ISCA 2025

Paper Evaluation Objectives

The committee will make every effort to judge each submitted paper on its own merits. There will be no target acceptance rate. We expect to accept a wide range of papers with appropriate expectations for evaluation – while papers that build on significant past work with strong evaluations are valuable, papers that open new areas with less rigorous evaluation are equally welcome and especially encouraged. We also acknowledge the wide range of evaluation methodologies in ISCA including modeling, simulation, prototyping, experimental implementation, real product evaluation, etc.

Field	Value
Page Limit	11 pages, not including references
File Format	PDF
Paper Size	US Letter: 8.5in x 11in
References	no page limit, list all authors' names

Content

Reviewing will be double blind: please do not include any author names on any submitted documents except in the space provided on the submission form. You must also ensure that the metadata included in the PDF does not give away the authors. If you are improving upon your prior work, refer to your prior work in the third person and include a full citation for the work in the bibliography. For example, if you are building on your own prior work in the papers, you would say something like: “While the authors of [x][y] did X, Y, and Z, this paper additionally does W, and is therefore much better.” Do NOT omit or anonymize references for blind review. There is one exception to this for your own prior work that appeared in IEEE CAL, arXiv, workshops without archived proceedings, etc., as discussed later in this document.

Figures and Tables

Ensure that the figures and tables are legible. Please also ensure that you refer to your figures in the main text. Many reviewers print the papers in gray-scale. Therefore, if you use colors for your figures, ensure that the different colors are highly distinguishable in grayscale.

References

There is no length limit for references. Each reference must explicitly list all authors of the paper. Papers not meeting this requirement will be rejected. Authors of NSF proposals should be familiar with this requirement. Knowing all authors of related work will help find the best reviewers. Since there is no length limit for the number of pages used for references, there is no need to save space here.

Paper Submission Instructions

Guidelines for Determining Authorship

ACM guidelines dictate that authorship should be based on a substantial intellectual contribution. It is assumed that all authors have had a significant role in the creation of an article that bears their names. In particular, the authorship credit must be reserved only for individuals who have met each of the following conditions:

1. Made a significant intellectual contribution to the theoretical development, system or experimental design, prototype development, and/or the analysis and interpretation of data associated with the work contained in the article;
2. Contributed to drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for intellectual content; and
3. Approved the final version of the article as accepted for publication, including references.

A detailed description of the ACM authorship guidelines and responsibilities is available here. Per these guidelines, it is not acceptable to award honorary authorship or gift authorship. Please keep these guidelines in mind while determining the author list of your paper.

Declaring Authors

Declare all the authors of the paper upfront. Addition/removal of authors once the paper is accepted will have to be approved by the program chairs, since it potentially undermines the goal of eliminating conflicts for reviewer assignment.

Areas and Topics

Authors should indicate these areas on the submission form as well as specific topics covered by the paper for optimal reviewer match. If you are unsure whether your paper falls within the scope of ISCA, please check with the program chairs – ISCA is a broad, multidisciplinary conference and encourages new topics.

Declaring Conflicts of Interest

Authors must register all their conflicts on the paper submission site. Conflicts are needed to ensure appropriate assignment of reviewers. If a paper is found to have an undeclared conflict that causes a problem OR if a paper is found to declare false conflicts in order to abuse or “game” the review system, the paper may be rejected.

Please declare a conflict of interest with the following people for any author of your paper. A conflict occurs in the following cases:

1. Between advisors and advisees, forever.
2. Between family members, forever (if they might be potential reviewers).
3. Between people who have collaborated in the last FIVE years. This collaboration can consist of a joint research or development project, a joint paper, or when there is direct funding from the potential reviewer (as opposed to company funding) to an author of the paper. Co-participation in professional activities, such as tutorials or studies, is not cause for conflict. When in doubt, the author should check with the program chairs.
4. Between people from the same institution or who were in the same institution in the last FIVE years.
5. Between people whose relationship prevents the reviewer from being objective in his/her assessment.

"Service" collaborations such as co-authoring a report for a professional organization, serving on a program committee, or co-presenting tutorials, do not themselves create a conflict of interest. Co-authoring a paper that is a compendium of various projects with no true collaboration among the projects does not constitute a conflict among the authors of the different projects.

On the other hand, there may be others not covered by the above with whom you believe a COI exists, for example, an ongoing collaboration which has not yet resulted in the creation of a paper or proposal. Please report such COIs; however, you may be asked to justify them. Please be reasonable. For example, you cannot declare a COI with a reviewer just because that reviewer works on topics similar to or related to those in your paper. The program chairs may contact co-authors to explain a COI whose origin is unclear.

Most reviews will be solicited among the members of the program committee and the external review committee but other members from the community may also write reviews. Please declare all your conflicts (not just restricted to the PC and ERC) on the submission form. When in doubt, contact the program chairs.

Concurrent Submissions and Workshops

By submitting a manuscript to ISCA 2025, the authors guarantee that the manuscript has not been previously published or accepted for publication in a substantially similar form in any conference, journal, or the archived proceedings of a workshop (e.g., in the ACM/IEEE digital library) – see exceptions below. The authors also guarantee that no paper that contains significant overlap with the contributions of the submitted paper will be under review for any other conference or journal or an archived proceedings of a workshop during the ISCA 2025 review period. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection.

The only exceptions to the above rules are for the authors' own papers in (1) workshops without archived proceedings such as in the ACM/IEEE digital library (or where the authors chose not to have their paper appear in the archived proceedings), or (2) venues such as IEEE CAL or arXiv where there is an explicit policy that such publication does not preclude longer conference submissions. In all such cases, the submitted manuscript may ignore the above work to preserve author anonymity. This information must, however, be provided on the submission form – the PC chair will make this information available to reviewers if it becomes necessary to ensure a fair review. If you have already put your manuscript on arXiv, in the interest of double blind review, modify the title for the version you submit to ISCA. As always, if you are in doubt, it is best to contact the program chairs.

Finally, the ACM Plagiarism Policy and the IEEE Plagiarism Policy cover a range of ethical issues concerning the misrepresentation of other works or one's own work.

Additional Rules for Authors

Authors MUST:

1. Abide by the ACM code of ethics and the IEEE code of ethics.
2. Abide by the criterion for authorship laid out by ACM and IEEE. Authorship is reserved only for individuals making substantial intellectual contributions. Gifting authorship is strictly prohibited.
3. List all legitimate CoIs and only legitimate CoIs. Asking someone for feedback on a draft of the paper or discussing the idea with someone does not create a CoI.
4. Abide by the Concurrent Submission Policy (see above).
5. Anonymize their submission for double-anonymous reviewing. This means not having any author names on any submitted documents, including in PDF metadata, except in the space provided on the submission form. If referring to one’s work, authors must do so in the third person and include a full citation for the work in the bibliography. References must not be omitted or anonymized.
6. Fully anonymize any link to artifacts produced by them concerning the submission (e.g., GitHub repository). Remove any links to artifacts that cannot be fully anonymized.
7. Report any allegations of submission or reviewing misconduct to the Program Chairs, who has the responsibility to follow up on them. The only exception is if the complaint is about the Program Chairs; in this case, the Steering Committee should be contacted.
8. Make no assumptions as to whether a particular paper represents a “community paper” and whether its co-authors are or are not conflicted with each other. The decision rests entirely with the Program Chairs, who must be either petitioned explicitly or will be presented with the choice through a conflict-tracking tool. A community paper is defined as a paper presenting a survey, compendium, tool, or artifact to which multiple authors contribute without engaging in an actual project collaboration (e.g., a paper describing an open-source software framework to which the authors have contributed different modules).

Authors MUST NOT:

1. Contact reviewers or PC members about any submission, including their own. This includes asking about the outcome of a submission following the online discussion period and the PC meeting. Similarly, authors are not allowed to ask another party to contact the reviewers on their behalf.
2. List potential reviewers as conflicts of interest based solely on fear or suspicion of a negative bias. If an author believes there exists clear and articulable evidence of a negative bias against their work from a potential reviewer, the author may contact the Program Chairs and present such evidence in support of their case. The Program Chairs must acknowledge receipt and may solicit additional information. The Program Chairs are not required to notify the authors of any decision taken.
3. Attempt to sway a reviewer to review any paper positively or negatively.
4. Contact reviewers or PC members requesting any type of information about the reviewing process, either in general or specifically about submitted papers.
5. Disclose the content of reviews for one’s paper publicly before the results are announced. Any grievances should be directed to the Program Chairs.

Acknowledgments

This document is derived from previous conferences, in particular ISCA 2024.