Submission Rules and Advice

Submissions violating the formatting and anonymization rules will be rejected and returned without reviews. There will be no extensions for reformatting.

The instructions are similar in spirit to ones used for other conferences with double-blind reviewing (submissions and reviews are anonymous). In fact, some of the language has been lifted from calls for papers of other conferences. If you have any questions, feel free to send email to kaashoek@mit.edu.

Good luck with your submission!

Formatting rules

Submitted papers must be no longer than fourteen (14) 8.5"x11" pages in a typeface no smaller than 10 point. The page limit includes everything: references, title page, figures, appendices, etc. The submitted papers should be in PDF form and follow the ACM rules for camera-ready copy, with a few exceptions:

• Submissions should be anonymous (see below). On the front page, in place of the authors' names, the paper should indicate: the paper ID number assigned during the paper registration process and the total number of pages in the submission.
• ACM specifies a 9-point font, but for the submission authors should use a 10-point font or larger;
• Pages should be numbered. (For the submission, you may be better off not using the SIG template; just use the standard latex "article" format in 10, or larger, point double column, so that pages are numbered.)

For the submission, please make sure that:

• The paper prints well on black-and-white printers, not color printers. This is especially true for plots and graphs in the paper.
• The output has been formatted for printing on LETTER (8.5" by 11") size paper, with 10-point font and 12-point spacing. All material (except page numbers) should be in a 7" by 9.25" block on each page. The block should be formatted with two columns, with 0.25" separation between the two columns.
• Symbols and labels used in the graphs are readable as printed, and not only with a 20x on-screen magnification.
• Try to limit the file size to less than 15 MB.

Anonymizing rules

Authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize their submissions, and not identify themselves either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references or acknowledgments). Yet, at the same time, the reviewer should be able to fully grasp the context of related work, including your own. Common sense and careful writing will go a long way towards preserving anonymity. Additionally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

• Remove authors' names and affiliations from the title page.
• Remove acknowledgement of identifying names and funding sources.
• Use care in naming your files. Source file names, e.g., Joe.Smith.dvi, are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments.
• Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, a good solution is to reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work.
• If you have a concurrent submission, reference it as follows: "Closely related work describes a microkernel implementation [Anonymous 2007]." with the corresponding citation: "[Anonymous 2007] Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing."

We recognize that, even following these guidelines, closely building on your own prior work may indirectly reveal your identity.

Blind reviewing

Reviewing of submissions will be done by the program committee, with limited use of outside referees. Reviews will be anonymous. The reviewers will not attempt to violate the anonymity of the submissions. That is, reviewers won't search the web with the sole intent to discover the authors of a submission, won't ask around with the intent to discover the authors, etc.

Writing advice

Lots of papers and books have been written about how to write a good paper. We strongly suggest that you read the following:

• An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions; or, How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper.
  This was written by Roy Levin and David D. Redell, the program committee co-chairs for SOSP-9, and first appeared in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July, 1983), pages 35-40.
• The Science of Scientific Writing, George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan, In American Scientist, Vol. 78, No. 6 (Nov-Dec, 1990), pp. 550-558.
  This article describes not how to write an entire paper, but how to write sentences and paragraphs that readers can understand.

For matters of English usage, style, and taste we strongly recommend that you purchase and consult this little gem of a book:

• The Elements of Style. William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1979.

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