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Guidelines for the Program Chair for SIGPLAN-Sponsored Conferences

  1. The Program Chair may not submit papers to the conference. The SIGPLAN Executive Committee recommends to steering committees of sufficiently large conferences that their program committee members and the general chair also not be allowed to submit papers. If program committee members are allowed to submit papers, their papers should be held to a higher standard to avoid the appearance of impropriety. As a Program Chair, you should make all Program Committee members and reviewers aware of SIGPLAN's policies on reviewing of conference paper submissions. You should also make Program Committee members aware of ACM's Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism.

  2. The conference steering committee should be consulted for any changes to the accepted way of organizing and running the conference.

  3. You, the Program Chair, in consultation with the General Chair, should decide on any general policies relating to the program committee (PC) such as:
  • Are the PC members expected to attend the program committee meeting where the papers are selected? SIGPLAN expects PC members to attend the meeting except in unusual circumstances.
  • When and where will the PC meeting be held?
  • Who pays for the travel expenses of the PC members?
  • Who pays for the conference registration of the PC members? Typically, the PC member is responsible for all of his/her expenses, including registration. If a decision is made to provide funding for some/all of the members, these expenses must be included in the budget.
  1. The previous year’s Program Chair for the same conference is a good resource. You should contact the person for suggestions.

  2. With help from the conference chair, develop a list of potential program committee (PC) members. In formulating a potential list of PC members, the General Chair and Program Chair should be mindful of SIGPLAN's diversity policy.

  3. Send the list to the SIGPLAN Chair and Vice Chair for their comments and approval (1 year prior to meeting).

  4. Make arrangements for the program committee meeting - place and time. (1 year prior)

  5. After SIGPLAN approval of PC members, ask the people on the list to serve. Please explain what is expected of them and any policy decisions. Give them the date for the PC meeting. Expect some people to refuse to serve so have a list of alternates. Get approval from the SIGPLAN Chair and Vice Chair for the alternates.

  6. The conference steering committee should be consulted for any changes to the accepted way of handling the submissions. 

  7. Develop a call for papers and get approval of call from the Vice Chair. Note: you can produce a preliminary call without including PC members. Make sure to put the call on the Web site for the conference (established by the conference chair). The Web page should refer prospective authors to SIGPLAN's Republication Policy and to ACM's Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism. Once the conference web page is in place, have a link to the page from the SIGPLAN conference page by contacting the SIGPLAN Information Director.

    8. If the proceedings will be published by ACM, note that authors of accepted submissions are expected to transfer the copyright to the ACM. If presentations are to be videoed, mention that presenters must sign a permission form for the video to be released online. Mention that publication of auxiliary material is encouraged, and note the associated copyright policy (see 'Auxiliary material', below).

    The conference web page should include information about the various benefits offered to SIGPLAN members attending SIGPLAN conferences. These benefits include travel and lodging assistance for student authors and assistance for members who need a companion care-provider in order to attend a SIGPLAN conference. Please see SIGPLAN's Professional Activities Committee web page for more details.
     
  8. Many SIGPLAN conferences have included author response as part of the paper review process and the general feedback concerning author response has been positive (see Experiences with Author Response at PLDI and ICFP 2004, Kathleen Fisher and Craig Chambers, (SIGPLAN Notices, Dec. 2004). Program chairs and steering committees are encouraged to consider allowing author response or rebuttals as part of the paper review process.

  9. Set up the paper submission web site. Many services are available for this purpose. Most include support for the ABCD rating scale [Nier00], author feedback, and double-blind reviewing.

    [Nier00] Oscar Nierstrasz, Identify the Champion.

    Some advice: Many systems make it easy to include ratings on a large number of different scales, but please don't do this. Most experienced PC chairs use only two scales, an overall rating and an expertise rating. It also works best to have just two or three text fields: one for a summary of the paper (this is optional), one for comments for both the PC and the authors, and one for comments to be seen by the PC only. The ABCD scale avoids ranking papers by average: instead you can group papers by highest and lowest rating (not a linear scale, since AD neither precedes nor follows BC).
     
    For more details see: Conferences with improved management and style, Philip Wadler, SIGPLAN Notices, Feb. 2006.

  10. Before papers are received, develop an evaluation procedure. Send received papers and a description of the evaluation procedure to the PC members.

  11. During the meeting,
  • decide on any policies that should be in effect such as:
    • What happens if a member has a conflict of interest?
    • What defines a conflict of interest?
    • What are the rules of confidentiality?
    • Do you want to have a best paper/s award/s?
  • decide how many papers you want to accept
  • decide what papers should be accepted
  • plan the sessions and the session chairs

Also, it is strongly recommended that the program chair have an assistant that helps the program chair at the program committee meeting. Having an assistant that takes on certain administrative and logistical tasks during the meeting allows the program chair to concentrate on leading the discussions of papers. Typical duties of the an assistant would be to keep track of the disposition of papers for the program committee, interface with the on-line review system, and record any relevant information about a particular paper (e.g., paper Y paper is being shepherded by committee member X, committee member X agrees to revise their on-line review, etc.). Past program chairs have used graduate students or post-docs as assistants with good results.
  1. Any expenses that are to be reimbursed by the conference should be put in the conference budget. Send receipts to the ACM Representative to SIGPLAN for reimbursements.

  2. Email acceptance and rejection letters as soon as possible after the program committee meeting. Authors using LaTeX should be directed to the template developed by SIGPLAN. This template was designed to allow more material in a paper while remaining easy on the eyes (typically, a paper that requires 12 pages with the old format requires 11 with the new, and most readers find the new style easier to read than the old). The new template and directions for its use are found here.

  3. The Sheridan proceedings service can be initiated once you decide that you want formal proceedings.  Please contact the ACM Publications Coordinator, Adrienne Griscti, griscti@acm.org to begin the process.  ACM will provide Sheridan with pertinent conference information. Sheridan will  forward you a schedule and instructions on how to proceed. 
     
  4. Please draft a "Letter from the Program Chair," which should include a description of the paper selection process (number of papers submitted and accepted, etc.).  Forward  the letter to Sheridan with any other front matter (possibly a "Letter from the Conference Chair," a List of Reviewers, etc.) that will be included in the proceedings. Sheridan will format all front matter; their schedule will include a deadline for front matter submission. They will also compile the table of contents/author index, using the schedule of talks/advanced program that you provide to determine paper order.
     
  5. Accepted authors will submit their papers directly to the Sheridan web site. Once Sheridan has collected all of the papers/copyright forms and front matter, compiled the table of contents/author index and paginated the book they will provide on-line "blue lines" for your review. The proceedings will not be printed until the "blue lines" have been reviewed and approved. It is a good idea to send the table of contents to the contributing authors to confirm the spelling of their names and affiliations. You then will be asked to provide conference shipping information and number of proceedings needed for the conference.

  6. At the meeting, give a short summary of the paper evaluation process. Include the number of submissions, in what topical areas, and the number of accepted papers. You might want to compare the number of submissions and acceptances with the previous year (these numbers should also be in the proceedings and the final report). You should also explain the review process, e.g, how many PC members reviewed each paper and the organization of the pc meeting. You might want to talk about the geographic distribution of submissions and any unusual trends. The summary should take about 15 minutes.
     
  7. Help the conference chair prepare the final report.
     
  8. The program chair of many of our conferences serve on the conference's steering committee. For the steering committee formal rules for your particular conference, consult the relevant SIGPLAN conference web page. Links to these pages can be be found here.
     
  9. The program chairs of the major SIGPLAN conferences, POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, and ICFP, are automatically on the selection committee for the following year's SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award.
Important email addresses:
SIGPLAN Chair: chair_sigplan@acm.org

SIGPLAN Vice Chair: vc_sigplan@acm.org

SIGPLAN information director: SIGPLAN information director

ACM Representative to SIGPLAN - Ginger Ignatoff: ignatoff@hq.acm.org
Auxiliary material

The ACM Digital Library and Sheridan Printing (which prepares many ACM proceedings) are both set up to accept auxiliary material. The SIGPLAN EC encourages SIGPLAN-sponsored conferences to accept such material as part of the publication process. (Some conferences also accept auxiliary material with submissions; this is an independent issue.)

Auxiliary material may include

  • A technical report with additional details
  • Source code for software
  • Source code for automated theorem provers
  • Test data
or anything else relevant. It is SIGPLAN policy to encourage authors to publish adequate auxiliary material to enable others to reproduce their work.

Authors retain copyright of their auxiliary material, while copyright of the paper is normally assigned to ACM. Referees may examine auxiliary material, if it accompanies the submission, but this should not be considered part of the review process. There are two reasons for this: one is to reduce burden on referees; the other is that ACM requests the copyright to reviewed material, but ceding copyright to software or other auxiliary material may be problematic.

For an example of auxiliary material in the Digital Library, see here and click on "source materials".

Useful Conference Information

 

 

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