OOPSLA PC Chair’s Welcome

Welcome to the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA). We have selected an exciting group of papers to present at the conference covering topics such as language design, program verification, concurrency, parallelism, security, mobile application development, design & analysis tools, faults and types, among others.

This year OOPSLA adopted a new selection process consisting of two phases of review. This is a hybrid journal/conference model that some other research conferences have also recently adopted, most notably CSCW, AOSD and VLDB. The ultimate goal of this process is to increase the quality of the published work by giving the authors the opportunity to improve their papers in non- trivial ways, and according to reviewers’ feedback. The first reviewing phase assessed the papers using the criteria stated in the Call for Papers. Each paper was reviewed by at least 3 committee members; submissions from members of the Program Committee were reviewed exclusively by the External Review Committee, and were given to 4 members of that committee. The first phase of reviews resulted in the selection of a subset of submissions that were either accepted as-is or deemed potentially acceptable. All other papers were rejected in that first phase. Authors of potentially accepted papers were then requested to improve specific aspects of the work and the papers. Authors were given 2 months to perform the revisions, after which a second submission occurred. The second and final review assessed how the concrete revision requests were acted upon by the authors, and whether the final paper maintained, or even improved, the level of contributions of the original submission. The second reviews were assigned to the same committee members who had reviewed the papers in the first phase.

There were 189 submissions, 51 of which were selected for the second phase. After the final review, 50 papers were accepted for publication, resulting in a 26.4% acceptance rate. Of the 189 submissions, 24 included members of the Program Committee as co-authors, and 7 of those were accepted.

The authors’ improvements to the papers during the revision period were remarkable; not only the reviewers were impressed, but the authors also seemed quite pleased with the opportunity to improve their work and address the weaknesses identified by the reviewers. As a result, I believe this is an outstanding collection of papers that many people will want to read.

It was a pleasure and an honor to serve as the program chair for OOPSLA 2013. The engagement from the research community in this conference (as, I’m sure, others) is mind boggling! Here are some numbers: the Program Committee consisted of 32 members, each taking a reviewing load of 15 papers on average; the Extended Review Committee consisted of 24 members, each taking a reviewing load of approximately 4 papers. Additionally, members of the PC and the ERC reached out to their professional network of experts, engaging 143 additional reviewers. During the selection process, 1,654 reviewing actions (reviews, online comments, etc.) were produced. All this activity happened in a short period of 4 months. These numbers are staggering, and they are a testament to how much this community values OOPSLA.

Crista Lopes
OOPSLA’13 Program Chair