SIGOPS Research Highlights

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is the flagship magazine of the ACM and is one of the most widely read publications in computer science. The “Research Highlights” section of CACM publishes recent papers selected from a broad spectrum of computing research conferences. The final selection by the CACM Research Highlights editorial board is competitive, as many SIGs nominate papers. This document describes how SIGOPS chooses papers to nominate to CACM.

Selection Process

The SIGOPS Research Highlights Committee is selected by the SIGOPS board and has sole responsibility on behalf of SIGOPS for deciding which papers to submit to the CACM Research Highlights editorial board. The committee will typically comprise 5 people, with each person serving a 2-year term.

The committee invites the program chair of each SIGOPS conference to recommend up to three papers for consideration. The recommendations should be made shortly after the conference completes.

It is important to note that the criteria for nominations to Research Highlights are not necessarily the same as those for traditional conference best paper awards. The nominations need to be of broad interest beyond the operating systems community. They must create excitement and do not necessarily need to have all the details worked out. Papers with surprising results that stir stimulating debate at the conference are particularly encouraged.

Program chairs should send their recommendations to the SIGOPS Research Highlights Committee at researchhighlights@sigops.org along with a short description of the process used. To aid in writing strong nominations, the committee will then ask program chairs to forward reviews and author responses for the papers chosen for nomination. The committee will provide a way to do this without exposing reviews to members who have conflicts. Such materials have been instrumental in enabling the committee to articulate strengths, mitigate perceived weaknesses, and identify appropriate technical perspective writers. The section below describes the SIGOPS policy regarding this material.

Policy on Review Materials

SIGOPS permits PC chairs of SIGOPS-sponsored conferences to forward review materials (including reviews, online discussion comments among reviewers, and author responses) to the SIGOPS Research Highlights committee, subject to the following requirements: (1) A committee member with a conflict of interest for a paper will not see the review materials for the paper. (2) The PC chair will obtain permission from the authors before forwarding the review materials for a paper to the committee. (3) The PC chair will either redact reviewer identifying information from the review materials forwarded to the committee or will obtain permission from the reviewers to provide this information.

To simplify (2), SIGOPS encourages PC chairs to include the following statement in the call for papers:

According to SIGOPS guidelines, reviewer comments and author rebuttals for selected papers may be shared with (non-conflicted) members of the SIGOPS committee for nominating papers for CACM Research Highlights.

To simplify (3), SIGOPS encourages PC chairs to include the following statement in the invitation to PC members, ERC members, and ad hoc reviewers:

According to SIGOPS guidelines, reviews and online discussion comments for selected papers (along with reviewer identification) may be shared with (non-conflicted) members of the SIGOPS committee for nominating papers for CACM Research Highlights.