Micro Camera Ready

MICRO Camera-Ready

For the 2026 cycle: notification July 7, camera-ready September 11, 2026 — nine weeks, with artifact evaluation (see micro-artifact-evaluation) running inside the same span and the symposium following in Athens, Oct 31 – Nov 4. This skill turns the acceptance email into a correct published record.

The nine-week plan

De-anonymization is an additive diff, not a rewrite

Produce the camera-ready as a reviewed diff against the accepted PDF:

• Author block, affiliations, ORCIDs in.
• Acknowledgments restored — people, funding agencies, grant numbers were required to be absent at submission (2026 guidelines), so they are easy to forget permanently. Check the grant-numbers list with every PI.
• Self-citations rewritten from third person where it now reads awkwardly.
• Artifact links swapped from anonymized mirrors to the permanent public home — coordinated with AE badge requirements (archival repository for the Available badge; a GitHub URL alone does not qualify).
• Nothing else moves without a reason traceable to a review or the rebuttal log. Silent post-acceptance content changes are how camera-readies grow claims the PC never reviewed.

# guardrails on the final build
latexdiff accepted.tex camera.tex > diff.tex && pdflatex diff.tex   # human-review the delta
grep -n "et al" references.bib && echo "STILL banned at camera-ready: expand authors"
grep -inE "anonym|under review|blind" camera.tex                    # stale scaffolding
pdftotext camera.pdf - | grep -iE "acknowledg" || echo "MISSING acknowledgments?"

Note the second line: MICRO's all-authors-no-"et al." reference rule is a formatting requirement of the venue, not an anonymity artifact — it survives into the final version. New references added at camera-ready must follow it too.

Page arithmetic changes

Camera-ready page allowances (and whether the artifact appendix rides free) are set by the publisher instructions that arrive with acceptance — the 2025 cycle granted a two-page artifact appendix at no charge for papers passing AE; assume the same shape for 2026 but treat exact numbers as 待核实 until the author kit lands. Budget the appendix content early from the AE package README rather than writing it fresh in week 8.

Publication and indexing facts worth knowing

• MICRO proceedings appear in both the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore (the symposium is IEEE/ACM; e.g., the 58th's proceedings are in the ACM DL, the 40th's in Xplore). Your DOI will be the citable anchor — put it in the artifact README when the publisher assigns it.
• AE badges (Available / Functional / Reproducible, per the 2025 AE pages) are printed on the paper and attached as ACM DL metadata — the camera-ready and the AE outcome must land together.
• Attendance/registration obligations for publication (who must register, whether presentation is in-person-only for Athens): 待核实 on micro59/attend/ — verify before booking nothing or everything.

Presentation pipeline (the deadline after the deadline)

Athens follows seven weeks after camera-ready. Start the talk while the paper is still warm:

• The talk is the four-beat argument at 4x compression (see micro-writing-style): one characterization slide, one insight slide, the block diagram, the headline bar chart with the cost line on the same slide. Everything else is backup slides for Q&A.
• Q&A at MICRO is methodology Q&A. Prepare backup slides for: baseline config table, sensitivity sweep edges, the worst-regressing workload, and the iso-storage comparison. These four cover most questions actually asked.
• Whether lightning sessions, poster obligations, or speaker-registration deadlines apply for the 2026 program: 待核实 on the program pages when they post — assign an owner to watch for them.

Post-camera-ready checklist

• arXiv posting updated to the final text (respecting the publisher's policy).
• Artifact repository tagged micro26-camera-ready, badge requirements met.
• Talk and poster pipeline started — the Athens slot arrives fast after the September deadline.
• Consider IEEE Micro Top Picks submission when the call opens: it selects from the year's architecture conference papers, and MICRO papers are core candidates.

Metadata that outlives the conference

The camera-ready fixes the paper's permanent search surface — worth ten deliberate minutes:

• Title and abstract as submitted to the publisher become the ACM DL / IEEE Xplore record; typos here are forever.
• Author name forms and ORCIDs consistent with each author's prior record, or the bibliometric graph splits.
• Index terms/keywords chosen for the mechanism community's search habits (structure names, not application buzzwords).
• The artifact DOI and the paper DOI should cross-reference: paper's artifact statement cites the Zenodo DOI; the Zenodo record cites the paper DOI once assigned.

Output format

[Worklist] rebuttal promises: N total, N done, N dropped-with-reason
[Diff audit] camera vs accepted: additive-only confirmed / flagged changes listed
[Restored] authors / acks+grants / self-citations / permanent links: done each
[References] et-al scan clean incl. new entries: yes / no
[AE coupling] badge target · archival deposit done · appendix drafted: status
[Publisher] rights form / metadata / page allowance: done each (待核实 items named)
[Logistics] registration & presentation rules verified on live page: yes / pending

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → MICRO-Skills/skills/micro-camera-ready/SKILL.md