OSDI Review Process

Model the pipeline the paper enters at the December deadline. The process facts below are the OSDI '26 cycle (verified 2026-07-08); OSDI re-decides its process per edition — '26 itself removed the response period — so read the current CFP's process section before predicting anything.

The pipeline, author's-eye view

Dec 11  submission complete on HotCRP (osdi26.usenix.hotcrp.com)
   |    double-blind PC review, typically multi-round:
   |      early round -> low-scoring papers exit with fewer reviews
   |      later round(s) -> surviving papers gather more reviews
   |    online discussion + PC meeting
   |    (no author-response step existed in the '26 cycle)
Mar 26  notification: accept | conditional accept | reject
   |    conditional: shepherd assigned, mandated-change list issued
Jun 9   shepherd-approved final paper due (or the acceptance lapses)
Jul 13  open-access proceedings live as the event opens

Round structure and reviewer counts are PC-internal and vary; what is stable is the consequence: the first two or three pages decide whether the paper earns the later rounds, because early-round reviewers triage a large pile (capped at eight submissions per author, but multiplied across a big community).

What "no response period" changes about review

OSDI '26 eliminated the author response. Reading the decision process correctly means internalizing three shifts:

• Reviewer misunderstandings are terminal. A reviewer who misreads the threat model or misses the baseline's tuning carries that reading into discussion unchallenged. The only defense is prose that cannot be misread (osdi-writing-style's objection pass).
• The PC discussion is where papers are saved or sunk — by other reviewers, not by you. A paper survives when its champion can answer objections from the paper's own text; write so a champion is armed.
• Conditional acceptance absorbs the dialogue. The conversation that a rebuttal would have hosted moves after the decision, into shepherding, where it has teeth: mandated changes, verified by a named shepherd, on a deadline.

Conditional acceptance and heavyweight shepherding

OSDI '26 stated the mechanism plainly: some papers are accepted conditionally, and will be rejected unless the authors make the changes the PC determined, completed by the final-paper deadline and approved by the shepherd. Treat it as:

osdi-author-response covers how to run the exchange itself.

Structural facts worth knowing

• Two tracks, one PC decision process: Research and Operational Systems papers are reviewed against different evidence expectations (novel design vs deployed experience) — know which bar your reviewers were told to apply.
• Co-chair recusal: OSDI '26 pre-committed that a submitting co-chair's papers are handled exclusively by the other co-chair under the same double-blind procedure — an unusually explicit conflict rule worth citing if conflict questions arise.
• Best-paper lineage: the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award (inaugurated at OSDI '08) is selected by the PC from the accepted program; strong artifacts and clean claims correlate with it, but it is not something authors apply for.
• Openness after decision: accepted papers become free PDFs the day the event opens (USENIX open access) — reviews themselves stay confidential; OSDI does not publish reviews or decisions OpenReview-style.

Surviving the triage round

Multi-round PC review means the paper's first job is to not exit early. What early-round reviewers can actually evaluate in a large pile:

• Pages 1–2 carry the whole argument — pain, gap, named idea, headline evidence with its cost. A reviewer who stops at page 3 should already be wrong to reject.
• The evaluation's table of contents — skimmers check that the strongest baseline appears and that a cost/limitations discussion exists before reading any numbers; their absence is a triage-round exit.
• Figure captions as a parallel paper — early readers walk the figures; captions that state takeaways ("recovery flat from 8 to 64 nodes; baselines linear") let the skim reach the right conclusion.
• Formatting smells — cramped spacing, page-13 spillover, or an appendix where none is allowed mark the paper as careless before content is weighed (osdi-submission).

None of this is gaming; it is writing for the process that actually exists — one with early exits and no author response to recover from a bad first impression.

Reading a rejection usefully

Without a response phase, OSDI reviews are the only signal you get, so mine them: recurring phrases across reviewers ("unclear workload realism," "incremental over X") are the PC-meeting summary leaking through. Sort objections into fixable-by-writing, fixable-by-experiment, and fit-level; the first two feed a SOSP/NSDI retarget within months (osdi-workflow), the third sends you to osdi-topic-selection before any retarget.

Decoding the decision letter

Three outcomes, three very different next moves: a clean accept still usually assigns a shepherd for lighter-touch final-version guidance — treat their suggestions seriously even when not framed as mandates; a conditional accept is a contract with a June enforcement date, decoded in the section above; a reject with substantive, convergent reviews is the system working — the reviews are the retarget's requirements document — while a reject with thin, scattered reviews usually means a triage-round exit, and the fix is the paper's first two pages, not its technical core.

Output format

[Phase] pre-decision / conditional / accepted / rejected
[Process facts confirmed live] response period? tracks? shepherding wording? (待核实 if unread)
[If pre-decision] top 3 misreadings the text invites (terminal without rebuttal)
[If conditional] change-list scoped? shepherd contact opened? June feasibility
[If rejected] objection triage: writing / experiment / fit + retarget call