IJCAI Workflow

Use this as the project-management skill for an IJCAI submission. Replace all dates with the current official timetable and work backwards from Chairing Tool cutoffs.

IJCAI is a conference, not a journal: it has no standing editor-in-chief and no article-processing charge. The rotating leadership is the per-edition Conference Chair and Program Chair (IJCAI-ECAI 2026: Conference Chair Francesca Toni; Program Chair Diego Calvanese, verified 2026-06-22), and the cost model is registration fees, not APCs. The Primary Paper Initiative fee below applies only to an author's non-primary (extra) submissions and is a submission-volume disincentive, not a per-article publication charge. Conference organizers rotate yearly, so re-check the current CFP and conference-committee page rather than carrying a name forward.

Milestones

• Venue fit: choose main track, a special track, Survey Track, or a different AI venue.
• Evidence lock: freeze contribution, experiments, proofs, datasets, reproducibility story, supplement, and resubmission package.
• Abstract deadline: register a real title, brief abstract, authors, contact details, and keywords. Placeholder abstracts are unsafe.
• Author-information deadline: ensure every coauthor has confirmed authorship, ORCID status, and required profile fields.
• Full-paper deadline: upload anonymous PDF, supplementary material, resubmission files, and Chairing Tool fields.
• Payment checkpoint: handle any non-primary paper fee by the current deadline.
• Phase 1: plan for summary-reject risk by making the contribution obvious within two reads.
• Response period: answer only pressing questions, factual errors, or unethical-review issues.
• Acceptance: submit camera-ready files, copyright/metadata, registration, presentation plan, and public artifact release.

Critical-path coupling

IJCAI separates abstract registration from full-paper upload and freezes the author set at the author-information deadline, so dependencies bite earlier than at venues with a single deadline. Track what each milestone blocks.

Worked vignette: a planning team's backward plan

A four-author planning team targets the main track. Work backward from Chairing Tool cutoffs: freeze the contribution and benchmark suite two weeks before full-paper upload; collect all ORCID confirmations before the author-information close because no author can be added after; register a real abstract early since the abstract deadline precedes the paper; and budget for phase-1 summary-reject risk by having a non-specialist read the first page well before submission, since the response stage may never arrive. Replace every date with the current official timetable.

Risk register and the venue-specific fix

• "Abstract slot never created." Register a real title and abstract by the abstract deadline, not a placeholder.
• "Coauthor confirmed late." Chase ORCID and confirmations before author-information close; the set locks afterward.
• "Counting on the rebuttal." Treat phase 1 as potentially terminal and make the contribution obvious within two reads.

Output format

[Current stage] idea / experiments / writing / abstract / submission / phase 1 / response / accepted
[Next official deadline] <date and source, or unknown>
[Critical path] <three tasks that determine readiness>
[Risk register] <page/anonymity/authors/PPI/resubmission/reproducibility/presentation>
[Owner map] <task -> person or role>