Please read these guidelines carefully. We have written them to help you give your submission its best possible chance to be accepted. (As you know, the Program Committee cannot accept every paper submitted to the conference.)

Generally speaking, we are looking for papers that report on answers to interesting and/or important research questions in the area of operating systems. Retrospective papers are welcomed as are papers that report negative results, but convey important information.

The key element of a good paper is that it teaches the readers something that they can use when designing or using their systems, or causes them to think about a computing systems in new ways.

CONFERENCE DATES:

The Third OSDI Symposium will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, Feb 23-25, 1999. Dates for paper submissions:

• Submissions due: July 28, 1998
• Notification to authors: October 13, 1998
• Final papers due for editorial review: December 1, 1998
• Camera-ready papers due: January 6, 1999

THE CALL FOR PAPERS:

• Authors should submit electronic mail encapsulating a document suitable for printing. Fifteen paper copies should also be sent to the address below.
• Authors must submit full papers to the program chair. Papers may be no more than 14 single-spaced 8.5"x11" pages including tables, figures and references. Papers longer than 14 pages will be discarded without review.

  All submissions will be acknowledged.

  Email to osdi99papers@usenix.org.

  15 Paper copies via surface mail to:
  Margo Seltzer
  Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences
  Harvard University
  28 Oxford Street
  Cambridge, MA 02138
  Phone: 617-496-5663
  

• The authors must also submit via Email to osdi99papers@usenix.org the following information:
  1. The title of the manuscript and the names of the authors.
  2. The name of one author who will serve as a contact, their email address, day and evening phone numbers, postal mail address, and a fax number, if available.
  3. An indication of which, if any, of the authors are full-time students.
  4. A short abstract of the paper (100-200 words) (this can be the same as the paper's abstract).

HOW SHOULD I GET MY MANUSCRIPT TO YOU?

The Program Committee wishes to receive submissions via electronic mail, but there are occasionally problems in printing them.

Submissions via email can be made in several formats. The simplest to read and distribute is Postscript, as long as it uses standard fonts or includes everything needed, and has not been generated in a non-portable environment. (Some PostScript generators are quite buggy and we may not be able to print their output. For example, lots of software generates PostScript that can only be printed on Apple Laserwriters.) If you send PostScript, remember the following:

• Use only the most basic of fonts (TimesRoman, Helvetica, Courier), or include nonstandard fonts. Other fonts are often not available with every printer or previewer.

• PostScript that requires some special prolog to be loaded into the printer won't work for us. Don't send it.

• If you used a PC or Macintosh-based word processor to generate your PostScript, print it on a more generic PostScript printer before sending it, to make absolutely sure that the PostScript is portable.

Flat text files are always easy to print, but if you have any figures or graphics this probably won't work. If you do use flat text, please remember to format it neatly and keep lines under 80 columns in width.

We really don't want to have to format your input ourselves. If you can't generate Postscript or PDF, contact the chair to discuss alternatives, such as providing LaTeX input. NOTE: no extensions will be granted in cases of non-standard formats -- if you need us to do something special, we absolutely need everything from you by the July 28 deadline.

By the way, if you are using troff or LaTeX, try to use either the troff template or LaTeX template available here.

DO NOT send files meant for other word-processing packages (Word, WordPerfect, MacWrite, etc.). We do not have the resources to deal with them.

Since electronic mail systems have been known to mangle mail, it is always a good idea to wrap up your submission either by using MIME encapsulation (quoted-printable or base64, as appropriate) or by using shar(1) or tar(1). Note, if you use tar, or, if your email contains any non-printing characters, use uuencode(1) to convert your email to pure ASCII characters.

Overseas authors should make sure that their abstract prints properly on US-style 8.5x11 inch paper. Please make sure that you leave enough room for top and bottom margins.

MORE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE:

Lots of papers and books have been written about how to write a good paper. We strongly suggest that you read a paper called "An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions; or, How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper." This was written by Roy Levin and David D. Redell, the program committee co-chairs for SOSP-9, and first appeared in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July, 1983), pages 35-40.

Another helpful paper is:

"The Science of Scientific Writing", George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan, American Scientist, Vol. 78, No. 6 (Nov-Dec, 1990), pp. 550-558.

This article describes not how to write an entire paper, but how to write sentences and paragraphs that readers can understand. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions we cannot make this available online or send you photocopies, but almost any library should have copies of this magazine.

Finally, if you have any other questions, feel free to send mail to the Program Chairs at osdi-chairs@usenix.org.

Good Luck,
The Program Committee