Call for Papers

• Introduction
• Contact
• Review Process
• Reserve Reviewer Policy
• Submissions
• Publication
• ACM Policies
• FAQ
• Important Dates

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 2026 will have two rounds of reviewing, with the Round 1 submission deadline October 10, 2025 and Round 2 submission deadline March 17, 2026 (AoE). All deadlines are firm. New papers may be submitted to either round. Papers accepted in either round will be published in the 2026 volume of PACMPL(OOPSLA) and invited to present at the SPLASH conference in 2026.

Please be aware of the following practices that are (relatively) new in the OOPSLA review process:

• At least one author of a paper submission must be registered as a Reserve Reviewer as per the Reserve Reviewer Policy.

• Unlike OOPSLA’25, the decisions “Conditional Accept” and “Minor Revision” have been merged into a single “Minor Revision” outcome. (See Paper outcomes.)

Contact

You can reach the two RC Chairs (Anders Møller and Isil Dillig) through this email:

oopsla26-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.

Minor Revision: While the Review Committee likes the work, it has some specific concerns that it would like to see revised. Thus, you will receive specific suggestions for your revised manuscript. The committee expects the revisions to be doable within the revision phase.

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 two decisions, please note:

• Unlike in some previous years, there is no restriction on when you can submit your revision. The decision does not imply a duration.

• 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, Minor Revision papers will be invited to submit artifacts. However, acceptance of artifacts has no impact on the acceptance of the revised papers.

Only Accepted and Minor Revision papers can submit artifacts for evaluation. The reason for this is that often, Major revisions end up affecting the artifacts, sometimes substantially. It is not reasonable to ask the AEC to review the artifacts twice; nor does it make sense to review artifacts that are likely to change. For this reason, artifact evaluation will only happen once the paper reaches (near-)final form. Thus, for instance, a paper accepted after revisions in R1 can submit to the AEC for R2, and get its badges then.

Reserve Reviewer Policy

To prepare for the possibility of a higher volume of submissions, we are implementing the same “reserve reviewer” policy introduced in OOPSLA’25: 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:

• the paper has no senior authors,
• at least one senior author is already in the RC for this conference, or
• every senior author of the paper satisfies one or more of these criteria:
  • is new to SIGPLAN and SIGSOFT, meaning they have published less than 3 papers at major SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT conferences (PLDI, POPL, OOPSLA, ICFP, ICSE, FSE, ISSTA)
  • is chairing a major SIGPLAN conference last year, this year, or next year;
  • 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 page. Please use

\documentclass[acmsmall,screen,review]{acmart}

at the top of your paper.

Page Limit

Initial submissions must be at most 23 pages using the template. 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 correspondingly go up to a maximum of 25 pages. This includes papers given a minor or major revision in 2025, 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 or that you promised.

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.

Procedure

Please submit using HotCRP. (Link will appear here.)

Publication

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, 2026, while those accepted in Round 2 (OOPSLA2) will be published no earlier than October 1, 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Important update on ACMs new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences:

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%).

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a geographic or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy.

To support a smooth transition and encourage broader ACM Open participation, ACM has introduced a temporary subsidy on APC pricing for 2026, funded directly by ACM. This pricing applies to all articles published in ACM and SIG sponsored conferences taking place in 2026. The subsidized conference pricing for 2026 is as follows:

Authors	No ACM or SIG members	At least 1 ACM or SIG member
ACM and SIG Sponsored Conference Article	$350	$250
From a lower-middle-income country	$175	$125

This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period.

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.

Important Dates

	R1	R2
Submission	Fri 10 October 2025	Tue 17 March 2026
Author Response	Tue 2 Dec - Fri 5 Dec	Mon 18 May - Thu 21 May
Author Notification	Wed 17 Dec	Wed 10 June
Revision submission	Tue 3 Feb 2026	Tue 21 July
Author Notification	Tue 17 Feb	Tue 4 Aug
Camera Ready	Fri 27 Feb	Fri 14 Aug