Roles and permissions in Littview
A project has exactly three roles: Owner, Assistant, and Reviewer. Roles are per project — you can own your own review and at the same time be a reviewer in a colleague’s. The split follows how a systematic review is actually run: a small group manages the process, and the people judging papers judge them independently. The owner picks each member’s role at invitation and can change it later; the boundaries are enforced by the server, not just hidden in the interface.
One thing the role does not decide is who screens. Screening and extraction work goes to whoever is selected in the distribution step — and that list includes the owner and assistants, not just reviewers. This is how solo reviews work (the owner assigns the papers to themselves) and how an assistant can co-manage and take a share of the screening. Think of the role as what you can manage; the distribution as what you’re assigned.
Owner: the project and its membership are yours
Section titled “Owner: the project and its membership are yours”The owner is whoever created the project. There is exactly one, and it cannot be handed over — the project stays with its creator. Day to day, an owner works with the same pages as an assistant; what sets the role apart are the decisions about people and method that shouldn’t be spread across the group:
- Who is in the project, and as what. Only the owner invites, removes, and changes roles in Manage Members — and only the owner can switch a member’s AI access on or off.
- How AI screening behaves, in AI Screening Configuration. Assistants and reviewers can open it to see what is configured, but not change it.
- When the review is over. Archiving the project — freezing it read-only with every decision preserved — is the owner’s call.
Assistant: shares the process work
Section titled “Assistant: shares the process work”Assistant is the role for a colleague who runs the review with you rather than just screening in it. Everything that turns a protocol into project settings, and everything that keeps the review moving, is open to them:
- Getting the evidence in: importing libraries, attaching PDFs in PDF sources, and working through deduplication.
- Setting the rules: the Criteria Builder, Paper Distribution, the extraction Template builder, and Extraction distribution.
- Watching progress: the Screening overview with its agreement figures, and the Extraction monitor and overview.
- Settling disagreements: the conflict workspace, where split screening decisions are resolved.
- Producing the outputs: the PRISMA pages and diagram, and generating Methods and Results drafts in the Report Generator.
In practice an assistant is an owner without the membership keys: the only pages where they can look but not touch are Manage Members and AI Screening Configuration.
Reviewer: independent judgment, on purpose
Section titled “Reviewer: independent judgment, on purpose”A reviewer’s project is deliberately smaller. Their navigation goes to their own work — My screening queue and My screening progress, My extraction queue, My verification queue — and the setup pages open read-only, so the people applying the rules can always read the rules: which criteria are in force, how papers were distributed, what the extraction template asks.
What a reviewer never sees is other people’s judgment in progress. There is no screening overview with agreement rates, no conflict workspace, and nothing in their queue reveals how a colleague voted on the same paper. That is not a trust issue — it is the method. Double screening only means something if each decision is made blind to the others; disagreements are surfaced afterwards, to the owner and assistants, as conflicts to resolve.
Reviewers still share in the results as co-authors: they can open, filter, and export the Evidence Table and read generated report drafts. Shaping those outputs — marking key papers, running the AI generation, saving report settings — stays with the owner and assistants.
Side by side
Section titled “Side by side”| Owner | Assistant | Reviewer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Members (Manage Members) | Invites, removes, changes roles, toggles each member’s AI access | Views the member list | Views the member list |
| Sources (libraries, PDF sources, deduplication) | Imports libraries, attaches PDFs, resolves duplicates | Same as owner | Views libraries; the PDF sources page is not shown |
| Screening setup (Criteria Builder, Paper Distribution) | Defines criteria, distributes papers | Same as owner | Reads the criteria and the distribution, changes nothing |
| AI Screening Configuration | Chooses the tier and settings | Reads the configuration | Reads the configuration |
| Screening work | Screens the queue assigned to them, if any | Same as owner | Screens the queue assigned to them |
| Progress and agreement (Screening overview) | Sees every reviewer’s progress and the agreement figures | Same as owner | Sees own progress only |
| Conflicts | Sees all votes, resolves disagreements | Same as owner | Never sees how colleagues voted |
| Extraction setup (Template builder, Extraction distribution) | Builds the template, distributes extraction and verification | Same as owner | Reads the template and distribution, changes nothing |
| Extraction work | Extracts and verifies what is assigned to them, if any | Same as owner | Works My extraction queue and My verification queue |
| Extraction monitoring (monitor, overview) | Sees everyone’s extraction progress | Same as owner | Sees own progress only |
| PRISMA (included, excluded, diagram) | Full access | Same as owner | Not shown |
| Results (Evidence Table, Report Generator) | Marks key papers, generates and saves report drafts | Same as owner | Views, filters, and exports the table; reads drafts |
| Project lifecycle | Archives and unarchives the project | — | — |
Choosing roles, and changing your mind
Section titled “Choosing roles, and changing your mind”If you are reviewing alone, you need no one else: you are the owner, and you assign the papers to yourself. With others, the question to ask is not “who is senior” but “who shares responsibility for the process”: a colleague who will import search results, tune criteria, or resolve conflicts needs Project Assistant; someone whose contribution is their independent judgment on papers is a Reviewer.
Nothing about the choice is final. The owner can switch any member between the two at any time in Manage Members (Update member role) — promoting an experienced reviewer to assistant mid-review is common — and work they have already done is unaffected.