Submission Rules

Information For Authors

  • Papers must be submitted through the DSN 2013 submission website.
  • Authors will have the opportunity to correct, during the rebuttal period, factual inaccuracies in the reviews.
  • Authors of accepted papers will be expected to supply electronic versions of their papers and encouraged to supply source code and raw data to help others replicate and better understand their results.
  • At least one author of every accepted paper is expected to register (as a regular registration) for the conference and present the work.

Important Dates

Deadline to register abstracts November 28, 2012, 11:59 PM GMT
Submission deadline (no extensions) December 5, 2012, 11:59 PM GMT
Rebuttal period February 12-13, 2013
Acceptance notification February 25, 2013

Please note that all submission deadlines are hard – there will be no extensions!

Paper Categories

Submissions can be made in one of the following categories (authors are required to indicate the category as part of the title):

  • Regular papers (max. 12 page submission; 12 pages in proceedings): full paper describing a research contribution to dependable computing, including experimental work focused on implementation and evaluation of existing dependability techniques.
  • Practical experience reports (max. 8 page submission; 8 pages in proceedings): a short paper describing practitioner experiences or lessons learned applying tools and techniques to real-world problems.
  • Tool descriptions/demonstrations (max. 8 page submission; 8 pages in proceedings): descriptions of the architecture, implementation and usage of substantive tools to aid the research and practice of dependability.
  • Panel proposals (2 page submission; 2 page panel summary in proceedings): descriptions of the proposed panel, including the proposed topic(s); the panel objectives; the panel organization; and the names, addresses and background of probable panelists.

The number of pages indicated above includes everything: title page, text, references, figures, appendices, etc.

Please contact your program chairs (Peter Kemper for PDS and George Candea for DCCS) in case you have any questions concerning to which category your paper should be submitted.

Paper Submissions

The program committee will perform double-blind reviewing of all submissions, with limited use of outside referees. Papers will be held in full confidence during the reviewing process, but papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms are not acceptable and will be rejected without review.

Authors must anonymize their submissions (see below for guidelines). Submissions violating the formatting and anonymization rules will be rejected without review. There will be no extensions for reformatting.

Formatting Rules

Submissions must adhere to the IEEE Computer Society camera-ready 8.5″x11″ two-column camera-ready format (using a 10-point font on 12-point single-spaced leading, with a maximum text block of 6.5″ x 9″, and with 0.25″ separation between the two columns). The templates are reproduced below for your convenience, and further details can be found here.

Each paper must be submitted as a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file. All fonts must be embedded. We also strongly recommend you print the file and review it for integrity (fonts, symbols, equations etc.) before submitting it. A defective printing of your paper can undermine its chance of success. Please take a note of the following:

  • Submissions should be anonymous.
  • The first page must include the title of the paper (postfixed by the keyword Regular/Practical/Tool/Panel to indicate the category), a maximum 150-word abstract, and a declaration that the material has been cleared through the author affiliations. The first page is not a separate page, but is a part of the paper (and thus has technical material in it). Thus, this page counts toward the total page budget for the paper. The page limit includes everything: references, title page, figures, appendices, etc.
  • Pages should be numbered.
  • The use of color is acceptable, but the paper should be easily readable if viewed or printed in grayscale. This is especially true for plots and graphs in the paper.
  • Symbols and labels used in the graphs should be readable as printed, without requiring on-screen magnification.
  • Try to limit the file size to less than 15 MB.

Authors of accepted papers will be expected to supply electronic versions of their papers and encouraged to supply source code and raw data to help others replicate and better understand their results.

Anonymizing Rules

Authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize their paper. As an author, you should not identify yourself in the paper either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references or acknowledgments). However, only non-destructive anonymization is required. For example, system names may be left un-anonymized, if the system name is important for a reviewer to be able to evaluate the work. For example, a paper on experiences with the design of .NET should not be re-written to be about “an anonymous but widely used commercial distributed systems platform.”

Additionally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

  • Remove authors’ names and affiliations from the title page
  • Remove acknowledgement of identifying names and funding sources
  • Use care in naming your files. Source file names, e.g., Joe.Smith.dvi, are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments.
  • Use care in refering to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, a good solution is to reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work.
  • If you have a concurrent submission, reference it as follows: “Closely related work describes a microkernel implementation [Anonymous 2007].” with the corresponding citation: “[Anonymous 2007] Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.”
  • If you cite anonymous work, you must also send the deanonymized reference(s) to the PC chair in a separate email.

Submissions that do not conform to the above submission deadline, anonymization and formatting guidelines (e.g., are too long, use fonts or line spacing smaller than what is indicated above) or are unoriginal, previously published, or under submission to multiple venues, will be disregarded.

Review Process and Author Response

After the papers have been reviewed, but prior to the Program Committee meeting, the reviews will be made available to the authors to provide a forum for responding to any factual errors in the reviews. Please note that this is NOT a forum to add any additional information on the paper, to submit an updated or revised paper, or to list changes the authors promise to include in the final version. Author responses will be made available to all PC members before the paper is discussed for selection in the PC meeting. The submissions website will contain full author-response guidelines.

Submission Website

Links to the DSN-DCCS and DSN-PDS submission websites are posted here.