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.

1. Reviews written for the meeting compress; a terse negative review may encode a

long live discussion. Mine every sentence — each one survived an argument.

1. 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?