SIGIR Community Survey on Preprint Services

Recently, there has been a growing number of questions about the relationship between preprints and double-blind peer-review at the SIGIR conference. These questions come from authors who wish to post papers which are under review to preprint servers such as arXiv.org, as well as reviewers who become aware of author identities through such postings, and are subsequently, unsure of how to proceed in a double-blind review process. A review of current conference publication guidelines was conducted, along with a survey of SIGIR community members to gain insight about their behaviors, practices and opinions. The paper presents results of this survey, as well as recommendations about submission and review policies for the SIGIR conference.