These guidelines are primarily intended for Program Chairs of SIGPLAN-sponsored conferences. For organizers of workshops and similar events, see this page.
This document uses “Program Committee (PC)” and “Program Chair (PCC)” as generic terms. For PACMPL conferences, “Program Committee” corresponds to “Review Committee,” and the current Program Chair normally serves as an Associate Editor, as described in the PACMPL procedures.
You may be an experienced Program Chair, in which case much of the advice on this page may already be familiar to you. Nevertheless, even experienced chairs sometimes forget some important points, and some policies and guidelines are specific to SIGPLAN, so please at least skim the rest of this page and the following others:
Most importantly:
Please help us keep this document (and the rest of this site) up to date: If you notice any errors, duplications, inconsistencies, etc., please inform the SIGPLAN vice chair.
In consultation with the General Chair (and the rest of the Steering Committee), develop a list of potential Program Committee members. In formulating this list, be mindful of SIGPLAN’s diversity policy. Also, some people will decline the invitation, so your list should include sufficient alternates. The list should be finalized at least one year prior to the meeting.
Download the PC proposal spreadsheet template and enter the requested information for your proposed PC members and alternates. Send the completed spreadsheet to the SIGPLAN Vice Chair (vc_sigplan@acm.org) for comments and approval by the SIGPLAN Executive Committee. The approval process normally takes less than two weeks. If the conference has other reviewing committees (for example, an External Review Committee), the same approval process applies.
At the same time, make plans for the review-discussion and decision process so that these can be communicated to potential PC members when you invite them: finalize key dates for online discussion periods and any virtual or in-person meetings.
After SIGPLAN approval is confirmed, invite the people on the list to serve. Explain what is expected of them and any relevant policy decisions, and give them relevant dates. If more people than expected decline and you run out of alternates, send the SIGPLAN Vice Chair another set of candidates for approval.
Recommendations:
When inviting PC members, clearly communicate the expected reviewing load, deadlines, discussion responsibilities, and applicable policies. A person who cannot make that commitment should decline the invitation or promptly inform the PCC if circumstances change.
PC members should personally read their assigned submissions, provide constructive and sufficiently detailed reviews, declare their expertise accurately, read the other reviews and any author response, and participate actively in discussion and decision making.
The PCC should monitor timely completion, review quality, participation in discussion, and compliance with SIGPLAN’s Conference Submission Review Policy. Questions about related publications, conflicts, reviewer conduct, or the integrity of the review process should be referred to the PCC.
Develop a call for papers. Note that you can produce a preliminary call without listing the PC members. Make sure to put the call on the website for the conference (established by the General Chair). The web page should refer prospective authors to SIGPLAN’s Republication Policy, Conference Submission Review Policy, ACM’s Policy on Authorship, and ACM’s Publications Policies. Once the conference web page is in place, establish a link to it from the SIGPLAN conference page by contacting the SIGPLAN Information Director.
For proceedings published by ACM, the call for papers should explain ACM’s open-access publication model and refer authors to ACM’s current Open Access information, Publication Rights and Licensing Policy, and Author Rights and Responsibilities. The call should make clear that publication charges may apply unless the corresponding author is covered by an ACM Open institutional agreement or an applicable waiver or discount. Because the rates and arrangements may change, link to ACM’s current information rather than stating specific charges.
For proceedings published as an issue of a Proceedings of the ACM journal, consult the journal’s Editor-in-Chief regarding any additional journal-specific requirements, including the collection of review-process statistics required by the PACM Steering Committee. See PACM Title Assessment and EiC-Provided Statistics for details.
If presentations are to be recorded or streamed, inform presenters of the applicable consent or release requirements.
Explain whether authors may submit supplementary material for reviewers to consult (see the Review policy), whether reviewers are expected or merely permitted to consider it, and any applicable anonymity requirements. Such material may later be published alongside the accepted paper; see “Published Supplementary Material” below. If the conference has a separate artifact-evaluation process, the call or conference web page should clearly distinguish that process from the submission of supplementary material with the paper.
The conference web page should include information about the various benefits offered by the SIGPLAN Professional Activities Committee to participants in SIGPLAN-sponsored conferences. These include travel support for eligible students and other participants, child-care travel support, and companion travel grants.
Set up the submission and review site sufficiently early to test the submission form, review form, conflict declarations, anonymity settings, reviewer assignments, author response, discussion, and decision notifications. Most SIGPLAN conferences use HotCRP, but the PCC may use another system that supports the conference’s reviewing model and applicable SIGPLAN policies.
Before submissions open, determine and publish the main elements of the review process, including:
The review form should be kept reasonably simple, reflect the published evaluation criteria, and explain its questions and rating scales clearly. The PCC should avoid treating numerical scores or averages as substitutes for substantive judgment and discussion.
Keeping the review form reasonably stable across editions can help authors and reviewers calibrate and interpret its ratings. One possible model is Nierstrasz’s Identify the Champion scoring process, which has stood the test of time. The essence of the process is to ask each reviewer whether they would champion the paper during discussion, without prescribing a specific scale. One example review form in this spirit has (at least) the following fields:
Reviewers sometimes gravitate toward middle scores; the PCC should remind the PC that the scale is meant to be used across its full range, and that a paper’s score should reflect the reviewer’s honest willingness (or reluctance) to champion it.
Additionally:
The PCC should ensure that each submission receives reviews of sufficient quality and breadth. In particular, the PCC should identify papers for which the assigned reviewers lack sufficient expertise, reviews are incomplete or inadequate, or reviewers substantially disagree, and seek additional reviews where appropriate. External reviewers should be selected and managed in accordance with SIGPLAN’s Conference Submission Review Policy.
Some large conferences divide the Program Committee into groups, each led by an Associate Chair who chairs that group much as the PCC chairs the PC as a whole. Associate Chairs are sometimes called “Area Chairs” when the groups are organized by topic of expertise.
The PCC may also assign a PC member as guardian for a submission. A guardian is responsible for helping ensure that the paper is assessed carefully and fairly. Depending on the conference’s review process, the guardian’s role may include:
The guardian does not replace the assigned reviewers and does not make the acceptance decision. The PCC retains responsibility for ensuring that the review process is fair and that the final decision is properly supported.
Configure and announce the author-response process in accordance with SIGPLAN’s Conference Submission Review Policy. The PCC should make every effort to complete the initial reviews before the response period, ensure that reviewers read and consider the responses, and incorporate them into subsequent discussion and decisions.
The PCC should organize an active discussion period after the initial reviews and any author response. Discussion may take place asynchronously in the conference management system, in synchronous online meetings, or through a combination of these.
The PCC, and any designated discussion leads, should ensure that reviewers read the other reviews and the author response, discuss significant disagreements and outstanding questions, and assess papers according to the published criteria. Concerns raised late in the process should be communicated to the other reviewers and considered fairly.
The PCC should make acceptance decisions based on the reviews, discussion, author response, and published evaluation criteria. Numerical scores and votes may inform a decision but should not determine it mechanically. Before decisions are communicated to authors, each decision should be supported by a clear author-visible rationale that accurately reflects the main points of the discussion.
The PCC should designate another qualified committee member, commonly called the COI-PCC, to manage submissions for which the PCC has a conflict of interest. The COI-PCC should have the authority and access needed to manage reviewing, discussion, and decisions for those submissions independently of the PCC.
A conference may use shepherding or another conditional-acceptance process when a paper can be accepted subject to clearly identified revisions. The PCC should appoint a qualified reviewer or committee member to oversee the revision. In consultation with the other reviewers, the shepherd should provide the authors with a concise list that clearly distinguishes changes required for acceptance from optional suggestions.
The shepherd should assess whether the revised paper adequately addresses the required changes and report this assessment to the PCC. The shepherd should not impose substantial new requirements that were not part of the acceptance decision without consulting the PCC and the other reviewers. The PCC retains responsibility for the final acceptance decision.
Most SIGPLAN-sponsored conferences use Conference Publishing Consulting to manage the proceedings-production process. Contact ConfPub early and agree on the production schedule, author instructions, required metadata, and division of responsibilities. For proceedings published as an issue of a Proceedings of the ACM journal, also coordinate with the journal’s Editor-in-Chief and follow any journal-specific requirements.
After acceptance decisions have been finalized, provide ConfPub with complete and accurate metadata for all accepted contributions, including titles, author names and affiliations, contact information, submission identifiers, and contribution types. ConfPub will normally use this information to initiate ACM’s publication-rights process and the production workflow.
Authors must complete ACM’s publication-rights process and provide their final source material in accordance with the instructions supplied by ConfPub. ACM currently uses The ACM Publishing System (TAPS) to produce and validate the PDF and HTML versions of published articles. Depending on the production workflow, authors or ConfPub may submit and correct the source files in TAPS. ConfPub coordinates the process, communicates instructions and deadlines to authors, monitors progress, and helps resolve production problems.
The PCC should provide authors with clear deadlines and instructions for preparing their final versions, including the applicable ACM template, page limits, citation style, accessibility requirements, supplementary material, and treatment of third-party material. Allow sufficient time for authors to address formatting, metadata, rights, and TAPS validation problems.
Before the proceedings are finalized, the PCC or a designated proceedings chair should verify that all accepted contributions are included and that their titles, author lists, ordering, and other metadata are correct. Also check the front matter, table of contents, and any required review-process statistics or journal-specific information. Coordinate corrections with ConfPub rather than making changes directly in ACM’s production systems.
ACM supports the evaluation and publication of research artifacts and displays applicable artifact badges with the associated papers in the ACM Digital Library.
The Artifact Evaluation Committee chairs should provide ConfPub with the final list of papers whose artifacts have received badges and the badge assignments. ConfPub coordinates the inclusion of the badges in the published papers and the collection of any required artifact metadata.
The conference should give authors clear instructions concerning artifact submission, evaluation, archival availability, licensing, and any requirements for persistent identifiers or external repositories.
ACM proceedings may include supplementary material associated with a published paper, such as:
SIGPLAN encourages authors to make appropriate supplementary material available when it supports reproducibility and future research. The conference should provide authors with clear instructions for submitting such material through the applicable proceedings-production process.
This published, post-acceptance supplementary material may be distinct from material that authors may submit alongside a paper at submission time for reviewers to consult, which has its own anonymity and consideration rules; see the Review policy for that.
Up to 10% of the accepted papers may be selected for ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Awards. The selection process should consider relevance, originality, significance, and clarity, and should not rely mechanically on numerical review scores.
The PCC should establish a fair process for identifying and assessing candidate papers. Nominations may be solicited from the PC and any other reviewing committees, and the PCC may appoint a suitably qualified subset of the committee to assess the candidates. Papers with PC members among the authors remain eligible.
The usual conflict-of-interest rules apply throughout the process. Conflicted committee members must not nominate, assess, discuss, or vote on the relevant papers. The PCC and General Chair have final responsibility for the selection, unless the conference has an approved alternative procedure.
Coordinate with the General Chair and other organizers on the PCC’s responsibilities during the conference. These may include introducing the technical program, presenting paper or artifact awards, assisting session chairs, and handling program changes or problems involving presenters.
Provide attendees with a brief summary of the submission and review process, either during the conference or in the proceedings or conference website. This will typically include the numbers of submissions and accepted papers, the reviewing model, the number and types of reviews obtained, and any other information useful for understanding how the program was selected. Relevant comparisons with previous years or aggregate statistics about submissions may also be included.
Ensure that session chairs have the information they need and know whom to contact if a presenter is absent, a session runs late, or another problem arises. Coordinate any changes to the published program with the General Chair and web or publicity chairs.
Be familiar with the conference’s code-of-conduct and incident-response arrangements, and promptly refer any incident to the appropriate conference organizer.
Prepare a post-event report for the conference Steering Committee, if the conference has one, and otherwise for the SIGPLAN Executive Committee. The report should summarize the submission, review, acceptance, and technical-program statistics, note any significant issues that arose, and record recommendations for future editions of the conference.
Prepare a brief handover for the next PCC, including the review-process timeline, committee organization, relevant statistics, useful procedures, and lessons learned.
Complete any remaining proceedings, award, artifact-evaluation, or journal-specific tasks, and ensure that outstanding author or reviewer communications have been handled.
Former PCCs may also be invited to serve on the conference Steering Committee or otherwise advise future organizers.
SIGPLAN Chair: chair_sigplan@acm.org
SIGPLAN Vice Chair: vc_sigplan@acm.org
SIGPLAN Information Director: infodir_sigplan@acm.org