AI-assisted pre-review of open-source software submissions: an experience report from BOSC 2026

Most conferences rely on peer-review of submissions, but as generative AI makes it easier than ever to prepare submission materials, some conferences are seeing an overwhelming surge of submissions. We wanted to see if generative AI could help our conference's volunteer reviewers by pre-reviewing abstracts for certain criteria. The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) was well-positioned to experiment with this, as we already had a detailed rubric used by reviewers to evaluate submitted abstracts on multiple criteria, including openness (public availability of the code or other content associated with the project), valid open source license, and "runnability" (how easy it is to download, build, and run the project - an important measure of reusability). For BOSC 2026, we built bosc-pre-review, an agentic skill that assessed six review criteria, and Runabilly, which builds and tests each project in a disposable Docker container for safety. The AI only gathered evidence to present to the reviewers; humans made every decision regarding the acceptance of the abstracts. After the review period, we surveyed the reviewers to determine how useful they found the pre-review. Most of those who responded said they found it useful, but they preferred to check the AI's conclusions against their own, rather than accepting the AI results unquestioningly.