Summer 2025 update

I had strong ambitions for progress on our beta of Reciprocal Reviews this summer. Andrew is doing great work on policy and design verification. Jérémie is investigating deep integrations with ORCID. And I have a clear backlog of design and polish work to do on the front end to make the platform a viable place for researchers to track and monitor their peer review contributions.

Two things have gotten in the way this summer:

• I had a serious bike accident at the end of June (the beginning of my summer) and have been mostly unable to do any software development for the past 6 weeks. Pain, fatigue, and broken bones, plus serious concussion symptoms meant that my July was mostly rest. I’m just starting to have energy and stamina again for some weekend hobby work on this platform, and that’s feeling great. But I’m not where I wanted to be on progress.

• The U.S. federal assaults on higher education have created immense uncertainty on research funding, budgets, enrollment. It’s caused weekly crises I’ve needed to manage in my administrative role and created major gaps in my ability to support my PhD students and postdoc. It’s also created major gaps in reviewer availability, which meant most of the time I had reserved for contributing has gone to journal crisis management.

Nevertheless, we are still committed to getting this platform live. I’m resuming work on our backlog, Jérémie is making progress on ORCID integrations, and launching this has never been more critical to the sustainability of ACM Transactions on Computing Education (and from what I’m hearing from my other Editor counterparts, for all the other journals in the world as well).

I plan on resuming my regular work sessions on this on Sunday mornings. Watch our CHANGELOG for progress updates and let us know if you’d like to help out.

Meanwhile, for this beginning semesters soon in the northern hemisphere, good luck with the return to school. (I’m on quarters, and have another 6 weeks before summer is over, yay!)

— Amy