Sosp review process

SOSP Review Process

Use this to model what happens to a SOSP paper between the April upload and the July decision, and to time author-side actions to the phases that actually move outcomes. Anchors below are from the 2026-cycle CFP and the sosp26.hotcrp.com schedule (checked 2026-07-08): submission April 2026, author response ahead of the PC meeting, notification July 3, 2026.

The pipeline

Phase	Who acts	What authors can do
Conflict screening (from abstract registration)	PC chairs audit declared conflicts, add or remove entries	Declare defensibly; chairs treat strategic conflicts as misconduct-adjacent
Early reviewing	A subset of the PC reads every paper	Nothing — the paper speaks alone
Later-round reviewing	Papers still alive draw additional, often more senior, reviews	Nothing; round structure and counts vary by year (待核实 per cycle)
Author response	Authors correct factual errors, answer posed questions	The one sanctioned intervention (see sosp-author-response)
PC meeting	Full committee discusses candidates live, single track	Nothing — but the response was written for this room
Decision + shepherd assignment	Chairs notify July 3; accepted papers get a shepherding PC member	Camera-ready planning begins (see sosp-camera-ready)

Two structural facts do most of the explanatory work. First, reviewing is staged: a paper that reads as unsound in the first pass never reaches the reviewers most likely to appreciate a subtle contribution, so the opening pages must survive a skeptical fast read (see sosp-writing-style). Second, decisions are made in a meeting, not by score averaging: one convinced advocate who can defend the paper against live objections beats four mildly positive scores.

Reading SOSP reviews

Systems reviews concentrate their weight in predictable places:

• Soundness attacks ("the evaluation doesn't isolate the claimed mechanism", "this workload can't show the tail behavior claimed") are the score-drivers. Address these first in any response.
• Positioning complaints ("how is this different from X at OSDI two years ago") signal a related-work gap the meeting will replay (see sosp-related-work).
• Taste judgments ("incremental", "not SOSP-worthy") rarely change through argument; they change when an advocate reframes the paper's principle at the meeting — which your response can quietly arm with one crisp sentence.

Post-review triage sheet (fill before drafting anything)

For each review R1..Rn:
  overall lean:        champion / positive / neutral / negative / kill
  score-driving issue: <one sentence>
  type:                factual error | missed content | posed question | judgment
  response-eligible?:  yes (types 1-3) / no (type 4)
Meeting risk:          <the objection an advocate could not answer alone>

Confidentiality and integrity edges

• Reviews and PC discussion are confidential; reviewers are anonymous forever, and guessing at reviewer identity in the response reads badly (reviews are anonymous in both directions).
• Double-blind holds until notification. Do not advertise the submission where PC members will see it; the CFP's anonymization duty does not lapse after upload.
• HotCRP is the channel of record. Deadline-adjacent questions go to the PC chairs through it, not to PC members you happen to know — that is a conflict violation in a culture that audits conflicts.

Calibrating expectations

SOSP is a low-acceptance venue where most submissions are competent; rejections routinely carry reviews that would be accepts elsewhere. Per-year submission counts and acceptance rates are published with each program (待核实 for 2026 until the program appears; cross-check dl.acm.org/conference/sosp and dblp for history). Practical consequences of the meeting-centric model:

1. A rejected paper with one strong champion review is often a revise-and-retarget candidate for the next systems deadline, not a redesign candidate.
2. Reviews written for the meeting compress; a terse negative review may encode a long live discussion. Mine every sentence — each one survived an argument.
3. Because SOSP and its sibling OSDI both now run annually, the cost of a rejection is measured in months, not years (see sosp-workflow for the retargeting map).

Output format

[Phase] where the paper sits in the pipeline now
[Review map] per-review lean + score-driving issue + response eligibility
[Meeting risk] the one live objection to defuse
[Action] respond / wait / prepare retarget
[Integrity check] anonymity holds? all contact via HotCRP?