Blended PC Peer Review Model: Process and Reflection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The academic peer review system is under increasing pressure due to a growing volume of submissions and a limited pool of available reviewers, resulting in delayed decisions and an uneven distribution of reviewing responsibilities. Building upon the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) community's earlier experience with a Shadow PC (2021 and 2022) and Junior PC (2023 and 2024), MSR 2025 experimented with a Blended Program Committee (PC) peer review model for its Technical Track. This new model pairs up one Junior PC member with two regular PC members as part of the core review team of a given paper, instead of adding them as an extra reviewer. This paper presents the rationale, implementation, and reflections on the model, including empirical insights from a post-review author survey evaluating the quality and usefulness of reviews. Our findings highlight the potential of a Blended PC to alleviate reviewer shortages, foster inclusivity, and sustain a high-quality peer review process. We offer lessons learned and recommendations to guide future adoption and refinement of the model.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.063 | 0.165 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".