HOW TO SUBMIT TO THE FREENIX REFEREED TRACK

You may submit either a complete paper, or a 2-5 page extended abstract or summary of your work to date. The program committee reads these submissions to determine which papers to accept for the conference; it is important that you include enough detail that program committee members can know what you are doing. In no event should you submit a description in excess of 14 pages including all figures, tables, and bibliography.

All submissions for the USENIX 2002 FREENIX Track will be electronic, in PostScript, PDF, or plain text, via this Web form.

Authors will be notified of receipt of submission via e-mail. If you do not receive notification by Friday, November 16, 2001, please contact: freenix02chair@usenix.org.

A good paper should:

• be informative. The readers of your paper should learn something from it. It should be clear whether readers can apply your work to their own environment, and how they would go about doing so. ``Negative results'' that contradict the conventional wisdom are often more important than positive results, especially in case studies.

• demonstrate the innovation in the work being discussed. Freely-redistributable source code alone does not necessarily make a project innovative. Projects being discussed need not be major breakthroughs in their fields, but should at minimum demonstrate something new, potentially useful, and non-obvious. Papers should clearly demonstrate any improvements over the previously published work in their field.

• demonstrate the maturity of the work. The work described should be well under way. Most of the design and some of the implementation and testing should be accomplished by the summary submission date. You should have some initial results to report, including some idea of the performance of the work described (if appropriate). Final details are not needed at summary submission date, but should be presented in the final published work.

• describe a project which has freely-redistributable source code, or work related to such a project. Authors are strongly encouraged to release any source code they have prior to initial submission, even if the sources are incomplete and may not compile. If your project is not far enough along for that to be possible, it may be more appropriate for a Work-in-Progress session. Similarly, if at all possible, final papers should include references to published source code.

• be clearly written. Submissions should clearly describe the ideas, work already accomplished, and work to be completed. Authors are encouraged to use available online writing style guides if they need guidance in this area. (Good examples include: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style.html and https://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/publications/levin/SOSPhowto.html.)

While summary submissions will not be final or complete, the qualities listed above should be evident in the summary submissions. Summary submissions should clearly detail where work is still to be done or explained.

Papers previously published by USENIX, especially those published in the FREENIX Refereed Track, may be useful to help determine what is appropriate, and to improve your paper. A list of papers previously published by USENIX is available in our Library of Proceedings.

Note: the USENIX Technical Conference, like most conferences and journals, requires that papers not be submitted simultaneously to more than one conference or publication, and that submitted papers not be previously or subsequently published elsewhere. Papers accompanied by non-disclosure agreement forms are not acceptable and will be returned to the author(s) unread. All submissions are held in the highest confidentiality prior to publication in the Proceedings, both as a matter of policy and in accord with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.

Authors will be notified of paper acceptance or rejection by January 22, 2002. Authors whose submissions are accepted are expected to produce a final written report for the proceedings. Each accepted paper will be shepherded by a member of the program committee. Shepherds will help authors through the writing process prior to final acceptance for publication. The final reports must be reviewed and accepted by the paper's shepherd by April 8, 2002. After shepherd approval, the reports must be submitted with the standard release forms to the USENIX publications office by April 16, 2002. If you would like to avoid future formatting changes, you may consult a predefined template which formats according to the USENIX guidelines: StarWriter 5.0, Troff, LaTeX and style file, Framemaker.

Final reports should be as polished as possible; higher quality submissions are often better received by the community. The papers should describe work that has been completed as of the time of their final submission. Your talk at the conference may describe not only what is in your paper but also the work completed between the time that the final paper is submitted and the conference is held.

If you have specific questions about submissions, send them to the program chair via email to: freenix02chair@usenix.org.

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