Procedure for Proceedings Processing

This guide-line for conference chairs explains the publishing process with Conference Publishing Consulting. Please also consider the information on Artifact Processing.

Our procedure starts around the date when the program chairs send out acceptance notifications.

There are three important deadlines that divide the process into two phases: the acceptance notification deadline (your action), the camera-ready paper deadline (authors' action), and the delivery of final proceedings to you (our action).

Your tasks (Program Chair):

1. You send the author notifications. In your message text, please include:
   • the camera-ready submission deadline,
   • the page limit, and
   • an announcement that a separate author-kit e-mail will follow.
2. For ACM events: Right after the final notification, please ask the authors of all (conditionally) accepted papers to enter:
   • their correct affiliation including its country and
   • their institutional e-mail addresses (not gmail.com, etc.)
   in the review system (HotCRP, PCS, EasyChair) (perhaps give two days for this).
3. You provide us (to info@conference-publishing.com) a list of accepted papers in a certain format (extracted from conference system, see below for the format definition). Please use the method described below to extract the data from the conference system.
4. You lock your conference system (after the previous two steps), such that no author can accidentally submit a final paper there. The submission site will be announced in the author kit that we send to the authors.
5. Please do not submit any records via the conference system (e.g., HotCRP) to ACM. We will take care of this.
6. You partition the papers into sessions and send that partition to us as well (optional).

Our tasks (Conference Publishing):

1. We prepare a list of accepted papers (advance table of contents) for your web page. For integrating this into your web page, you need to put us in contact with the person who takes care of your conference web page. We will send you a web page from which you can copy the advance table of contents.
2. We send author-kit e-mails to all authors of accepted papers. The author kit contains a link to more detailed formatting instructions, a link for the submission of the final paper (camera-ready version), and information about the electronic copyright transfer.
3. We set up electronic copyright transfer with ACM or IEEE, and have copyright-transfer instructions sent to the authors.
4. After the deadline for camera-ready submission has passed, we will process the papers, send problematic papers back to the authors and work with them on formatting issues etc. We manually check that the authors and titles of all papers match the data that we received from the conference, and report any inconsistencies to the chairs for clarification.
5. We will, by the deadline for our submission to you, deliver the final version of the proceedings to you for approval. (You can get as many intermediate draft versions as you wish, if you wish to monitor progress and quality.)
6. After your approval, the electronic version of the proceedings, the version for the digital library, and perhaps print masters are produced and sent to you. (If you order USB sticks or CDs, those are now produced as well.)
7. If you want, we provide the meta data from our database to the conference-program apps, in order to support better conference experience (for example: http://conferoapp.com). Also, we can provide your program schedule as Google calendar or in iCal format for import. We also provide export in XML and JSON format.

Let us know if you have any questions about this process.

Page Limits

The page limits are completely up to the conference. There are no technical limitations from the publishing point of view.

From the academic point of view, you should consider:

• fairness among authors (not granting one author more pages than the others in the same category),
• that not too much new content is produced that was not reviewed (for example, going from 3 to 6 pages means a completely different paper),
• to keep traditions (not too much difference to the length in comparison with the last edition of the same track), and
• to synchronize page limits with the steering committee of your conference.

We will try to enforce whatever page limit you specify. (Or tell us not to limit the number of pages.)

ACM Conferences — Early Publication

Publication Date

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library.
This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference.
The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Definition of the Format for Lists of Accepted Papers (for Extraction from Conference System See Below)

(If using EasyChair, go directly to the next section, if using CyberChairPro, the CyberChair admin will send us the list.)

We need a table that represents each paper in one line, where the columns are separated by a single tab, according to the following format:

• Column 1: Paper Id (must be track-unique).
• Column 2: Paper Type (e.g., Full Paper, Short Paper, Position Paper, Formal Demo Paper, Informal Demo Paper, etc.). From the paper type, we have to be able to derive the page limit. User-defined paper types are acceptable, e.g., "Demo Paper (5 pages)", "Demo Paper (7 pages)".
• Column 3: Title of Paper.
• Column 4: All Authors, first-name first, last-name last, i.e., "John S. Smith", not "Smith, John S.". Authors are separated by "; " (semi-colon + space), cf. example below.
• Column 5: All E-Mail Addresses, separated by "; " (semi-colon + space).
• Column 6: All Affiliations, using the notation "Institution, Country", cities only if part of the name. Affiliations are separated by "; " (semi-colon + space). If an author has two affiliations, use the notation "Institution 1, Country / Institution 2, Country".

For non-ASCII characters, please use UTF-8 encoding.

This format is easy to generate from the various conference systems.

We also accept tables in the format of Excel or OpenOffice, if they follow this format, i.e., without tabs, because the tabs are replaced by the native delimiters, but the rest should follow the format above.

Example:

HotCRP: Extraction of the Proceedings Info (List of Accepted Papers) from HotCRP

Please follow these three steps to export the data from which we can assemble all records that we need:

• Use the HotCRP search facility to find all of the accepted papers (use the search term “dec:accept”, which is the standard way to list accepted papers).
• Go to the bottom, select all papers.
• Choose “Download TOC XML” from the ACM menu at the bottom-right, then click “Go”.
  

This produces an XML file that we can import.

EasyChair: Extraction of the Proceedings Info (List of Accepted Papers) from EasyChair

We need the following two tables from you, from which we can assemble all records that we need.

• Table 1: List of Authors with E-Mail Addresses and Affiliations
  (once for all, as conference chair, or super chair if you use a multi-track conference instance of EasyChair)
  - Menu: Administration -> Authors -> ... e-mail addresses
  copy&paste the table "All Authors of Accepted Papers" into a spreadsheet (ODS or XLS)
  Attention: Please make sure to copy from the table of all authors, not just the corresponding authors. Make sure to preserve the order of authors in the table (do NOT sort).
  You do not need to remove authors from other tracks (in case of a multi-track conference).
  Result: a table of lines with the following columns: paper number, author, e-mail, country, affiliation
  Example: SEAMS12_AuthorEmails.xlsx
  
  (as track chair if you use a multi-track conference instance of EasyChair)
  - Menu: Premium -> Data views -> List of authors, click on spreadsheet icon on the right
  Paper selection: choose only "ACCEPT"
  Author selection: do NOT select the checkmark for "Show only corresponding authors"; we need the information for ALL authors;
  send us the table as is, not need to change anything
• Table 2: List of Accepted Papers (once for each track, as track chair)
  - Menu: Status -> All submissions
  (Attention: Please make sure to copy from menu Status, not from menu 'Submissions', 'Reviews', or 'Administration -> List of accepted papers'.)
  Disable the check-box "Show paper authors" to get rid of the authors here.
  1. copy&paste the table into a spreadsheet (ODS or XLS)
  2. remove all rows that are not ACCEPT
  3. remove all columns except id, title, and decision
  4. transform the column 'decision' into paper categories including page limit (Example: 'Short Paper (4 pages)')
  Result: a table of lines with the following columns: paper number, paper title, paper category (and page limit)
  Then, group the papers into sessions and insert session titles, as illustrated in the following example.
  Please remember to manually (with help of your co-chair) add those accepted papers for which you declared a conflict of interest.
  Example: SEAMS12_Sessions.xlsx

CyberChair: Extraction of the Proceedings Info (List of Accepted Papers) from CyberChair

Please ask the CyberChair admin (Richard) to send us the list in the usual format.

Web Page with Table of Contents / Import of Data into Conf.ResearchR

Listing from Our Server

You can always get the current version of our data as table of contents from our overview page https://www.conference-publishing.com.

For example, if your conference has event id 'PLDI20', then you can access the table of contents via https://www.conference-publishing.com/list.php?Event=PLDI20. (If you provide a partitioning into sessions, this will be reflected there as well.)

An XML export is available by using module 'listXML.php' instead of 'list.php': https://www.conference-publishing.com/listXML.php?Event=PLDI20.

Import for Program Listing via Conf.ResearchR

If your conference web page is based on Conf.ResearchR, you can import our data into your conference web site using our interface with researchr. You need the event id, which consists of the acronym letters followed by two digits for the year. Example: PLDI20.

Instructions for Import: Edit the Tracks tab, and go to the “Import Data (HotCRP/EC/CPC)” section in the left column. Click on “Conference Publishing Consulting” under “Step 1”. You can enter the CPC event ID and click on “import”. Then below, you will see “Step 2: Pick an imported file to start conversion”. Click on the event ID that comes from CPC, and click on “start conversion/update wizard”. That will take you through every event in CPC’s database for your conference, and you have to approve every single event/talk using the wizard to scroll through each and click on “save” if you approve the changes/import for this event/talk. After approving all events/talks, you can exit the wizard.