├── FAQ.md ├── LICENSE ├── README.md ├── benefits-and-observations.md ├── motivation.md ├── pc-roles.md ├── steady-state-submission-process.md └── transition-process.md /FAQ.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # FAQ 2 | 3 | 1. **Current practice is to solicit additional reviews for borderline papers or those with high variance in scores. Are we giving up on that?** 4 | 1. No. After the first round of reviews, chairs will have discretion to solicit additional reviews from other PC members and/or external reviewers, while still making every effort to ensure a timely review process. 5 | 6 | 1. **How will these changes impact the volume of submissions to IEEE S&P?** 7 | 1. Obviously at this point, we can only speculate. VLDB and PETS both saw submission volume increase after they moved to a similar model. Assuming this happens for IEEE S&P, we will likely need to increase the size of the PC. We would also expect additional pressure on presentation time at the conference itself. 8 | 9 | 1. **Are we giving up on filtering low-quality papers with only two reviews?** 10 | 1. No. Chairs or Associate chairs may use their discretion to assign only two reviews to papers that appear likely to be Rejected. 11 | 12 | 1. **Does making this change convert the Symposium into a journal?** 13 | 1. No. While we are borrowing elements of the journal review process, the Symposium will still be held annually, and papers that are accepted through this process will still be described as being part of the Proceedings of the Symposium. It’s possible that at some point the community will decide to convert this into a journal publication instead, but that remains a separate decision. 14 | 15 | 1. **Will there still be a PC meeting?** 16 | 1. A physical PC meeting offers several benefits: 17 | 1. Networking 18 | 1. Amongst PC members 19 | 2. Exposure for new PC members 20 | 1. Standards 21 | 1. Setting uniform standards across areas (e.g., for quality and ethics) 22 | 2. Helping new PC members learn community standards 23 | 1. Allow PC members to learn about trends in the community 24 | 25 | While these are important benefits, note that all but ii.a benefit only (or primarily) members of the PC itself, a rather small subset of the overall security community. It also comes at the cost of two long days of work plus associated travel time and expenses. 26 | We hope that the conference itself is a valuable venue for networking and learning about the state of the art in the community. Nonetheless, we are interested in trying to preserve some of the benefits discussed above, particularly maintaining uniform standards across areas. The current plan is to hold a PC meeting immediately preceding the conference itself to decide on Distinguished Paper Awards and a larger pool of Honorable Mentions. 27 | Possible alternatives include virtual PC meetings or holding a PC meeting to assign presentation slots of varying lengths to the papers that have been accepted to date. 28 | 29 | 1. **How will we maintain transparency in the review process?** 30 | 1. As with the traditional review process, once a PC member submits their reviews, they will be able to see reviews and discussion for all other papers. 31 | 1. Lists of papers that seem likely to be accepted or rejected will be disseminated to the PC throughout the process so as to encourage more interest in the process. 32 | 1. Additional non-reviewer PC members will be assigned to each paper to evaluate the reviews and participate in the discussion. 33 | 1. As discussed below, we will gather data before and after the transition in order to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of the new process. 34 | 35 | 1. **Are we keeping the special bulk-submission handling, introduced for 2016?** 36 | 1. No, in the new submission model, we do not plan to have special rules for bulk submissions. 37 | 38 | 1. **Are we keeping the appeals process?** 39 | 1. Yes, but only for rejected papers. Those papers can appeal to the Associate Chairs. 40 | 41 | 1. **Are we keeping the Student PC review process?** 42 | 1. At present, it is unclear whether it will make sense to hold a Student PC meeting, given the new submission process. 43 | 44 | 1. **How will this affect my students’ ability to get jobs, or my ability to get tenure?** 45 | 1. Enabling students to get jobs (or faculty to get tenure) should be the consequence of performing high quality science. The new process should enhance both. Other communities who have adopted this approach have seen a noted improvement in paper quality. The new process should also allow faster turnaround, making it more likely that you and/or your students can include a paper acceptance on a CV. 46 | 47 | 1. **How will we know if this new format is achieving its goals?** 48 | 1. We expect that the definition of success metrics will be an evolving process, with different metrics being used over time. 49 | 2. Immediately, we will start collecting quality metrics as part of the reviewing process, to assess whether authors and reviewers feel that both reviews and papers are improving in quality, as a result of these changes. 50 | 3. After a few years, we---like other conferences that have adopted a VLDB-like model---can survey quantitative metrics, such as the number of citations that papers are getting, etc., as a proxy for their quality. 51 | 4. One ongoing metric we will use is based on surveys of the IEEE S&P community, and its perception of the different aspects of concerns, such as the quality of the review process and of the accepted papers. Our plan is to perform such surveys annually, with the first one being done before the implementation of any changes. 52 | 5. Ultimately, if we decide the new format is not working, then a vote of the business meeting will be held to revert back to the old submission process (or possibly some alternate put forward in the interim). 53 | 54 | 1. **Will reviewers be able to consistently meet deadlines?** 55 | 1. Based on conversations with PETS and VLDB chairs, this hasn't, thus far, been a major issue for them. They find that while the PC chairs do more "nagging" work, the reviews do generally get done on time, a process that's helped by the fact that the workload is so much lighter for each deadline. After all, some reviewers will always choose to procrastinate, but if the deadline is two days way, it's still quite feasible to read and review 1-3 papers, whereas at that point, it's impossible to be timely with 15-20. 56 | 57 | 1. **How will this impact other security conferences?** 58 | 1. We do expect that other conferences will be affected, although it’s hard to say exactly how at this time. 59 | 2. By proceeding with this plan for IEEE S&P, the community can experiment without committing all of our conferences to a new format. While they may also eventually choose to adopt this model, we don’t see a need to make IEEE S&P’s move dependent on similar moves elsewhere. 60 | 3. We will discuss our plans with the other major security conferences, and encourage them to contribute to this open discussion process, to cover any issues that they identify. 61 | 62 | 1. **Will people really submit to deadlines other than the last one necessary to be included in the physical conference?** 63 | 1. This is a possible risk, but we don’t think it will be as bad as might be expected. First, if authors have a complete paper ready to go, then they can submit it immediately and expect to get feedback and eventually an online publication faster than if they wait until the last deadline. Second, data from VLDB suggests submissions do tend to spread throughout the year. The 2015 VLDB received 710 submissions during the year, of which just under 200 were first submitted at the final cutoff date, but the other 510+ were relatively distributed throughout the year (see the graph on slide 15 for more details: http://www.vldb.org/2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/VLDB2015-PC-Presentation.pdf) 64 | 65 | 1. **How do we ensure a balanced program at the conference when we’re accepting papers in an ongoing fashion?** 66 | 1. In general, each paper will be evaluated on its own merits, with no a-priori decision of acceptable coverage, within the constraints of the topics covered at IEEE S&P, as enumerated in the Call for Papers. 67 | 2. However, as part of this plan, the PC chairs and PC will seek an explicit mandate for crafting the best possible conference given the set of accepted papers—with that mandate granted by TC and business meeting—in order to have the flexibility to adjust to any unforeseen imbalance in accepted papers 68 | 3. An in-person PC meeting to allocate speaking time at the conference might be one way to address this. 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Affirmer understands and acknowledges that Creative Commons is not a 112 | party to this document and has no duty or obligation with respect to this 113 | CC0 or use of the Work. 114 | 115 | For more information, please see 116 | 117 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Proposed VLDB-like Process for S&P 2 | 3 | This GitHub repository aims to be a public forum for the crafting, documenting, and detailed planning of a VLDB-like ongoing submission model for IEEE Security & Privacy (a.k.a. Oakland). If the plan crafted here is approved at the May 2017 business meeting, the new process will become effective for Oakland'18. 4 | 5 | This repository can be used as with any other OSS code repository; i.e, you can fork, edit, and submit pull requests as you wish, to change the text of the proposed plan. 6 | 7 | However, we encourage the use of the GitHub *issues* feature to allow for threaded discussion of proposed changes. As a general rule, changes to the mainline draft plan without a corresponding discussion in the issues won't be accepted. Discussions within a pull request will be focused on minor tweaks and improvements. 8 | 9 | ## Proposed plan for an ongoing-submission model: 10 | * **[Philosophy and Motivation](motivation.md)** 11 | * **[Roles in Program Committee](pc-roles.md)** 12 | * **[Steady-state Process](steady-state-submission-process.md)** 13 | * **[Transition Process](transition-process.md)** 14 | * **[Observations](benefits-and-observations.md)** 15 | * **[F.A.Q.](FAQ.md)** 16 | 17 | Read at [https://ieee-security.github.io/ongoing-submission-plan/](https://ieee-security.github.io/ongoing-submission-plan/) 18 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /benefits-and-observations.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Benefits and Observations 2 | 3 | 1. Today, there’s a 6.5 month gap between when a paper is submitted to Oakland and when it is officially published. There’s also a ~3 month gap between submission and notification. With the new system, the gap between submission and notification will be 1.5 months, and the gap between submission and publication could be as little as 2 months. With Revisions, it will more likely be 3-4 months between submission and publication, but that’s still more rapid, and will also result in significantly improved papers that might otherwise have been rejected. 4 | 5 | 2. If you measure between completion of the research and publication, the improvement is more dramatic. In the current system, any idea completed after mid-November must wait up to 12 months just for submission to the next S&P. Submitting, instead, to the next top conference (USENIX Security) lowers the gap to 3 months, which is still significant. With the proposed system, authors will be able to submit a paper within a month of its completion date. 6 | 7 | 3. By delaying the start of the steady state system until July, 2017, we’ll have a full year to flesh out all of the details in a transparent manner based on input from the community. We will also have the opportunity to “abort” the transition at the 2017 business meeting if the system looks problematic (for example, if we cannot find enough PC members willing to participate in the new format). 8 | 9 | 4. The last possible deadline to submit a paper and have it appear at the conference will be January 1st. However, only papers that are accepted without Revisions will be accepted in time. If Revisions are required, then papers must be submitted by December 1st. Even then, authors will be gambling that the Revisions requested will be small enough to be addressed in two weeks or less. The much safer option will be to submit by November 1st, or ideally, even earlier. 10 | 11 | 5. This year, the gap between the notification from S&P and the submission deadline of USENIX Security was 11 days. The situation is similar for any other consecutive pair of conferences in the "top conference" circuit. This leads to rapid resubmission of papers, starving authors of the time needed to address reviewer comments. In turn, this decreases the quality of the papers being submitted, increases the number of rejected papers (and the frustration of both the reviewers and the authors), and propagates the resubmission cycle. 12 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /motivation.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Philosophy & Motivation 2 | 3 | The primary goal of the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (and computer science conferences more broadly) is to enable the timely dissemination of high quality science. Hence, our goal in revamping the Symposium’s submission and publication process it to enhance the quality and timeliness of the scientific results we disseminate. One aspect of this is to enhance the quality of the reviewing process, since peer-review is one of our primary tools for identifying high-quality work. 4 | 5 | Unfortunately, today’s review process reduces the quality of the scientific results we publish and creates excessive work for both authors and reviewers. With a single deadline each year, authors often face the dilemma of submitting half-baked results (in the hopes that they will be accepted via some miracle), or waiting another year before they can submit to the Symposium again (or at least three months for the USENIX Security deadline); either choice detracts from the timely dissemination of high quality science. Authors may fear that, faced with a mountain of reviews to process in bulk, some reviewers will look for reasons to reject papers, rather than identifying positive aspects or looking for ways a paper could become a stronger result. When authors resubmit their work (either to a future Symposium or to other venues), they typically face a new set of reviewers who may evaluate their work on entirely different grounds from the initial set of reviewers. Reviewers, in turn, who receive such revised work, do not have any input from the authors as to what has changed (or why some comments have been ignored), and hence waste time rereading such papers in their entirety and guessing at author intent. As our community grows, this process is becoming unsustainable. 6 | 7 | Thus, our proposed review process has two key goals. First we want to enable researchers to submit results when they are ready, rather than rushing to meet an annual deadline. Second, we want the review process to be more constructive and efficient, with reviewers focused on what it would take to make each paper a high-quality result, rather than searching for reasons to reject papers. We do not, however, intend in any way to lower the Symposium’s high expectations for published results. If anything, we expect the new process will result in higher quality reviews and higher quality published papers. 8 | 9 | Concretely, we propose a VLDB-like model, i.e., a review process featuring regular (e.g., monthly) submission deadlines with all papers that are accepted by an annual cutoff point invited to appear at the Symposium (hence, we will remain a conference, not a journal). The review process will ensure rapid turnaround while giving authors the opportunity to make real revisions that will be evaluated by the original reviewers. We anticipate a similar overall acceptance ratio (limited primarily by the duration of the conference), although possibly a bit higher given the new opportunity to improve papers through revisions. 10 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pc-roles.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Roles & Responsibilities 2 | * Senior and Junior Chair 3 | * Appoint Associate Chairs and Program Committee Members 4 | * Participate in review assignments; not reviewers. 5 | * Ensure the entire end-to-end review process runs smoothly and fairly. 6 | * Maintain a uniform quality bar across Associates. 7 | * Resolve disputes on contentious papers. 8 | 9 | * Associate Chairs 10 | * Experts in a particular field or Associate of work where we expect submissions; papers on very closely related topics/techniques are guaranteed to go to the same Associate chair. 11 | * Not reviewers. 12 | * Assist in assigning new papers to appropriate PC members or external reviewers when necessary. 13 | * Solicit additional reviews when needed 14 | * Guide review discussions to a conclusion 15 | * For papers where the decision is “Revision”, write a review summary of necessary revisions. 16 | * For rejected papers, act as the adjudicator for any appeal. 17 | * Confirm that camera-ready papers comply with all reviewer requests. 18 | * Ensure reviews are timely and fair. Protect the integrity of the review process. 19 | * Follow up (for up to three months after their year of service concludes) on resubmissions of papers previously overseen. 20 | 21 | * Program Committee Members 22 | * Timely reviews of a handful of new papers in each review period for one year. 23 | * Participate in paper discussions in each review period. 24 | * Timely review of resubmissions previously reviewed. This may extend for up to three months beyond the standard year of new reviews. 25 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /steady-state-submission-process.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 2 | 3 | # Steady-State Procedures [for 1.5-month turnaround] 4 | 5 | * A rolling deadline occurs on the 1st of each month at 9:00 AM (UTC-7). This deadline is strict and no extensions will be granted. 6 | * The submission server will open starting on the 20th of the preceding month. 7 | 8 | * Month X, Day 2: Each new paper will be automatically assigned to 1 Associate Chair and 3 PC members. 9 | * Every effort will be made to assign Revised papers to the same Associate Chair and PC members. 10 | * PC members constitute a general pool (i.e., not assigned to a particular Associate Chair), and hence may end up working with several different Associate Chairs. 11 | * Goal: Each PC member will receive 1-3 new papers every other month, and possibly revisions to previous papers each month. 12 | * We expect a spike (perhaps 3-5 papers per PC member) in the last two months before the conference cutoff. 13 | 14 | * By Month X, Day 3: Associate Chairs review assignments and reassign based on preferences/expertise. Email assignments to PC members. 15 | 16 | * By Month X, Day 5: Cutoff for papers to be Withdrawn without penalty. After this point, a Withdrawn paper is subject to a 12-month moratorium from the date of submission. 17 | * This moratorium (as well as all others mentioned in this document) only applies to submission to IEEE S&P. Authors are free to resubmit elsewhere or to post their publications online. 18 | 19 | * Month X+1, Day 1: Initial reviews due. Discussion period begin. 20 | * For each paper, 3-5 PC members who did not review the paper will be assigned to sanity-check the reviews and participate in the discussion. 21 | * PC members will be able to see all reviews for all papers they are not conflicted with, and PC members will be encouraged to participate in the discussion of all such papers. 22 | * Chairs/Associate Chairs will disseminate a list (appropriately redacted for conflicts) of papers likely to be accepted to encourage further discussion. 23 | * Chairs and Associate Chairs may solicit additional reviews. 24 | 25 | * Month X+1, Day 15: Decision reached. Associate Chair responsible for driving discussions to a conclusion. 26 | * A decision is one of: Reject, Revise, or Accept. 27 | * Associate Chairs make a recommendation to the Chairs, who make the final decision. 28 | * Rejected papers must wait for one year, from the date of original submission, to resubmit to IEEE S&P. 29 | * The policy on what distinguishes a new submission from a resubmission will need to be tuned over time. If a paper is from the same or similar authors, and a reviewer could write a substantially similar summary of the paper compared with the original submission, then the paper will be considered a resubmission and subject to the one-year moratorium. 30 | * Accepted papers will be expected to submit a camera-ready copy by the end of Month X+1 to be published online. Late submissions will be published as part of the Month X+2 batch. 31 | * Submission should include delta from submission 32 | * Associate Chair reviews to ensures comments addressed and only appropriate new material added 33 | * Once approved, camera-ready papers are published online at the end of the month. 34 | * They may be cited as “To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, May 20XX”. 35 | * Ideally, they will be published via the usual IEEE channels. 36 | * Failing that, they can be published on the Symposium’s website as preprints until the conference. 37 | * Failing that, they can be published on Archive and linked to from the Symposium’s website. 38 | * Papers that receive a Revise response will also receive a review summary from the Associate Chair stating what revisions are necessary to reach acceptance. 39 | * Revisions must be submitted to one of the next 3 submission deadlines. After that they will be treated as Withdrawn and subject to the same 12-month moratorium as Rejected papers. 40 | * It will be emphasized to reviewers that a good paper that only needs minor revisions should be Accepted, not Revised. Conversely, only papers that the reviewers truly believe will be IEEE S&P quality following a revision should be marked Revise. All others should be Rejected. 41 | * Associate Chairs and PC members will remain anonymous throughout this process, unless they choose to deanonymize themselves. 42 | * For new papers, based on the experience of other communities, such as VLDB, our expectation is that: 43 | * 1-5% of papers will be Accepted 44 | * 10-14% of papers will be Revised. 45 | * 80-85% of papers will be Rejected 46 | * Overall, the goal is to maintain or raise the current quality bar, rather than necessarily meeting a particular acceptance ratio. 47 | * For revised papers, the expectation is that: 48 | * The vast majority (over 80%) will be Accepted. 49 | * Follow the same camera-ready procedure as above 50 | * A small number will be Rejected. Such papers will be subject to the standard 12-month moratorium, starting from the submission of the Revision. 51 | * Further revisions are only expected in extreme cases. 52 | 53 | * Initial reviews will be returned to the authors by Month X+1, Day 15. 54 | 55 | * Symposium Acceptance: 56 | * All papers Accepted (not submitted) by February 15th, 20XX will be invited to appear at the 20XX IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Papers accepted subsequently will appear at the 20[XX+1] symposium. 57 | 58 | * PC members will serve for one year, starting March 1st. After the year completes, they will no longer receive new papers, but they will still be asked to review revisions to papers they previously reviewed. By definition, this will continue for no more than 3 months (i.e., until after the May submission deadline). 59 | * Associate Chairs will be handled similarly: After one year of service, their only obligation for the following three months will be to conclude decisions on revised papers. 60 | * We will also continue the standard practice of ensuring reasonable overlap between consecutive PCs in order to ensure consistency 61 | 62 | * PC Meeting 63 | * A PC meeting serves multiple useful functions that the community is reluctant to abandon entirely. Hence, we will still have a PC meeting, likely in conjunction with the main conference or a related conference (e.g., NDSS), where the focus will be on assessing the accepted papers. For example, the meeting may be used to decide on Distinguished-Paper awards and a larger pool of Honorable Mentions. 64 | 65 | 66 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /transition-process.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Transition to the New Submission Process 2 | 3 | For the 2017 Symposium, we will follow the standard review process with the following revisions. 4 | * As usual, submissions will be due in early November, and authors will be notified of the paper decisions in early February. 5 | 6 | * Papers rejected from the 2017 Symposium whose reviews clearly describe potential revisions that would have made the paper acceptable to the reviewers are encouraged to submit revised versions to the new review process when it begins. Every effort will be made to assign these papers to the original PC members. 7 | * If the paper is then Accepted, it will proceed to a camera-ready iteration which will then be immediately published online and will be included in the 2018 Symposium. 8 | 9 | * The “steady state” submission process for new papers will begin July 1st. This will mean a shorter than average period of service for the PC members, since their “term” will end in March 2018. 10 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------