The VLDB-15 conference is no longer accepting new submissions of research papers.
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Papers are to be formatted according to the conference’s camera-ready format, as embodied in the document templates. The maximum paper length is 12 pages for full papers and 4 pages for mini-papers. The conference management tool for the submission of abstracts and papers is accessible at: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/VLDB2015

Submission Process

PVLDB uses a monthly 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 conference. The basic cycle will operate as follows:

• A Rolling Deadline occurs on the last day of each month, 23:59 Pacific Time (Daylight Savings observed according to US calendar). The last-day-of-month at 23:59 PT deadline is strict and no extensions will be granted.
• Initial Reviews are intended to be done in a little over a month in most (but not all) cases, and they will include notice of acceptance, rejection, or revision requests. Authors are not guaranteed a review in this time period: additional time may be required due to disagreement among reviewers, missing/late reviews, an editorial decision to seek additional reviews, and so forth.
• Revision Requests are to be specific, and moderate in scope. Authors may take up to three months to produce a revised submission.
• Second Reviews of revised papers will directly address the authors’ handling of the requested revisions.

Authors are advised that reviewing turnaround time is subject to fluctuations in submission rates, which are expected to be higher toward the end of the annual cycle.

Notes on revision requests

The revision process is intended to be a constructive partnership between reviewers and authors. To this end, reviewers bear a responsibility to request revisions only in constructive scenarios with specific requests.  In turn, authors bear the responsibility of attempting to meet those requests within the stated timeframe, or of withdrawing the paper from submission. When necessary, at the discretion of the Editors-in-Chief, mechanisms may be employed for reviewers and authors to engage in further dialog during the revision period.  Common revision requests can include “justify a crucial assumption”, “present a real(istic) scenario where the defined problem occurs”, “clean up notation”, “tighten presentation”, “compare against some relevant previous system”, “show experimental results with better data, such as at larger scale or from a real system”.  Revisions will not be requested to address lack of technical depth or novelty or where the revised paper will address a substantially different problem from the original.

For a paper to be presented at the VLDB 2015 conference, it must be accepted by June 1, 2015. Papers accepted after this date will be rolled over for presentation at VLDB 2016. Given variability in the time required for reviewing and for potential revision, a submission cutoff date cannot be established for the VLDB 2015 conference.  However, all papers originally submitted by Feb. 28, 2015, will be reviewed by the PVLDB Vol. 8 team, even if the revision and final decision is extended well into 2015.

In previous years, special rules were established for papers submitted in the last couple of months of the volume.  It is our intention not to have any such special rules at the end of this submission volume (in February and March of 2015).  The later in the volume year you submit a paper, the greater the chance that it will not be accepted by the June 1 cutoff date.

Resubmission, Originality, and Duplicate Submissions

Authors are not allowed to resubmit work that was previously rejected from any same-length track 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.  PVLDB currently has three full paper tracks: research, innovative systems, and experiments and analysis.  Papers in these three tracks are all the same (full) length.  A submission rejected from any of these three tracks may not be resubmitted within 12 months to the same track or a different track within these three.  PVLDB also has a mini paper track called “experiments and analysis-mini”.  A submission rejected from this track may not be resubmitted within 12 months to the track.  Note that the resubmission embargo does not apply to resubmissions across tracks of different length.  For example, a rejected experiments and analysis-mini paper can be developed into a full research paper and submitted without a 12-month limitation.  The embargo also 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.  Note that the Experiments and Analysis mini papers have their length limits set to 4 pages precisely so as not to preclude future publication of a full paper.

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 VLDB 2015, you must await the response from PVLDB and only resubmit elsewhere if your paper is rejected, or withdrawn at your request, from PVLDB.

Extended Journal Articles

Because PVLDB accepts conference-length papers, authors are encouraged to develop longer versions of PVLDB papers and submit them to traditional journal venues. The Editors-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal (VLDBJ) have formally agreed that extended versions of papers published in PVLDB may be considered for publication in VLDBJ. Other journals have informally encouraged this as well. More information on this topic is available in the PVLDB FAQ at: http://vldb.org/pvldb/pvldb-faq.html.

Conflict

To minimize biases in our decision-making, we use CMT’s conflict management system. Your submission will not have a reviewer or Associate Editor (AE) with whom any co-author has a conflict. Furthermore, such reviewers and AEs will not even be able to see any information regarding your paper. We encourage our reviewers and AEs to report conflicts and recuse themselves, but the primary burden lies with the authors.

Prior to the submission deadline, you must have all authors declare conflicts on CMT. (If some co-author is unavailable, the submitting author may include conflicts for the unavailable co-author into his/her own conflicts. However, this loophole should only be used as a last resort, because it can lead to downstream complications.)

You have a conflict with person X:

• If you and X have worked in the same university or company in the past two years, or will be doing so in the next months on account of an accepted job offer. Different campuses do not count as the same university for this purpose — UC Berkeley does not have a conflict with UC Santa Barbara.
• If you and X have collaborated recently, as evidenced in a joint publication or jointly organized event in the past two years, or are collaborating now. To help you find co-author conflicts, you may use the tool developed by Manohar Kaul at Aarhus University, and available at http://cs.au.dk/~mkaul/php/check.html. Please note that this tool gives you all your co-authors on the PVLDB review board: it is up to you to filter by year and to add collaborators with whom you have not jointly published. Also, it is your responsibility to validate this list against the list of members of the PVLDB editorial board, in case the tool overlooked any conflict.
• If you are the PhD thesis advisor of X or vice versa, irrespective of how long ago this was.
• If X is a relative or close personal friend, subjectively defined.

If you fail to declare a conflict, and it is discovered during the review process, it creates difficulties for us since new reviewers (or AEs) have to be found. For these reasons, submissions with undeclared conflicts will be rejected, unless the omission is deemed to be an innocent error. Since we are trying to push the time cycle to get you feedback within one month, we do not have the buffer time to manage such reassignments easily. For these reasons, you should expect that processing of your submission will be delayed, typically to the following month, even in cases where you can convince us that the omission was accidental.