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Appoint a faculty reviewer

Each faculty and school nominates someone to review its research before the RIC publishes it — a supervisor, or a designated research reviewer. Putting that person into the system is a RIC task. This page shows how.

It is the same kind of job as enabling a depositor: the account already exists, and what you grant is a right, not an account.

What you're granting

The nominated person needs to be in their faculty's reviewer pool. Once they are, submissions to that faculty's collections appear in their MyDSpace as pooled tasks, and they can approve work up to you or send it back to the author.

They cannot publish, and they cannot create a DOI — only your approval does that. So adding a reviewer is a low-risk grant: the worst a mistaken reviewer can do is return work to its author.

One pool per faculty, not one per collection

Each faculty has a single reviewer pool covering all of its collections — for example the Faculty of ICT's pool covers every collection in every one of its departments. Adding someone to the pool once is meant to cover the whole faculty, rather than repeating the job for each collection.

Before you start

  • The person has already registered and has given you the email they signed up with.
  • You know which faculty or school they are reviewing for. Reviewers are appointed per faculty, not per department and not repository-wide.
  • The faculty has actually nominated them. The repository doesn't decide who reviews; it records the faculty's decision.

How the appointment is made

You confirm the appointment; ICT applies it

You can open Access Control → Groups and read any faculty's reviewer pool — useful for checking who currently reviews for a faculty. But adding or removing a member is restricted to system administrators, so the last step is ICT's.

To appoint someone, send ICT:

  • the person's email (the one their account uses), and
  • the faculty or school they will review for, with the exact pool name from the table below.

Give the pool name rather than the faculty name — two of them don't match, and it removes any guesswork at ICT's end.

The rest of this page explains what that pool is and how to check it, so you can confirm the appointment landed and see who reviews for a faculty at any time.

1. Find the faculty's reviewer pool

Open Access Control → Groups and find the pool for the person's faculty, using the exact name from the table below.

Two pools are not named after their faculty — look them up, don't guess

Searching "ICT" or "Media Arts" finds nothing. Both pools kept their original names when the faculties were renamed, so you must use the name in this table.

Faculty or school Reviewer pool group
Faculty of Agriculture & Environment Agriculture_Reviewers
Faculty of Business & Economics Business_Reviewers
Faculty of ICT Computing_Reviewers ← not "ICT"
Faculty of Education Education_Reviewers
Faculty of Engineering Engineering_Reviewers
Faculty of Media Arts Journalism_Reviewers ← not "Media Arts"
Faculty of Shari'ah & Law Sharia_Law_Reviewers
School of Medicine and Surgery Medicine_Reviewers
School of Public Health and Nutrition Public_Health_Reviewers
School of Nursing and Midwifery Nursing_Reviewers
School of Pharmacy Pharmacy_Reviewers
School of Medical Laboratory Sciences Medical_Lab_Reviewers
School of Dentistry Dentistry_Reviewers
Al Hayat Teaching Hospital Al_Hayat_Reviewers
School of Postgraduate Studies & Research Postgraduate_Reviewers
Amoud University Library Library_Coordinators

Never appoint a faculty reviewer into Supervisors

There is a group called Supervisors, and it looks like the obvious home for a supervisor who has been nominated to review. It isn't. Supervisors is a single repository-wide group attached to the thesis and student-project collections of every faculty — so putting one faculty's nominee in it makes them a reviewer for the whole university.

The person may well be a supervisor. The group must still be their faculty's pool from the table above.

2. Check who is in it

Open the pool to see its Current Members — that is the full list of people who review for that faculty. Use it to confirm an appointment ICT has applied, or to check whether a faculty has anyone reviewing at all before you chase a slow queue.

The Add EPeople search and the green + will not work for you; that is the administrator-only part.

3. Tell them they're active

Ask them to log in again, then open MyDSpace and set the Show filter to Workflow tasks. Point them at For faculty reviewers.

They will see nothing until a submission actually arrives — an empty queue is normal, not a sign that the grant failed.

Removing a reviewer

Also an ICT action — send them the person's email and the pool to remove them from. Do this when someone leaves the faculty or hands the role on, and don't let it wait: a departed reviewer keeps their queue and their claims.

Never empty a reviewer pool by removing the last member if that faculty relies on it

A review stage with no one in it is skipped entirely — submissions pass straight through to the next stage rather than waiting. Removing the last reviewer doesn't stop the queue; it silently removes the check. If a faculty is standing its reviewer down, tell ICT so the stage can be unbound deliberately rather than left hollow.

Keep the roles separate

A reviewer shouldn't review their own submissions

If the same person both deposits into a collection and reviews it, they can wave their own work through to you. Keep the two on different people where you can, and be aware of the overlap where you can't.

Why not add reviewers collection by collection

A collection's own Assign Roles tab also has a Reviewers card, and unlike the pool, you can add people there yourself — so it is tempting as a way to avoid waiting on ICT.

Resist it. It grants review rights on that one collection only. A faculty has many collections across its departments, so doing it this way means repeating the job many times per person, and again whenever a collection is added. Worse, the two routes drift apart: someone added to a single collection does not appear in the faculty pool, so the pool stops being a truthful answer to "who reviews for this faculty" — including for you, on the screen above.

Wait for ICT and keep one list.

Next steps