Confidentiality
Submissions must be treated as confidential and must not be distributed or disclosed except to people explicitly authorized by the PCC for the purpose of review. Reviewers must not copy submissions, pass them to other people, or discuss them with anyone who is not authorized to participate in the review process. Confidentiality continues until the work has been publicly released by the authors or publisher. The PCC must keep a record of all external reviewers.
Reviewers grant paper authors permission to use the reviews however they wish. Reviews can also be analyzed under the auspices of SIGPLAN for research purposes such as evaluation of bias.
Submission metadata, acceptance status, and decision summaries may be shared with another authorized SIGPLAN process, such as a related review committee or artifact-evaluation committee, when necessary for that process. Only the information needed for the stated purpose should be shared, and all recipients must observe the applicable confidentiality requirements.
Conflicts
Authors and PC members must adhere to SIGPLAN’s conflict of interest policy.
A conflict of interest is defined as a situation in which the reviewer can be viewed as being able to benefit personally from the outcome of a review, or in which the reviewer is not able to remain objective for personal reasons. If a conflict of interest exists, then the reviewer should decline to review a paper.
Among the situations in which conflicts are typically considered to exist are between an advisor and an advisee (Ph.D. and post-doc; forever), between an author and a co-author (papers and proposals; for two years), between people at the same institution (branches of large companies or different locations of research institutes are considered to be the same institution; for two years after leaving an institution), between people with financial conflicts of interest, and between friends or relatives. If a reviewer feels unable to render an objective judgment for any reason, they should notify the program chair.
If the PCC has a conflict of interest with a submission, the PCC must not have access to or participate in its reviewing, discussion, or decision. Another qualified committee member must manage the submission independently.
Use of generative AI or LLM systems
Please see the FAQ for the general ACM policy. In particular:
Contacts
Reviewers should not interact with authors about their submitted papers. Any interaction should go through the program chair.
Author Anonymity
SIGPLAN conferences should implement double-blind reviewing. The primary goal of DBR is to help PC members review papers with minimal bias. The process should be such that authors are able to withhold their identity, and reviewers are able to avoid learning their identity:
Provision (2) above is intended to prevent DBR from inhibiting normal dissemination of scientific ideas. Authors should not, however, take it as a license to explicitly lobby the PC or likely reviewers on behalf of their work. While SIGPLAN will not attempt to codify or police such behavior, PC chairs may wish to remind authors of their obligation to live up to the spirit as well as to the letter of DBR. A major point of contention concerns posting research results in social media or wide-reach mailing lists. PC Chairs should carefully consider to what extent such publicity conforms to their implementation of DBR and inform authors accordingly.
The two variants of DBR in current SIGPLAN use are “lightweight DBR” and “full DBR”. Under lightweight DBR, author names are revealed to reviewers after the initial review is submitted and before paper deliberations. In full DBR, author names are not revealed until the end of deliberations, and possibly only for accepted papers. These variants (and their many variations in implementation) reflect different models of the threat of reviewing bias and the benefit of knowing author identity. Lightweight DBR is based on the belief that authorship information should not bias “first impressions” of the paper’s quality, but the reviewers’ informed technical opinion will be unaffected, and even improved in depth, if author identities are later revealed. Full DBR rejects all authorship information as a bias factor.
Expert and External Reviews
SIGPLAN conferences should strive to ensure that every submission is reviewed by people with sufficient relevant expertise. Review teams may combine complementary areas of expertise, and well-informed non-expert reviews can also provide a valuable perspective representative of the paper’s broader readership.
The PCC should exercise judgment when interpreting reviewers’ self-reported expertise ratings, since PC members calibrate these ratings differently: some consider themselves experts on most topics, while others rarely do.
External reviewers must be vetted, authorized, and recorded by the PCC. They should be encouraged to participate in discussion of the papers assigned to them, but must not have access to unrelated submissions or discussions.
Submission of Supplementary Material
Conferences may allow authors to submit supplementary material (examples, proofs, software, datasets, etc.) at the time of submission. The PC may, but is not required to, consider this material. Supplementary material should be anonymized for double-blind reviewing.
Evaluation Criteria and Acceptance Ratio
Conferences should strive to accept all high-quality submissions, and avoid numerical limits on acceptable papers.
PC Submissions
PC submissions can be problematic to manage, but, on balance, the benefits of allowing PC submissions exceed the costs, so conferences should allow PC submissions.
If Program Committee members are allowed to submit papers, either their papers should be held to a higher standard or other EC-approved measures should be taken, to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Conferences that use full double-blind reviewing and have program committees with at least fifty members need not hold PC papers to a higher standard, as the EC has judged that these are sufficient conditions to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
The policy on PC submission should be clearly explained to candidate PC members when their participation on the PC is solicited.
Acceptance decisions for PC papers should be communicated at the same time as decisions for other submissions.
The Program Chair (PCC) may not submit papers to the conference; SIGPLAN’s Executive Committee recommends that the General Chair (GC) also not be allowed to submit papers.
Author Response
SIGPLAN conferences typically allow author responses to reviewers. Authors should be allowed to read all reviews that are available at the time of the author response period. The PCC should make every effort to complete all initial reviews before the author-response period. Additional reviews may be solicited after the author response period and it may not be possible for the authors to see these reviews before final decisions are made by the PC. Ideally, authors should be allowed at least four days to respond. Additionally: