Interview with ACM TOSEM EiC Prof. Abhik Roychoudhury on the Review Committee

Interview conducted by Ruijie Meng and Damian Tamburri,
ACM TOSEM Social Media Editors

To further broaden our engagement with the larger community, ACM TOSEM has set up a Review Committee. The Review Committee Members are appointed for two years (1 Jan 2026–31 Dec 2027), and they assist the editorial board by serving more consistently as reviewers. This is also aimed at alleviating a concern that has been recently discussed in software engineering conferences — the scarcity of reviewers. We are pleased to interview Prof. Abhik Roychoudhury, Editor-in-Chief of ACM TOSEM, to learn more about this initiative.

1. What motivated the creation of a formal Review Committee at this point?

We have had a Distinguished Reviewer Board in the past. This time, since we have specific areas earmarked for papers namely as follows, this helped us structure the Review Committee (RC).

Requirements and Architecture; Human and Social Aspects; Testing, Analysis and Verification; AI and SE; Security and SE; Maintenance and Evolution; Analytics and Empirical Studies.

The Review Committee members are available here:

https://dl.acm.org/journal/tosem/editorial-board

We have aligned each RC member to one of the areas. We note that TOSEM submissions now come marked with an area — so it can help in assigning RC members to papers. I would like to thank the entire editorial board for giving suggestions, and specifically Xiangyu Zhang, who worked to build the committee capturing various expertise.

2. How many reviewers are part of the Review Committee, and what criteria did you use when selecting its members?

The current RC has 42 members. We try to encourage community members at different stages of the research journey and colleagues from all over the world — to enhance diversity.

3. With the introduction of the Review Committee, how do you envision the role of regular reviewers evolving? Will they continue to be involved?

Definitely they will be involved. The RC gives us a pool of committed reviewers with wider exposure to TOSEM papers. At the same time, for a specific topic covered by a paper, the role of the domain expert reviewer will always be paramount.

4. How frequently are Review Committee members expected to review, and what is the anticipated workload for them?

Each RC member has been appointed for two years, during which time they could be reviewing 10 papers. Their term is from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2027.

5. What benefits do you see in participating?

It gives wider exposure to a larger number of community members. There are regions of the world where we want to strengthen participation, such as South America, India, the Middle East, and Africa — and this is another mechanism through which we can bring in participation from these regions. Last but not least, we envision RC members who are active, to be considered for Associate Editor (AE) positions (after the conclusion of their RC term 2026–7) to even further widen their engagement with the community,

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