brycewang-stanford STOC Workflow
STOC is a conference with per-edition leadership, not a journal: SIGACT appoints
a fresh program committee and chair every year (STOC 2026: PC chair Artur
Czumaj; verified 2026-07-08 via the CFP), there is no standing editor, and
publication costs ride on conference registration rather than author fees.
Anchor timeline, 2026 cycle: submissions November 4, 2025 (4:59pm EST);
notification by February 1, 2026; camera-ready and public full version March 31,
2026 (AoE); conference June 22–26, 2026, Salt Lake City, inside a five/six-day
TheoryFest program. Every date below is that cycle's snapshot — reopen
acm-stoc.org for the live year before acting on any of them.
The two-beat theory year
The field's real planning unit is not one deadline but the STOC/FOCS pair: STOC submissions close in early November for a June conference; FOCS closes in early April for a fall conference (FOCS 2026: deadline April 1, 2026, 21:00 UTC; conference November 8–11, 2026, New York — verified 2026-07-08). The same community, largely overlapping reviewer pools, near-identical scope. Strategic consequences:
| Situation in late October | Sound play |
|---|---|
| Result complete, writing strong | Submit to STOC |
| Proof complete, writing weak | Submit only if the overview can be made honest in time; a rushed overview at a no-rebuttal venue is unrecoverable |
| One lemma still open | Hold for FOCS in April; five months closes lemmas |
| STOC rejection arrives Feb 1 | Two months to repair for FOCS — enough for presentation surgery, rarely enough for new mathematics |
| Result claimed by concurrent preprint | Post to arXiv immediately for priority, then decide venue calmly |
A result that misses both beats simply waits; nothing in theory culture penalizes a strong paper for arriving one cycle later, but plenty penalizes a broken proof for arriving on time.
Backward plan to a November deadline
- T−16 weeks: the mathematical result exists in believed-complete form. Everything after this is verification and writing; theorem-proving scheduled inside the writing window is the classic failure.
- T−12 weeks: full proofs written out (full-version draft), not just notes. Writing proofs is verification at this venue; gaps surface only under the discipline of complete prose.
- T−8 weeks: internal verification pass — each theorem checked by a
coauthor who did not draft its proof (
stoc-reproducibility's workflow). - T−6 weeks: extract the extended abstract from the full version: choose
the twelve-page story, write the technical overview (
stoc-writing-style). - T−3 weeks: hostile-read by a colleague outside the sub-area; their confusion map drives the final overview rewrite.
- T−1 week: literature re-sweep (arXiv/ECCC), objection-ledger check
(
stoc-author-response), anonymity sweep and HotCRP dry run (stoc-submission). If opting into a pre-submission feedback experiment (2026: full paper due ~3 days early), the paper must be done here. - T: upload with hours to spare; the deadline is a US-Eastern wall-clock time, not AoE, and this catches Europeans annually.
Between submission and decision (Nov–Feb)
- Post or refresh the arXiv/ECCC version if the cycle's double-blind rules permit (待核实 — check the live CFP's stance on preprints during review).
- Keep a corrections file: any bug or improvement found post-submission goes in it, dated. If a chair-mediated query arrives, answers come from this file; if acceptance arrives, it becomes the camera-ready worklist.
- Do not silently rewrite the posted preprint mid-review in ways that diverge from the submitted PDF; reviewers may be reading both.
From acceptance to Salt Lake City (Feb–Jun)
- Triage the corrections file into camera-ready fixes vs. full-version-only
improvements (
stoc-camera-ready). - Hit both March 31 deliverables: the ACM proceedings version and the public full version with complete proofs — the CFP treats the second as an expectation of acceptance, not a courtesy.
- Prepare the TheoryFest talk: one theorem, one technique, one open problem; rehearse to the announced slot length. Poster/workshop add-ons follow the program announcement (待核实 per cycle).
- Confirm registration and attendance obligations from the acceptance email (待核实; not stated in the CFP excerpts verified for this pack).
The cycle at a glance (2026 snapshot)
2025-11-01 optional LLM-feedback upload (experiment; 3 days early)
2025-11-04 STOC deadline, 4:59pm EST
2026-02-01 decisions out (at the latest)
2026-02..03 accepted: corrections triage, ACM reformat, talk draft
rejected: repair memo -> FOCS decision point
2026-03-31 camera-ready (AoE) + full version live on arXiv/ECCC
2026-04-01 FOCS 2026 deadline, 21:00 UTC (the other beat)
2026-06-22 STOC / TheoryFest week opens, Salt Lake City
2026-11-08 FOCS 2026 conference, New York
Print the equivalent table for the live year from the current CFPs before using it; both venues move their dates by days-to-weeks between cycles.
Ownership map for multi-author teams
Name one owner each for: proof verification, the twelve-page story, the literature sweep, anonymity/format compliance, and the full-version release. The two that slip when shared are verification ("I thought you checked Lemma 5") and the full version ("the arXiv update can wait") — both are reputation-priced at this venue.
Cycle-volatility warnings
- Deadlines, the guaranteed-read window, double-blind details, and any feedback experiments are re-set annually in the CFP; the TheoryFest format itself evolves (待核实 whether future editions keep the expanded-week structure).
- FOCS mechanics are set independently by the IEEE TCMF side; never infer one venue's rules from the other's.
Output format
[Current stage] proving / verifying / writing / submitted / decided / camera-ready
[Beat decision] STOC <year> / FOCS <year> / hold one cycle
[Backward plan] <next two milestones with dates>
[Corrections file] empty / <n> entries pending
[Owner map] <verification, story, literature, compliance, full version>