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

We are looking for papers that address issues in the innovative use of the Internet.

Good papers will teach readers something that they can use when designing or using their systems, or causes them to think about a computing issue in new ways, or just plain helps "get the questions right."

CONFERENCE DATES:

The USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems will be held in Boulder, Colorado, October 11-14, 1999. The Workshop will begin with one day of tutorials, followed by 2.5 days of technical sessions. The Workshop will accept extended abstracts, which will be refereed and selected for publication as full papers in the Proceedings.

Dates for refereed paper submissions

• Official submissions deadline: March 25, 1999 NEW DATE!
• Hard submissions deadline after automatic extension -- no further extensions will be granted: April 1, 1999 NEW DATE!
• Notification to authors: May 14, 1999 NEW DATE!
• Shepherded papers due for editorial review: July 23, 1999
• Camera-ready final papers due: August 31, 1999

THE CALL FOR PAPERS:

For your convenience, here is a summary of the important information in the Call For Papers as it pertains to refereed papers:

• Authors must submit an extended abstract of their paper, (about 5-7 pages long or about 2500-3500 words, not counting references and figures) to the program chair.
  • Please submit one copy electronically using the form provided All submissions will be acknowledged.

  • The alternate method of submission is postal mail; you may mail 15 copies of your submission to:

    Fred Douglis
    Room B137
    AT&T Labs-Research
    180 Park Avenue
    Florham, NJ 07932-0971
    phone: +1.973.360.8775
    

• 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.

WHAT KINDS OF PAPERS DOES USENIX PUBLISH?

The most important thought to keep in mind when deciding whether to submit a paper is "what will the audience or readers learn from my paper?" We don't expect every paper to report on a major breakthrough, but we do look for something new, potentially useful, and not entirely obvious. Think about how different your work is from previously published papers; it may be good work but if there is nothing new to learn, it isn't worth reading (or writing) a paper about it. Think about how other people might find your work useful; can they apply what you are teaching them to their own systems? And, does your work really improve upon the previous state of the art? Or does it show how other people have been confused? "Negative results" that contradict the conventional wisdom are often more important than positive results.

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 the USENIX newsletter ;login:. 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?

An "extended abstract" might better be thought of as a "condensed paper." Outlines, copies of presentation slides, or 1-page abstracts are very unlikely to be accepted for the refereed Proceedings.

When you write an extended abstract, you are explicitly leaving things out of the paper. Each time you do that, ask yourself, "Will it make it hard for the program committee to judge my paper?" There are no easy rules to follow here: something that might be vital in judging the value of one paper would be irrelevant detail in another case. It's best to leave out things that take a lot of explanation but are not central to the main point of the paper. You might also leave out descriptions of variations on, or extensions to, the main concepts. Don't leave out references to related work, but you can probably reduce this part to an explanation pitched to the program committee, rather than an "introduction to the field" written for the benefit of a non-expert reader. Include graphs, figures, and tables that are central to understanding the paper!

Finally, if a sample abstract would help, you can get a postscript copy of the abstract and postscript copy of the 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.

HOW SHOULD I GET MY MANUSCRIPT TO YOU?

Details on how to submit proposals are found on the Call for Papers. Details on how to submit accepted manuscripts will be posted on this web site.

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.

You can retrieve an additional copy by sending email to info@usenix.org, including the line: send advice papers in the body of your email.

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 douglis@usenix.org

Good Luck!