PVLDB Volume 16 — Submission Guidelines
New for Volume 16
Updated guidelines for submitting supplementary material for Transparency and Reproducibility
General Information
Papers are to be formatted according to the conference's camera-ready format, as embodied in the document templates. There are four categories of papers in the research track, as described under Guidelines for Contributions:
Scalable Data Science Papers (up to 8 pages excluding references)
Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark Papers (up to 12 pages excluding references)
Vision Papers (up to 6 pages excluding references)
All the content, including any appendices but excluding the references, must fit on the given number of pages. See Formatting Guidelines for details. Only the references can extend a paper beyond the page limit, and there is no limit on the number of pages used for them. The conference management tool for the submission of abstracts, papers, and supplemental material is accessible at: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/PVLDBv16_2023.
For Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark Papers, Vision Papers, and Scalable Data Science Papers, you need to append the category tag as a suffix to the title of the paper such as “Data Management in the Year 3000 [Vision]”; “Comparing Spatial Database Systems [Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark]”; “Data Cleaning in the Wild [Scalable Data Science]”. This must be done both in the paper file and in the CMT submission title. The suffix will not be part of the camera-ready copy if the paper is accepted.
VLDB is a single-blind conference. Therefore, authors MUST include their names and affiliations on the first page of the manuscript.
Submission Process and Deadlines
PVLDB uses a novel review process designed to promote timely submission, review, and revision of scholarly results. The process will be carried out over 12 submission deadlines during the year preceding the VLDB conference. The basic cycle will operate as follows:
The first monthly submission deadline for PVLDB Volume 16 is April 1, 2022. The final deadline is March 1, 2023.
For each submission cycle, the CMT site will be open for submissions from the 20th of the previous month. For example, the submissions for the February 2023 track will be accepted from January 20, 2023 onwards.
Notifications for Initial Submissions: Initial reviews will usually be available on the 15th of the next month following the submission deadline, and they will include notice of acceptance, rejection, minor revision, or revision requests.
For minor revision and revision requests, the reviews will be specific with regard to the expectations from the revision, and only one revision is permitted.
Revision Submission Deadlines: Authors may take up to three months to produce a revised submission, and submit it via CMT to the appropriate revision track by the 15th of each month for the next three months after the notification date.
The last three revision deadlines will be May 15, June 1, and July 15, 2023. Note that the June deadline is on the 1st instead of the 15th, and it is the final revision deadline for consideration to present at VLDB 2023; submissions received after this deadline will roll over to VLDB 2024.
Notifications for Revisions: The final reviews of revised papers will usually be available by the 15th of the month following the revision submission. Minor revisions will be reviewed only by the meta-reviewer.
Camera-Ready Copies: Proceeding chairs will contact the authors by the 5th of the month following the notification with instructions for camera-ready copies.
While all attempts will be made to adhere to the schedule mentioned above, authors are advised that reviewing turnaround times may be subject to fluctuations.
Conflict and Authorship
To minimize biases in the evaluation process, we use CMT's conflict management system, through which authors should flag conflicts with members of the Editorial Board. X and Y have a conflict of interest if any of the following applies:
X has been a co-author of a paper with Y in the last 3 years, or of 4 (or more) papers in the last 10 years.
X has been a collaborator within the past two years, as evidenced in a joint publication (subsumed by the stricter rule on co-authorship above), joint research project, or co-organizing events (e.g., co-chairs of conferences), or are collaborating now (including co-authorship on papers not resulted in final publication yet).
X is the PhD thesis advisor of Y or vice versa, irrespective of how long ago this was.
X is a relative or close personal friend of Y.
It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify and declare all COIs with members of the Editorial Board (reviewers, Associate Editors, and Editors-in-Chief) prior to the submission deadline. Submissions with undeclared conflicts or spurious conflicts will be desk-rejected.
With stricter COI rules than before, we understand that finding COIs with a large review board requires considerable extra effort. To facilitate this process, we are providing the following searchable spreadsheet of COIs (based on DBLP data) with the review board:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jgFr8_zPjOT9Z8g7zTdUo1KUgimT7gH2RDRkuzVeWyw/edit?usp=sharing
Authors can use this spreadsheet as a resource when declaring COIs during submission. It is not meant to be authoritative or cover all types of COIs, so authors must still do their due diligence to identify and declare COIs missing from the list. This spreadsheet may be updated during the year as well, so please be sure to check prior to every submission.
After a paper is accepted, the set of authors cannot be changed.
Transparency and Reproducibility
Authors are expected to submit supplemental material, such as code, data and other implementation artifacts used to produce the results reported in the paper. Reviewers and meta reviewers will have access to the supplemental material and consider it in their evaluation of the submission. As part of the meta reviews for accepted submissions, Associate Editors will use a standard rubric to assess the availability of supplemental materials, ensuring their openness and permanence, as well as the readability of instructions for the reuse of the artifacts by other members of the community.
Authors should place the supplemental material in a publicly accessible archival repository and provide a URL during the submission process. Please use standard openly accessible file sharing services with well-understood privacy policies and permanence guarantees, e.g., a public GitHub repository, or open commercial repositories such as Figshare or Dryad. Personal web pages are not acceptable for this purpose. URLs that raise doubt about security and anonymity of access will cause delays in paper evaluation and acceptance.
If authors are not submitting the supplemental material, they must explain why. We understand that there may be compelling reasons; for example, data/code may contain copyrighted contents, artifacts may be a commercialization candidate, or availability may simply not be applicable (e.g., for a vision paper containing no experiments). So long as a reasonable explanation is provided, the paper will be excused from the availability requirement and will not be penalized for the absence of supplemental material. On the other hand, “we ran out of time” and “too much work to prepare our code” would not be acceptable excuses — authors will be asked to address the availability issue before the paper can be accepted.
All accepted papers that provide supplementary materials meeting the availability requirement will be awarded an official ACM badge: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-and-badging-current
Additionally, we strongly encourage the authors to participate in the PVLDB Reproducibility Evaluation (https://vldb.org/pvldb/reproducibility) and compete for the Best Reproducible Paper Award.
Note that Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark (EA&B) papers (see Guidelines for Contributions: for details) are required to 1) make available all experimental data and related software (there are no excuses); and 2) submit their experiments for reproducibility evaluation by the PVLDB Reproducibility Committee. EA&B papers whose authors are not committed to making their results reproducible will be rejected.
Resubmission, Originality and Duplicate Submissions
Authors are not allowed to resubmit work that was previously rejected from the research tracks of PVLDB, within one year of the original submission date. A paper withdrawn by the authors after a revision decision will be considered as rejected and the 12-month resubmission ban applies to such papers as well. A submission rejected from the research track may not be resubmitted within 12 months to the PVLDB research track.
Note that the resubmission embargo does not apply, in either direction, to papers submitted to the VLDB conference that do not go through the PVLDB review process, including tracks such as industrial papers and demos.
A paper submitted to PVLDB must present original work not described in any prior publication that is more than 4 double-column VLDB-style pages in length. A prior publication is a paper that has been accepted for presentation at a refereed conference or workshop with proceedings; or an article that has been accepted for publication in a refereed journal. If a PVLDB submission has overlap with a prior publication, the submission must cite the prior publication, along with all other relevant published work, even if this prior publication is at or below the 4-page length threshold.
A paper submitted to PVLDB cannot be under review for any other publishing forum or presentation venue, including conferences, workshops, and journals, during the time it is being considered for PVLDB. After you submit a paper to PVLDB, you must await the response from PVLDB and only resubmit elsewhere if your paper is rejected, or withdrawn at your request, from PVLDB.
More details on publication policies can be found at https://vldb.org/pvldb/publication-policies/.
