: What new ideas or approaches are introduced? A paper must make a clear contribution to Human-Computer Interaction.
• Significance: Will others benefit from the paper? Why does the contribution matter?
• Rigor: Were the methods sufficiently rigorous to support the paper's argument?
• Validity: How confidently can researchers and practitioners use the results?
• Previous work: Is prior work adequately acknowledged and reviewed?
• Presentation: How well is the research framed, and is the argument clear throughout? Is the length of the paper commensurate with its contribution?

Please also consider any other recommendations you think would be useful to the authors.

Best Reviewer Prizes: Outstanding reviewers will receive a prize and be formally recognised at the OzCHI closing ceremony.