So, you've had a paper accepted to CHI? Congratulations! Thanks to your achievement, you now have more work to do.
While completing a camera-ready draft is substantially less effort than your initial submission, I always find it takes more effort than you might think. This guide helps you plan for this work. While I focus on the process for CHI (or other ACM SIGCHI venues, like UIST), this process should apply to other venues and will be updated for IEEE conferences (e.g., Haptics Symposium and World Haptics) in the future.
"Conditionally Accepted" means Accepted
CHI has three outcomes possible: Conditional Accept, Shepherd, and Reject. If your paper is conditionally accepted, then it is accepted - you can celebrate! People often announce their papers after the notice of decision, although I tend to prefer waiting until the camera ready is submitted.
The reason the decision is a "Conditional Accept" is because the PC reserves the right to hold authors to their promises in the rebuttal, and do a final quality check. Your 1AC will review your paper, especially checking revisions, before finalizing the acceptance. However, the truth is that rejects at this stage are very rare.
Shepherded papers ...
Your job: revise and fulfil rebuttal promises
Another truth is that ACs are overworked and will probably spend only a short time reviewing your paper. This means that it is the responsibility of the authors to make the promised changes, as any mistakes discovered in the future will reflect on the authors, not the ACs. We're all in this together, so make your AC's job easier - they'll appreciate it, and you'll appreciate it when you are in their role.
To revise the paper, take the following steps:
- De-anonymize everything by adding the authors
- Make all promised changes in the rebuttal. Start this early, so that the authors can iterate and revise the paper. Track your changes in a document so you can make sure you've handled it all
- Attempt to make changes you said you'd try to do in the rebuttal. Again, do this early. If you didn't promise a change, then that change isn't strictly required - but the paper will be better if you can fit it in
- Add acknowledgements. You may want to look at the NSERC guidelines if you received NSERC funding (very likely the case), but check with your supervisor(s) for grant and institutional funding, and make sure to also acknowledge any scholarships
- Do a full, detailed, polish pass on the paper
- Check the paper for accessibility. Use the SIGACCESS instructions for Word Documents and for PDFs
Update videos
If you submitted a video, this is your opportunity to improve things. Follow the same steps with the paper: de-anonymize, remove the "submission number", and update information.
Making a video accessible: Add subtitles for any text to the video to make sure you can receive the content with the audio turned off. Add a voice over or description so that you can receive the content without being able to see the video. If you are able, try to watch the video both ways to check for this.
Making a 30s preview: The 30s preview video is critical as it will be posted directly with the ACM DL. Cut the video to ~30s to give a very short overview of 1) the authors and title, 2) what the paper is about, and 3) what the main outcome is. This will help people understand the paper and share it to others, even without looking at the PDF.
Choosing the right copyright
In the Haptic Computing Lab, we typically choose the second option: Retain Copyright but exclusively license the materials. However, the practical result is pretty similar on all fronts: we can post PDFs of our published work to fulfil open access requirements. However, check with your supervisor(s) to see if the lab can support the cost for total open access publishing.
See Casey Fiesler's description of the ACM Copyright Licenses for more information.