Author / Submission / Reviewer Instructions

Deadline

The submission deadline is Fri May 20, 2016 09:00 AM pacific daylight time. 

You may upload an early version of your paper well before the deadline. Replacing an earlier version is allowed and does not take long, so upload early and often. In particular, please upload supplementary material early to avoid server congestion near the deadline. 

Online submission system CMT 

All NIPS submissions have to be made via the electronic submissions system. The submission server opens about two weeks before the submission deadline. 

If you are a reviewer as well as an author, please use the same email address to login to the CMT system. If your paper is registered by your co-author, tell them which of your email addresses to use (the same as the one you are using as a reviewer).

CMT FAQ: you can access FAQ information inside the CMT site by typing FAQ into the query box near the top of the page in the author console and then clicking on the FAQs link.

Formatting instructions

Your submission must follow the new latex style file.  Note that the LaTeX style file has changed compared to last years, please download the latest version from the NIPS webpage. All submissions must be in PDF format. The maximum file size for submissions is 30MB. Papers are limited to eight pages, including figures and tables. One additional ninth page containing only the cited references is allowed. Submissions  that do not follow these page limits (in particular by exceeding the page limit or increasing page sizes) will be rejected immediately. You are strongly encouraged to test your paper using the NIPS paper checker (well in advance of the deadline due to server limitations). 

Double blind submission

Reviewing will be double-blind: the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. It will be up to the authors to ensure the proper anonymization of their paper.  For effective anonymization please follow these guidelines: 

Do not include any author name or affiliation in the title. Do not include any acknowledgments.

Refer to your own published work in the third person: use "In the previous work of Jones et al.", not "In our previous work". If you cite own papers that are not widely available (e.g., a paper currently under review), use anonymous author names in the citation, for example an author of the form "A. Anonymous".

Submitting supplementary material

Authors can submit supplementary material not exceeding 30MB, including, e.g., long proofs, image, audio, video, details of experimental results (as a PDF), or even source code. The reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the paper solely on the basis of the submitted paper. To anonymize the supplementary material, remove author names and refer to previous work in the third person. The supplementary material has to be uploaded as an  archive (.zip or .tar.gz or .tgz). Please use meaningful file names and upload supplementary material as a zip archive even if it contains only a single PDF file. 

Toronto Paper Matching System

In order to help assigning reviewers to papers, NIPS uses the Toronto Paper Matching System that computes similarity scores between submitted papers and reviewer's publications. During the submission process, authors will be asked whether they agree that NIPS uses this service for their submission. Authors are not forced to agree. However, disagreeing might result in a poor match between your submission and the reviewers.

Reviewing by authors

To better distribute the reviewing load in the community and to make the reviewing process more transparent, we request that for each submission at least one of the authors volunteers as a reviewer. It is not mandatory, but we strongly encourage authors to take on that responsibility. The authors can choose during the online submission process who among them is going to volunteer.  The volunteer reviewers will get a reviewer invitation email the day after the conference deadline. They then have to accept the reviewer invitation within one day, so we can get the actual review process started.

Policy on dual submission

Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences or journals are not appropriate for NIPS and violate our dual submission policy. It is acceptable to submit to NIPS 2016 work that has been made available as a technical report (or similar, e.g. in arXiv) without citing it.

Policy on near-duplicate submissions

Multiple submissions with an excessive amount of overlap in their text or technical content are not acceptable. The Program Chairs reserve the right to immediately reject all submissions which they deem to be excessively similar and by the same authors.

Paper publication

A near-final version of each accepted paper will be due in advance of the meeting to be included in the electronic conference proceedings. We will publish online the anonymous reviews of all accepted papers. Authors will have the option to include minor revisions and additional references after the conference.

 

NIPS 2016 Program Co-chairs