PC members vs Subreviewers

One of the most important decisions chairs should make about reviewing is the structure and the hierarchy of reviewers.

The term "reviewer" is used by different communities in different ways. For this reason, this term is rarely used in EasyChair. In EasyChair there are two main kinds of reviewers: program committee members (aka PC members) and subreviewers (called external reviewers in some communities).

We receive a lot of questions related to differences between PC members and subreviewers.

The main difference between PC members and subreviewers is that PC members already agreed to reviewing for the conference, so chairs can assign submissions to them. Subreviewers cannot be assigned and are normally used by PC members to delegate reviewing. To do so, a PC member can send a review request for a specific submission to a subreviewer, who can accept to reject this request.

This is a simple summary of differences between PC members and subreviewers:

1. Chairs can assign submissions to PC members and cannot assign them to subreviewers
2. Subreviewers can reject a review request in EasyChair. If a PC member is assigned a submission, he or she cannot unassign or reject it in EasyChair - only chairs can change the assignment
3. By default, PC members may have access to other reviews (depending on the configuration) and discuss submissions, while subreviewers can only submit their review ones (though this may be changed in the configuration too).
4. PC members can be configured to have access to arbitrary submissions. Subreviewers can only fully access submissions they have agreed to review.
5. PC members constitute a program committee, which can be updated only by chairs. A conference may have or not have a pool of subreviewers, which can be used by PC members to find subreviewers for specific submissions, but PC members can also invite subreviewers from outside of the pool.
6. Chair can disable the use of subreviewers.