PVLDB Volume 20 — Submission Guidelines

New since PVLDB Volume 20

Yearly Submission Cap for PVLDB v20 (Effective April 2026)

To ensure high-quality reviews and encourage submitting only high-quality papers that are ready for prime time, PVLDB volume 20 introduces a new yearly submission cap of twelve papers per author in addition to the cap of two papers per month that was already introduced in PVLDB volume 19, effective from April 2026. This yearly cap is not a rolling cap across volumes but only affects the research track of PVLDB volume 20. Intentional violations of these caps will result in more severe penalties than mere rejection.

E&A Artifacts and Reproducibility (Effective April 2026)

As in prior volumes, E&A papers are required to make available all experimental data and related software as well as submit their experiments for reproducibility evaluation by the PVLDB Reproducibility Committee. For PVLDB volume 20, already the initial submission must include a link to the full reproducibility package of all experiments, data, and artifacts with meaningful instructions on how to run the experiments.

Mandatory Abstract Submission by 25th of Previous Month (Effective April 2026)

To improve the assignment of meta reviewers and reviewers to submitted papers, and as an indicator for out-of-scope papers, PVLDB volume 20 introduces a mandatory abstract submission by 25th of the previous month for a paper submission on the 1st of a month.

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 Call for Contributions:

Regular Research Papers (up to 12 pages excluding references)
Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark Papers (up to 12 pages excluding references)
Scalable Data Science Papers (up to 8 pages excluding references)
Vision Papers (up to 6 pages excluding references)

All content, including any appendices, acknowledgements, and the use of AI declaration but excluding the references, must fit on the given number of pages. See Formatting Guidelines for details. Only the reference section 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/PVLDBv20_2027/

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 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:

Submission Deadlines: A rolling deadline occurs on the 1st of each month, 5:00 PM Pacific Time (Daylight Savings observed according to the US calendar) with mandatory abstract submission by 25th of the previous month. These deadlines are strict and no extensions will be granted.
The first monthly submission deadline for PVLDB Volume 20 is April 1, 2026. The final deadline is March 1, 2027. 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 2027 cycle will be accepted from January 20, 2027 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, or revision requests. For 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 2.5 months to produce a revised submission, and submit it via CMT to the appropriate revision track by the 1st of each month for the next 3 months after the revision notification date (i.e., within 0.5 months, 1.5 months, or 2.5 months after the revision notification). The last three revision deadlines will be May 1, June 1, and July 1, 2027. Note that June 1 is the final revision deadline for consideration to present at VLDB 2027; submissions received after this deadline will roll over to VLDB 2028.
Notifications for Revisions: The final reviews of revised papers will usually be available by the 15th of the next month following the revision submission.
Camera-Ready Copies: Proceedings chairs will contact the authors by the 5th of the month following the acceptance 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.

Monthly and Yearly Submissions Caps

Submissions to the research track (independent from the paper categories) are subject to monthly and yearly submission caps:

a monthly submission cap of two papers per author
a yearly cap of twelve papers for the entirety of PVLDB volume 20.

PVLDB has experienced sharp submission surges, which created imbalances in the review process and risked lowering the quality of evaluation. To safeguard review quality, we need mechanisms that smooth submission fluctuations and prevent overload, while still maintaining substantial submission opportunities for authors.

How will the cap be enforced?

For any paper with ID = k, if one of its authors already has two other submissions with ID < k in the same month, then the paper will be desk rejected.
Revision submissions are not counted toward this limit.
Cap-based filtering is applied before other checks (e.g., conflict of interest, scope, formatting).
A paper that passes the cap filter may be subject to desk rejection for other reasons.

PVLDB Scope Policy

The PVLDB Scope Policy specifies the criteria used to determine whether a submission falls within PVLDB’s scope. Scope is assessed solely on the content of the submitted manuscript. In particular, PVLDB evaluates scope based on:

Core Data Management Focus: Whether the paper addresses data management challenges (e.g., scalability, efficiency, storage, lifecycle, queryability) and presents contributions that advance these challenges.
Connection to the Database Research Literature: Whether the paper builds upon or engages with relevant prior work published in data management venues. Submissions that do not reference or connect to the DB literature in a non-superficial manner cannot be reviewed by the PVLDB Board.
Evaluation in Data Management Contexts: Whether the experimental evaluation is grounded in motivating data management applications and demonstrates that the proposed techniques advance data management.

PVLDB recognizes that adjacent areas (including hardware systems, ML/AI, theory, security, knowledge representation, and others) can be highly relevant to data management. Scope is not determined by keywords, topic labels, or the existence of prior PVLDB papers on related subjects, it is determined by applying the above criteria to the submitted manuscript itself.

Authors submitting work outside traditional data management topics are strongly encouraged to complete the Self-Assessment of Relevance (SAR) section in the submission form. Authors should explicitly highlight: (i) the key data management challenges addressed in the paper and (ii) the principled ideas and contributions to data management. It is particularly helpful to reference specific sections of the paper where these contributions appear.

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.

Conflict Declaration on CMT: Each author is responsible for entering their own domain and individual PC conflicts on CMT. All authors of a paper (listed in the pdf) must register themselves in CMT and declare their individual domain and PC conflicts at the time of submission. 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. Conflicts of interest will also be checked using an automated CoI detection tool. Submissions with undeclared conflicts or spurious conflicts will be desk-rejected.

After a paper is accepted, the set of authors cannot be changed.

You can mark your domain and individual PC conflicts by clicking on your name (upper right-hand side on CMT) and selecting "Personal Conflicts". An author's declared conflicts will be automatically applied to all of their submissions.

X and Y have a conflict of interest (CoI) if any of the following applies:

X and Y have worked in the same university or company in the past 5 years, or will be doing so in the next 6 months on account of an accepted job offer. Different campuses within the same university system do not count as the same university for this purpose (e.g., UC Berkeley does not have a conflict with UC Santa Barbara).
X has been a collaborator within the past 5 years, as evidenced in a joint publication, 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.

Contributing to the Review Board

To ensure that all papers receive high-quality reviews, authors of submitted papers may be asked to assist in the reviewing process. More specifically, every submission must nominate at least one of its own authors who is a qualified reviewer (i.e., authors with at least two previous papers in SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, or CIDR conferences). If no qualified reviewer is available, the authors should nominate the best-qualified author for consideration by the Editors-in-Chief.

When necessary, the EiCs may draw from the pool of nominated authors to join the review board as a Light Load Reviewer, who may be requested to review (at most) 1 paper each month, up to 3 papers for each submitted paper in total. If the nominated author does not review an assigned paper, the yearly submission caps of all co-authors are decreased by one.

Transparency and Reproducibility

Authors must 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. 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 might jeopardize 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 Call for Contributions for details) are required to make available all experimental data and related software (there are no excuses); and submit their experiments for reproducibility evaluation by the PVLDB Reproducibility Committee.

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 embargo 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 for papers submitted to different tracks, e.g., Industrial and Demonstrations.

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.

Self-Declaration of Related Submissions

To ensure transparent and fair evaluation, PVLDB requires authors to self-declare all related submissions that are concurrently under review by the same authors, since such submissions can potentially affect the assessment of how novel/incremental the current submission's contributions are relative to them. While the existing PVLDB policy covers previously published work through the related-work section, the new policy extends this requirement to include all relevant papers that are not yet properly published, e.g., currently submitted to PVLDB or any other venue, going through the publication process, etc. Such works must be explicitly cited, marked as “under submission” in the list of references and report during submission to enable the Review Board to assess the manuscript’s incremental contribution under the assumption that the earlier submission will be accepted. Failure to disclose related concurrent submissions, if discovered during the review process, will be treated as a breach of policy.

More details on publication policies can be found at: https://vldb.org/pvldb/general-information/publication-policies