Asplos Submission

ASPLOS Submission

This is the audit to run in the final week, against the exact PDF that will be uploaded. Every rule below is the ASPLOS 2027 cycle as verified 2026-07-08 through the CFP and the April-cycle HotCRP pages; the numbers are one edition's snapshot.

Hard-format gates

The citation rules almost everyone gets wrong on the first try

ASPLOS imposes bibliography requirements that authors arriving from ISCA, SOSP, or PLDI habitually violate:

• Every reference entry must list the full, non-abbreviated first and last names of every co-author — "J. Smith et al." fails on both counts.
• In-text citation numbers should be hyperlinked to their reference entries.
• Each entry should carry a clickable link, preferably a DOI.

Mechanical sweep before upload:

# et-al and initials-only detection in the bibliography
grep -nE 'et al\.|\b[A-Z]\.\s*[A-Z][a-z]+' references.bib | head -40
# DOI coverage: entries without a doi/url field
grep -c '@' references.bib; grep -ciE 'doi *=|url *=' references.bib
# PDF-side: confirm links are live (count of URI annotations)
pdftk paper.pdf dump_data 2>/dev/null | grep -c URI || true

Double-blind sweep, ASPLOS flavor

• Cite your own prior work in the third person; if that is impossible, upload it as anonymized supplemental material instead.
• Do not write "removed for blind review" — the 2027 CFP disallows the placeholder itself.
• arXiv postings, tech reports, and talks are not prior publications, and the submission may ignore them to preserve anonymity — you are not obligated to cite or differentiate your own preprint.
• Sweep PDF metadata, embedded file paths, repository URLs, acknowledgments, and grant numbers. Workload traces or testbeds identifiable to one lab need neutral description.

Disclosure and policy items

• Generative AI: ACM authorship policy applies — any GenAI use must be fully disclosed; when using the Acknowledgments section for the disclosure, it goes immediately before the References.
• Concurrent submission: related manuscripts of your own that are under review elsewhere are handled through the anonymized-supplemental mechanism, not silence.
• Revision lineage: if this submission follows a prior ASPLOS Major Revision, the change note must describe deltas relative to the revision, since the revision itself counted as a submission.

Why the first two pages are a submission item, not a writing item

The 2027 process screens every paper with a rapid review that considers only the first two pages. Before upload, verify as a mechanical check — not a stylistic one — that pages 1-2 alone contain: the cross-layer problem, the one-sentence insight, the mechanism sketch, and the headline result with its platform named. If any of the four lives on page 3, the submission is structurally incomplete for the process it enters. (Deeper treatment: asplos-writing-style.)

Upload-day sequence

1. Recompile from a clean tree with the untouched template; diff page count.
2. Run the citation and anonymity sweeps above on the final PDF.
3. Complete every HotCRP field — title, abstract, authors, conflicts, topics — and upload.
4. Confirm the paper's HotCRP state reads complete, then have a co-author independently confirm it.
5. Freeze the exact submitted PDF and tag the repository commit; the response window and any revision will be argued against this artifact.

HotCRP form fields deserve the same audit as the PDF

The form is part of the submission and desynchronizes from the paper easily:

• Title and abstract must match the PDF verbatim — reviewers bid on the form text, and a stale form abstract mis-routes the paper to the wrong expertise.
• Author list and conflicts: every author entered before the deadline, with conflicts (advisors, recent co-authors, institutional) declared per the form's definitions; missing conflicts create integrity problems after assignment, when they are unfixable.
• Topic selections steer reviewer matching; choose the intersection topics that describe the contribution, not every area the paper touches.
• Record who submitted, from which account — response-window access flows through that account, and a departed intern's orphaned HotCRP login is a classic December emergency.

The last 48 hours, failure-ranked

1. AoE arithmetic error — 11:59 PM AoE is midday-plus the next day in much of Asia; compute each co-author's local equivalent in writing.
2. Recompile drift — a "trivial" final edit reflows a figure past page 11; any post-audit edit re-triggers the geometry check.
3. Wrong-file upload — the anonymized and camera-style builds coexist in the repo; name the submission artifact unambiguously (paper-BLIND-final.pdf).
4. Bibliography regression — a hastily added late citation with "et al." undoes the format pass; re-run the sweep after every reference edit.

Output format

[Verdict] ready / blocked (list blockers)
[Geometry] pages used incl. figures/footnotes: N/11 · template untouched: Y/N
[Citations] et-al hits: N · entries missing DOI: N · links live: Y/N
[Anonymity] third-person self-cites: Y/N · metadata clean: Y/N
[Disclosures] GenAI statement present/absent-and-unneeded · revision note lineage OK
[Two-page check] problem/insight/mechanism/result all within pages 1-2: Y/N
[HotCRP] status complete confirmed by second author: Y/N

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → ASPLOS-Skills/skills/asplos-submission/SKILL.md