changes of refereeing policies The average acceptance rate in 2009 at WMSCI and related conferences was 32.12%, with the average of 4.93 reviewers per paper/abstract. A combination of double blind peer reviews and non-anonymous peer reviews was used, with a total of 11902 reviews for the 2413 submissions. The organizers claim that for the refereed papers, the acceptance policy of WMSCI is the majority rule in both kind of reviewing, i.e. A majority of double blind reviewers and a majority of non-anonymous reviewers should recommend the acceptance of a submissions in order to be accepted for presentation and publication in the respective proceedings. More details regarding this two-tier reviewing methodology can be found at http://www.iiis.org/peer-reviewing.asp. when there is a tie between any kind of reviewers (double blind or non-anonymous)the tendency is to accept the respective submission. When there are a double tie among both kind of reviewers the tendency is to not accept the respective submission. This policy is (according to some people who contributed to this article) more liberal than that of other conferences using the alternative strategy, where papers are accepted when there is the positive agreement of the reviewers (This affirmation need to be referenced) According to the organizers, WMSCI's policy would probably increase the chances of accepting poor papers, but certainly decreases the chances of rejecting good papers. Motivating their acceptance policy, the organizers cite Ernst et al. who showed that the same paper was rated from "unacceptable" to "excellent" according to 6 out of 9 measures by 45 field experts. According to the organizers, their acceptance policy may be better suited for the purpose of bringing together multi-disciplinary engineering communities, and may reduce possibilities of plagiarism and fraud generated by the reviewing process (see also peer review, peer review failure). See also Oxford Round Table References Computer science conferences