hotcrp

What it does

HotCRP is software for managing review processes, especially for academic conferences. It supports paper submission, review and comment management, rebuttals, and PC (program committee) meetings. Its main strengths are flexibility and ease of use for reviewers, particularly through smart paper search and tagging. The README states it has been widely used in computer science conferences and for internal review processes at several large companies.

Hosting options

HotCRP is the open source version of the software running on hotcrp.com. Organizations that do not want to set up their own server can use hotcrp.com instead. The repository includes a development manual covering advanced configuration, software internals and extensions, a HotCRP OpenAPI specification defining the API with a local copy in devel/openapi.json, and a command line interface called Hotcrapi for API access.

Prerequisites and installation

HotCRP runs on Unix including macOS. It requires a web server, with Nginx recommended using php-fpm or Apache as alternatives, PHP version 8.1 or higher including MySQL support, php-intl and php-fpm, MariaDB, and Poppler's pdftohtml for format checking, with additional packages such as zip and sendmail or postfix possibly needed. Installation uses lib/createdb.sh to create the database and conf/options.php for configuration, and the README gives Nginx, Apache with mod_proxy, and Apache with mod_php examples. The metadata records the license as NOASSERTION.

Editorial conclusion

HotCRP is written in PHP, reported four hundred twenty nine stars at indexing, and is the open source edition of the hotcrp.com hosted service.