SOSP Review Process

Use this to model what happens to a SOSP paper between the April upload and the July decision, and to time author-side actions to the phases that actually move outcomes. Anchors below are from the 2026-cycle CFP and the sosp26.hotcrp.com schedule (checked 2026-07-08): submission April 2026, author response ahead of the PC meeting, notification July 3, 2026.

The pipeline

Two structural facts do most of the explanatory work. First, reviewing is staged: a paper that reads as unsound in the first pass never reaches the reviewers most likely to appreciate a subtle contribution, so the opening pages must survive a skeptical fast read (see sosp-writing-style). Second, decisions are made in a meeting, not by score averaging: one convinced advocate who can defend the paper against live objections beats four mildly positive scores.

Reading SOSP reviews

Systems reviews concentrate their weight in predictable places:

• Soundness attacks ("the evaluation doesn't isolate the claimed mechanism", "this workload can't show the tail behavior claimed") are the score-drivers. Address these first in any response.
• Positioning complaints ("how is this different from X at OSDI two years ago") signal a related-work gap the meeting will replay (see sosp-related-work).
• Taste judgments ("incremental", "not SOSP-worthy") rarely change through argument; they change when an advocate reframes the paper's principle at the meeting — which your response can quietly arm with one crisp sentence.

Post-review triage sheet (fill before drafting anything)

For each review R1..Rn:
  overall lean:        champion / positive / neutral / negative / kill
  score-driving issue: <one sentence>
  type:                factual error | missed content | posed question | judgment
  response-eligible?:  yes (types 1-3) / no (type 4)
Meeting risk:          <the objection an advocate could not answer alone>

Confidentiality and integrity edges

• Reviews and PC discussion are confidential; reviewers are anonymous forever, and guessing at reviewer identity in the response reads badly (reviews are anonymous in both directions).
• Double-blind holds until notification. Do not advertise the submission where PC members will see it; the CFP's anonymization duty does not lapse after upload.
• HotCRP is the channel of record. Deadline-adjacent questions go to the PC chairs through it, not to PC members you happen to know — that is a conflict violation in a culture that audits conflicts.

Calibrating expectations

SOSP is a low-acceptance venue where most submissions are competent; rejections routinely carry reviews that would be accepts elsewhere. Per-year submission counts and acceptance rates are published with each program (待核实 for 2026 until the program appears; cross-check dl.acm.org/conference/sosp and dblp for history). Practical consequences of the meeting-centric model:

1. A rejected paper with one strong champion review is often a revise-and-retarget candidate for the next systems deadline, not a redesign candidate.
2. Reviews written for the meeting compress; a terse negative review may encode a long live discussion. Mine every sentence — each one survived an argument.
3. Because SOSP and its sibling OSDI both now run annually, the cost of a rejection is measured in months, not years (see sosp-workflow for the retargeting map).

Output format

[Phase] where the paper sits in the pipeline now
[Review map] per-review lean + score-driving issue + response eligibility
[Meeting risk] the one live objection to defuse
[Action] respond / wait / prepare retarget
[Integrity check] anonymity holds? all contact via HotCRP?