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Recently, I nearly made a mistake: I was building my personal webpage, and I added a paper which we submitted to CVPR (a conference) in "publications", marking it as "submitted to CVPR". Fortunately my supervisor/co-author pointed out the oversight before I shared the website link with anyone else.

This got me thinking: I have not attached my CV to the website yet. I know that writing about a conference submission on a CV is not against the double blind rules, but by attaching my CV, I am, in fact, telling everyone who has the link about my submission.

Does adding a CV with info of a conference submission to my personal webpagebreach double-blind peer review?

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    Hi. I don't understand your question, how the situation you described in the first paragraph, which you acknowledged as a breach, differs from the second? For me it's the same thing.
    – The Doctor
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 10:41
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    @TheDoctor The difference is that my CV, even when publicly accessible, might not be a form of medium, while a website is.
    – user173920
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 14:07

2 Answers 2

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This would generally not breach the rules regarding double-blind reviews. I am not aware of any conferences that would forbid mentioning the paper on your CV, although I did not check every individual conference.

The double-blindness of reviews always depends on some level of cooperation from the reviewers. A reviewer can usually get a pretty good idea of the identity of the authors already if they search for it. Putting the paper on your CV which you then post on your website will make de-anonymizing your paper slightly easier, but only slightly.

I could not find any specific rules regarding double-blind reviews in the CVPR call for papers. I did check some other conferences, however. For example, this is the relevant paragraph in the Submission Instructions for AAMAS2023:

Reviewing for AAMAS is double-blind. This means that reviewers should not be aware of the identity of the authors of the papers they review. As an author you must make a reasonable effort to ensure that this is possible. Specifically, please replace your name and affiliation on the first page with the paper tracking number and do not include any acknowledgements in your submission. Cite your own prior work where appropriate, but do so in the third rather than the first person (that is, write, for instance, “X et al. [42] showed …” rather than “We showed … [42]”).

Other conferences may have different rules, but I believe that the AAMAS rules are pretty typical.

[EDIT: I found the releveant instructions on the CVPR site. They too clearly do not forbid you mentioning the paper on your website.]

CVPR reviewing is double blind, in that authors do not know the names of the area chairs or reviewers for their papers, and the area chairs/reviewers cannot, beyond a reasonable doubt, infer the names of the authors from the submission and the additional material. Do not provide information that may identify the authors in the acknowledgments (e.g., co-workers and grant IDs) and in the supplementary material (e.g., titles in the movies, or attached papers). Also do not provide links to websites that identify the authors. Violation of any of these guidelines may lead to rejection without review. If you need to cite any of your own papers that are being submitted concurrently to CVPR or another venue, you should (1) include anonymized versions of those papers in the supplementary material; (2) cite these anonymized papers; and (3) argue in the body of your paper why your CVPR submission is non-trivially different from these concurrent submissions.

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    While not explicitly against the double blind policy mentioned above, CVPR specifically does say it's very much on the line of breaching the anonymity component, and while reviewers shouldn't search for the paper, if the paper is found on a personal website, it'll probably get desk rejected, or removed from proceedings, depending on when it got identified. (cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2024/AuthorGuidelines: Section 3.2 The anonymity policy and its interpretation - accessed 20th December, 2023 @ 1535 UTC) goes into more detail on this)
    – qechua
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 15:41
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    They consider a preprint on a personal website breaches the anonymity requirements, but a preprint on arXiv doesn't? Isn't that just really really silly? Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 16:39
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    @DanielHatton I'm guessing it's a case of ideality bowing to practicality, but only to the extent necessary. They'd prefer the paper not be released anywhere, ever, until officially published, but preprint servers are so important these days, if they didn't carve out a specific exemption the rule would be so onerous they wouldn't get any submissions. So they begrudge arXiv, but apply the ideal rule elsewhere, even if the two don't make sense in combination.
    – R.M.
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 18:13
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    @qechua The policy is unfortunately not very clear, but I believe (based on policies of previous iterations and similar conferences) the restriction is on mentioning that the paper has been submitted to CVPR, not for listing the paper as a preprint or uploading to a personal website while not mentioning that it is under review at CVPR. See under "Dual submissions": "Under the above definition, arXiv preprints and university technical reports are not considered as publications.".
    – GoodDeeds
    Commented Dec 31, 2023 at 14:03
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Since reviews in double blind review are expected to deal with the paper as it is and not search for possible authors, I'd say that it is fine. Many papers have been seen by people other than the authors (collaboration circles, say) prior to submission.

If a reviewer somehow knows the author(s) they should inform the editor of the fact, but that is on them, not on the authors.

Double blind doesn't mean super secret. It is an attempt to get independent opinions on the value of a work, unaffected by external factors.

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