Editors' Introduction

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to introduce Issue 2 of Volume 2023 of the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs). PoPETs is a journal that publishes articles accepted to the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). To contribute to the free availability of scientific publications, PoPETs is published under the open-access Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs license. PoPETs/PETS uses a hybrid conference-journal model, one that has since been adopted by many other conferences in the field. In this model, articles are published throughout the year at regular intervals, and the papers for the year are then presented at an annual conference. Reviewers can request revisions of submitted articles, which may then be revised and resubmitted in the same year. PoPETs publishes four issues per year. By enabling resubmission across these issues, PoPETs provides a high-quality peer-review process that enables authors and reviewers to work together to produce and recognize significant scholarly contributions. The PoPETs double-blind peer-review process is similar to other top-tier computer-security publications. The process includes initial review by the Editors-in-Chief for rules compliance and in-scope content, written reviews by multiple independent reviewers, author rebuttal, discussion among reviewers, and consensus decisions with disagreements resolved by the Editors-in-Chief. The output of the review process is a set of reviews, a meta-review summarizing the reviewers’ opinions after discussion, and one of the following decisions: Accept, Accept with Minor Revisions, Major Revisions, Reject and Resubmit, and Reject. Reviewing by the Editorial Board is performed in two rounds. In the first round, the Editors-in-Chief assign two reviewers from the Regular Editorial Board and a meta-reviewer from the Senior Editorial Board to all papers, and at the end of the round early decisions are made to reject certain papers that have two reject scores (Reject or Reject and Resubmit) from the reviewers. The remaining papers receive additional reviews in the second round for a total of four reviews (in a few cases, submissions received fewer or more reviews). The meta-reviewer guides and summarizes the discussion into a meta-review and a decision recommendation to the Editors-in-Chief after the first or second round of reviewing. Many articles had an external review drawn from a pool of junior experts nominated by the community1. Further external experts were invited to review certain articles. All reviews were sent to the authors of papers that proceeded to the second round of review,