Dear ISMB/ECCB09 Program Committee Member,

Thank you for your willingness to serve on the PC for the ISMB/ECCB09
conference. At this point you should have received an invitation
from EasyChair to log onto the ISMB/ECCB09 easychair webpage, or
to establish an easychair account. If you have not received such
an invitation, please let your area chairs know.

Your area chairs will shortly make specific paper assignments.
EasyChair will send you a message asking you to look at the papers
you are supposed to referee.  All the reviews are due by Feb. 9,
2009. The period from Feb. 9 to Feb.  23 will be used for discussion,
and you may be asked to discuss your reviews and scores with the
chairs and/or the other reviewers on the paper.

When you receive your paper assignments, your first action should
be to inspect the papers to find out whether you have a conflict
of interest on any of the papers.  Of course, you cannot review a
paper where you are (co-)author.  Other conflicts of interest are
manifested by an author being a recent student (current or within
the last two years), a family relative, or a current institutional
colleague.  You also have a COI if the paper is so intimately related
to or competitive with your research, that you consider yourself
biased.  When in doubt about a COI, ask and report.  Please report
conflicts of interest to your area chair immediately, so that the
respective paper can be reassigned.

Upon filling in the review form, please carefully select the score
and your confidence. Of course, we are looking for high-confidence
judgments.  If you have a lower confidence in assessing the 
technical details  of a paper, please state that and  try to assess 
the paper in terms  of the biological interest of the results and 
its readibility for non  experts.

It is extremely important that you fill in the text parts of the
review form in order to provide the chairs and the authors with the
most relevant and in-depth comments.  You can choose to address
some comments to the program committee exclusively and others to
be seen by the authors.  We suggest that you target as much of your
comments as possible to the authors, so that they can follow the
line of reasoning that led to the decision on their paper. In
choosing your wording, please be polite and do not become personal
as you make critical remarks. It is essential for the reputation
of ISMB/ECCB that the authors feel they have been treated seriously 
and respectfully.

Also note that there will not be a second round of reviews.
The authors of accepted papers will only be able to make minor,  
mainly editorial, changes to their papers
before their camera-ready manuscript is due. Therefore, you must
judge the paper based on its current contents, rather than what the
paper would be if modified according to your suggestions.

The information contained in the submission is confidential.  It
is very important that you do not use this information for your own
research and do not communicate any of it to others. This is basic
scientific ethics on which the authors rely when they submit to the
conference. If you use subreviewers, you must instruct them to
adhere to this ethical code as well.

Please submit all your review reports by February 9 at the latest.

Thank you very much again for being willing to do this service to
the international computational biology community. If you have any
questions or comments, please let us know.

Best regards,

Dan Gusfield and Anna Tramontano