SoCG 2025 Conflict of Interest Guidelines
There are two types of Conflicts of Interest (CoIs) hard and soft. PC members and reviewers can have either, while authors can only have hard CoIs.
HARD CoIs:
Hard CoIs prohibit a person from reviewing a paper or interacting towards its acceptance decision. A reviewer should declare a CoI when they may be biased in regards to (one of) the authors, or when there is some other reason that they cannot review a paper objectively. In some cases the potential reviewer may feel that they would not be biased, but should still declare a hard CoI to avoid the appearance of bias. One does not need to specify a reason for declaring a CoI.
Specifically a hard CoI is automatically in effect if the author/reviewer belongs to one of the following cases:
Reviewer owes the author a favor (e.g., recently requested a reference letter).
Furthermore, if the reviewer and the author were involved in an incident that violates the code of conduct, then either can declare a hard CoI. For this CoI to be valid it is not necessary that the incident has been reported in any form.
A hard CoI should also be declared for:
This is intentionally a bit ambiguous, as we leave it to the authors/reviewers to decide when to declare these conflicts. It can be acted on as a soft CoI otherwise (see below). Note that if either side declares a hard CoI, it is marked as a hard CoI.
Under double blind review, and allowing PC submissions, other hard CoIs can materialize:
This is handled mainly in the bidding process, if PC members notice after the bidding process, they should email PC chairs. But also avoid asking as reviewers people that you somehow know have another SoCG’25 submission with significant overlap to the one needing review. Note that we wrote this as “significant overlap” implying that many of the main results are overlapping or in some other way very similar, and we expect it is relatively rare. This strong condition for a hard CoI is meant to prevent the situation where people are unable to review papers in their own expertise.
If after being assigned a review you notice a hard CoI, contact the PC chairs immediately.
SOFT CoIs:
Soft CoIs do not prevent someone from reviewing a paper, however they indicate that there is a chance there may be some perceived bias. For example, when the reviewer is a recent coauthor or collaborator of one of the authors, or is otherwise vested in their success – but the relationship has not risen to the level where the reviewer/author believes it does not allow them to write an unbiased review.
If you have a soft CoI, use your judgment on whether you want to review the paper. Do so only if you feel you can still be objective in your evaluation, or at least provide unbiased factual information.
If you choose to review a paper with a soft CoI, you should disclose the soft CoI in the review form under comments to the PC.
A subreviewer or PC member may feel they have a soft CoI due to minor overlap with one of their own submissions to SoCG’25, but feel it is not large enough overlap to be a hard CoI. In this case, they should not declare it in the “comments to the PC” field, as it may divulge blinded information on another paper. If they are concerned about the perception of bias, they can contact the PC chairs.
Declaring Hard CoIs for PC members:
PC members should declare their hard CoIs through HotCRP. If you have done this before for another conference, it may already be set.