Please read these guidelines carefully. They were written to help you give your formal submission its best possible chance to be accepted.

The program committee seeks papers describing application and system software that extends the reach of the use of smart cards in systems for authentication, electronic commerce, and secure personal data storage. Submissions across a broad range of smart card development phases are encouraged, from exploratory research and proof-of-concept studies to practical application and deployment of smart card technology.

CONFERENCE DATES:

Dates for refereed paper submissions:

THE CALL FOR PAPERS:

• Authors must submit an extended abstract of their paper, about 5 pages long, representing the paper in short form, as it will appear in the final paper. Full papers, limited to 12 single-spaced pages, will also be accepted.
  • Please submit one copy electronically to smartcard99submit@usenix.org

  • The alternate method of submission will be postal mail; you may mail 15 copies of your submission to:
    Smartcard '99 Submissions
    USENIX Association
    2560 Ninth St, Ste 215
    Berkeley, CA 94710
    510-528-8649

• The authors must also submit a cover letter or email containing the following information:
  1. The title and authors of the manuscript.
  2. The name of one author who will serve as a contact and his/her:
     - electronic mail address,
     - daytime and evening telephone numbers,
     - surface 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 (about 100-200 words).
• The final paper should be 8-12 typeset USENIX conference pages in length.

HOW SHOULD I GET MY MANUSCRIPT TO YOU?

Submissions via email can be made in several formats, such as PDF, Word, or Postscript. 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). 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.

WHAT KINDS OF PAPERS DOES USENIX PUBLISH:

Trying to decide if something is non-obvious isn't easy (patent lawyers make lots of money arguing about this), and sometimes the best ideas seem obvious in hindsight; but if lots of people have done the same thing, and you are simply the first person to have considered writing a paper about it, perhaps it's too obvious.

Also think about whether this workshop is the right place to publish your paper. Perhaps it belongs in the USENIX annual technical conference, a more theoretical conference, or a conference with a different kind of focus. Or perhaps it doesn't belong in a conference at all; it might be more appropriate for a USENIX publication, like ";login:" or the USENIX Journal, Computing Systems. On the other hand, USENIX conferences typically cover a broad range of practical issues in open computing systems. It may be that you can take a paper that has several possible themes, and write it to concentrate on issues specifically interesting to a USENIX audience.

The program committee will also be trying to decide if papers will lead to a good 25-minute presentation. Some systems are just too complex to be presented this way (perhaps you should focus on just one aspect); other papers just don't have enough to talk about for that long. On the other hand, a few rare papers are accepted mostly because the committee expects them to produce an interesting talk, but that might not otherwise merit publication.

Again, when you are writing your paper, keep in mind "what do I intend to teach the reader?" That means keeping the paper focused on one or a few main points. Don't try to cram too many big issues into the paper, and don't fill it up with irrelevant details. But do include enough background for the reader to understand why your problem is important, how your work relates to previous work in the field, and how it might fit into a practical system. Also, provide enough detail for the reader to put your performance measurements in context. It is vitally important to provide a good bibliography, both so that you give proper credit to previous work, and so that a reader can know where to turn to find additional background information. The program committee will not look kindly on a paper if the author doesn't appear to be familiar with the current literature.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EXTENDED ABSTRACT:

Finally, if a sample abstract would help, you can get a copy of the abstract and final paper that Matt Blaze did for the Winter 1992 USENIX conference (pp. 333-343). The abstract is probably most useful when compared with the final paper. MORE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE:

Lots of papers and books have been written about how to write a good paper. We'd like to 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.

Although SOSP and USENIX papers do differ somewhat, Levin and Redell give good advice for authors of any kind of systems paper.

The authors have graciously agreed to make this paper available online.

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.

We also recommend that you read the proceedings of some recent USENIX conferences to get an idea of what kinds of papers are published. Not every one of these papers is perfect (or even great), but most of them are better than most of the ones that got rejected.

Finally, if you have any other questions, feel free to send mail to the program chair at smartcard99chairs@usenix.org

Good Luck!