Call for Papers

• Introduction
• What’s New
• Contact
• Review Process
• Reserve Reviewer Policy
• Submissions
  • Template
  • Page Limit
  • Anonymity
  • Novelty
  • Data-Availability Statement
  • Procedure
• Publication
• ACM Policies
• FAQ

Introduction

The OOPSLA issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL) welcomes papers focusing on all practical and theoretical investigations of programming systems, languages, and environments. Papers may target any stage of software development, including requirements, modeling, prototyping, design, implementation, generation, analysis, verification, testing, evaluation, maintenance, and reuse of software systems. Contributions may include the development of new tools, techniques, principles, and evaluations.

OOPSLA 2025 will have two rounds of reviewing, with the Round 1 submission deadline October 15, 2024 and Round 2 submission deadline March 25, 2025 (AoE). All deadlines are firm. Papers accepted in either round will be published in the 2025 volume of PACMPL(OOPSLA) and invited to present at the SPLASH conference in 2025.

What’s New

There are two new things in this year’s Call that you should be sure to pay attention to:

• Reserve Reviewer Policy
• Data-Availability Statement

Contact

You can reach the two RC Chairs (Shriram and Sukyoung) through this email:

oopsla-2025-rc-chairs@googlegroups.com

Please use this address, not their personal email addresses, unless you think they are not getting your messages. Please allow 1–2 working days for a response before assuming they didn’t see your message, and longer right around deadlines.

In your email, please mention the number of the paper you are writing about (if you have one). That makes it easier to track the context (and avoids ambiguity).

Review Process

PACMPL(OOPSLA) has two rounds of reviewing. Each paper will typically receive three or more reviews. You will get an opportunity to respond to these reviews before decisions are finalized.

At the end of each round, each paper will receive one of the five following decisions:

Accept: Your paper will appear in the upcoming volume of PACMPL(OOPSLA).

Reject: Your paper will not appear in the upcoming volume of PACMPL(OOPSLA). In addition, a resubmission in less than a year from the original submission is not guaranteed a review. A paper is considered a resubmission if, in the judgment of the Chairs, it is substantially similar to the original submission.

Conditional Accept: While the Review Committee likes the work, it would like to see some specific changes made. You will receive a list of specific required revisions.

Minor Revision: While the Review Committee likes the direction of the work, it has several concerns that it would like to see revised. These concerns go beyond what can be enumerated in a list. Thus, you may receive some specific required revisions, but can also expect to receive broader comments.

Major Revision: While the Review Committee thinks the direction of the work has promise, it has significant concerns that it would like to see revised. You may receive some specific required revisions, but will also receive broader comments that may take significantly longer to execute.

If you receive one of the latter three decisions, please note:

• If you choose to submit a revised paper, you must also submit both (a) a clear explanation of how your revision addresses these comments, and (b) unless impossible, a diff of the PDFs. Independent of the decision, you can submit at the next deadline (either the opening deadline of the next round or the revision deadline of the current round). To the extent possible, your submission will be reviewed by the same reviewers.

• Unless you explicitly withdraw your paper, it is considered under review. Therefore, it would violate policy to submit it elsewhere. If you choose to withdraw the paper (e.g., to submit elsewhere), the next time you submit it, it will be treated as a fresh paper: you may get entirely different reviewers, previous reviews and comments will not be available, etc.

• Until your paper is accepted or rejected, you should maintain the anonymity of your submission. If you believe you need to violate it to respond to the reviews, please first discuss this with the Chairs.

• If the Artifact Evaluation submission deadline occurs before the decision date, you will be invited to submit artifacts. However, acceptance of artifacts has no impact on the acceptance of the revised papers.

Reserve Reviewer Policy

To prepare for the possibility of a higher volume of submissions, we are implementing a new review policy: for each paper, at least one senior author must — unless exempt under the criteria below — register as a reserve reviewer. They must list their information on the submission form, and they must register themselves on TPMS.

Instructions: Log into TPMS with the same email address as for your HotCRP account. The system will ask you to upload (or provide URLs for) 5-10 of your previous papers, to base your matching on. Uploading papers/URLs is pretty straightforward; here’s also a step-by-step video. You get to choose which papers you want to upload; these determine what papers you are most likely to be asked to review. So please go for both depth and breadth. In particular, please provide papers on topics for which you are a relatively rare expert.

The goal of this policy is to uphold the high standard of reviews within the SIGPLAN community. To achieve this, we must ensure manageable review loads, prevent burnout, and encourage reviewers to stay engaged for future rounds. High-quality reviews are one of the community’s greatest assets, playing a crucial role in elevating the quality of research for everyone.

Our hope is that these reserve reviewers won’t be needed at all! They will only be called upon as ad hoc reviewers if our projections fall significantly short. Even in that case, their review load will be far lighter than that of RC members, and we will do our best to assign papers that closely match expertise (hence the need for TPMS registration).

We define “senior” authors as those who completed their PhD five or more years ago. A paper is exempt from the reserve reviewer policy if:

1. The paper has no senior authors.
2. At least one senior author is already in the RC for this conference.
3. Every senior author of the paper satisfies one or more of these criteria:
   1. is new to SIGPLAN (has never published in it before);
   2. is chairing a SIGPLAN conference with 150 or more submissions last year, this year, or next year;
   3. has some other exceptional circumstance that didn’t prevent writing the paper but prevents doing any reviewing. This must be cleared at least three days before submission with the RC Chairs.

It is okay for one person to serve as the reserve reviewer for more than one paper. Please enter their information for each such paper (preferably identically).

Submissions

Template

SPLASH’s PACMPL templates and instructions are on the SIGPLAN author information and the ACM Primary Article Template pages.

Page Limit

Initial submissions must be at most 23 pages using the template below. This page limit does not include required statements, references, or supplementary material (such as appendices). However, papers must be self-contained; reviewers are under no obligation to read the supplementary material.

Revisions can go up to a maximum of 25 pages. This includes papers given a minor or major revision in 2024, as well as the final, camera-ready papers. For fairness, there will not be an option to purchase additional pages. For the final paper, we ask you to stick as closely as possible to the final version accepted by reviewers, and only add material that reviewers requested.

Anonymity

PACMPL uses double-blind reviewing. Authors’ identities are only revealed if a paper is accepted. Your papers must

• omit author names and institutions,
• use the third person when referencing your work,
• anonymize supplementary material.

Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission. When in doubt, contact the Review Committee Chairs.

Novelty

Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as described by SIGPLAN’s Re-Publication Policy. Submitters should also be aware of ACM’s Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism. Submissions are expected to comply with the ACM Policies for Authorship.

Data-Availability Statement

To help readers understand the state of the intended artifact, we ask you to add a section just before references titled Data-Availability Statement in the initial submission. This will not count towards the page limit, but please limit it to at most a few paragraphs (usually one paragraph suffices).

In it, indicate whether an artifact exists, its nature and limitations, and whether it will be submitted for Artifact Evaluation. This section should ideally also include links to preliminary versions of (anonymized) artifacts, datasets, and so on that reviewers may find useful (but are not obliged to follow). The statement is not meant to be a detailed description of how to use the artifact; that should accompany the artifact itself.

It is understood that some papers have no artifacts but, given the broad range of what constitutes an artifact, it would be helpful to readers to explain why the paper has none.

Accepted papers that fail to provide an artifact after promising one will be asked to explain why they did not do so.

Artifact Evaluation submission will closely follow paper notification, so make sure you check the Artifact Call as soon as you submit your paper.

Procedure

Please submit using HotCRP.

Publication

PACMPL is a Gold Open Access journal. All papers will be freely available to the public. Authors can voluntarily cover the article processing charge (USD 400), but payment is not required.

The official publication date is the date the journal is made available in the ACM Digital Library. The journal issue and associated papers accepted in Round 1 (OOPSLA1) will be published no earlier than April 1, 2025, while those accepted in Round 2 (OOPSLA2) will be published no earlier than October 1, 2025. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

ACM Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID iD, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and has made a commitment to collecting ORCID iDs from all of our published authors. ORCID iDs help improve author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID iD will help in these efforts.

The ACM Publications Board has recently updated the ACM Authorship Policy in several ways:

• Addressing the use of generative AI systems in the publications process
• Clarifying criteria for authorship and the responsibilities of authors
• Defining prohibited behaviour, such as gift, ghost, or purchased authorship
• Providing a linked FAQ explaining the rationale for the policy and providing additional details

You can find the updated policy here.

FAQ

What are reviewers looking for?

We consider the following criteria when evaluating papers:

Novelty: The paper presents new ideas and results and places them appropriately within the context established by previous research.

Importance: The paper contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field. We welcome papers that diverge from the dominant trajectory of the field.

Evidence: The paper presents sufficient evidence supporting its claims, such as proofs, implemented systems, experimental results, statistical analyses, user studies, case studies, and anecdotes.

Clarity: The paper presents its contributions, methodology, and results clearly.

How are papers from previous years handled?

We follow the same timeline as the other papers with the following two differences: (1) we try to assign the same reviewers you had in the previous year’s OOPSLA; (2) we strongly discourage reviewers from giving another “major revision” decision.

Are artifacts required?

No! It is understood that some papers have no artifacts. However, if the nature of the paper’s content and claims suggest there ought to be an artifact, authors must explain why they will not be providing one. The absence of such an explanation can be cause for rejection.

Can a paper be accepted if the artifact is rejected?

Yes. Sometimes artifacts are rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the research results (e.g., packaging issues).

What exactly do I have to do to anonymize my paper?

Use common sense. Your job is not to make your identity completely undiscoverable (e.g., if a reviewer does a Web search for the text of your paper) but simply to make it possible for reviewers to evaluate your submission without knowing who you are. This includes omitting your names from your title page, and referring to your own work in the third person. For example, if your name is Smith and you have worked on amphibious type systems, instead of saying “We extend our earlier work on statically typed toads [Smith 2004]”, you might say “We extend Smith’s [2004] work on statically typed toads.” Also, be sure not to include any acknowledgements that would give away your identity. It is best to suppress acknowledgments entirely until camera-ready.

Should I change the name of my system?

No. However, if it is not a new system and is likely to be known to others, you should refer to it as if it were created by a third party, rather than as your own creation.

My submission is based on code available in a public repository. How do I deal with this?

Cite the code in your paper, but replace the URL with text like “link removed for double-blind review”. If you believe reviewer access to your code would help during author response, contact the Review Committee Chairs.

I am submitting an extension of my workshop paper. Should I anonymize reference to that work?

Yes, you should treat it like any other anonymization. But you should also change the title of the paper to break a direct link between the two.

Am I allowed to post my paper on my web page or arXiv, send it to colleagues, give a talk about it, mention it on social media, …?

We want to help you navigate the tension between the normal communication of scientific results and actions that essentially force potential reviewers to learn the identity of authors. Roughly speaking, you may discuss work under submission, but you should not broadly advertise your work through media that are likely to reach your reviewers. We acknowledge there are grey areas and trade-offs. When in doubt about any of these guidelines, please first check in with the Review Committee Chairs: better safe than sorry. (If the Chairs give you permission, they can then also address any subsequent complaints about those actions from reviewers.)

Things you may do:

• Put your submission on your home page, arXiv, or other pre-publication sites.
• Discuss your work with anyone not on the review committees or reviewers with whom you already have a conflict.
• Present your work at professional meetings, job interviews, etc.
• Submit work previously discussed at an informal workshop, previously posted on a pre-publication site, previously submitted to a conference not using double-blind reviewing, etc.

Things you should not do:

• Contact members of the review committee about your work, or deliberately present your work where you expect them to be.
• Publicize your work on social media in an identifiable way with broad settings. For example, a post with a broad privacy setting (public or all friends) saying, “Whew, OOPSLA paper in, time to sleep” is okay, but one describing the work or giving its title is not appropriate. Alternatively, a post with paper details to a group including only the colleagues at your institution is fine.
• Reviewers will not be asked to recuse themselves from reviewing your paper unless they feel you have gone out of your way to advertise your authorship information to them.