NSDI Camera-Ready

Acceptance starts a production pipeline with several deliverables owned by different people — the final PDF, the public artifact, the presenter designation, and the trip to the symposium. Facts below reflect the NSDI '26/'27 pages rendered on 2026-07-08; the '27 final-paper dates were not yet posted (待核实), so anchor every date to the notification email and the authors' instructions it links.

Deliverables and owners

Assign these on notification day. Cohort timing matters here: a spring acceptance (notified July) has months of runway before the May symposium, while a fall acceptance (notified December) runs its production pipeline much closer to the event — same deliverables, tighter interleaving.

The final PDF

NSDI's cap is symmetric: final papers, like submissions, are limited to 12 pages including footnotes, figures, and tables, references and appendices beyond. There is no accepted-paper page bonus to spend, so camera-ready editing is substitution, not addition:

• De-anonymize: real names, affiliations, acknowledgments, funding — all inside the same 12 pages the anonymous version used, which usually costs a few lines; reclaim them from prose, not from evidence.
• Restore what blinding distorted: research-track papers that neutralized deployment context ("a large provider") may now name it — verify employer/legal sign-off on every restored detail, since this step is where confidentiality incidents happen.
• Real links replace anonymized ones: repository, DOI'd archive, dataset pages — consistent with what the artifact ships (nsdi-artifact-evaluation).
• Honor the revision record: for papers accepted via one-shot revision, confirm every change promised in the change memo survived into the final text; shipping a final that quietly reverts a required fix betrays the reviewers who accepted on those terms.
• Then re-verify the page count — de-anonymization and shepherd-requested edits both nudge layout.

One deadline, two prizes

The final-papers deadline carries double weight at NSDI: it is the production cutoff, and it is the Community Award eligibility line — the award goes to the best paper whose code and/or dataset is public by that date. Sequence accordingly:

1. Public release of the artifact repository/archive (with license and DOI) before the final-papers date.
2. Final PDF cites those live, permanent URLs.
3. Artifact-badge evaluation proceeds on its own schedule; badge outcomes do not retroactively fix a missed release date.

Presenter and symposium duties

• Accepted papers designate one co-author as presenter via the Presenter Information form the program co-chairs distribute. Decide early — visa timelines for a US venue (Providence, RI for May 11-13, 2027) run months, and the presenter should ideally be the person who can answer testbed questions.
• Registration requirements, speaker discounts, and remote-presentation options for '27 are 待核实 — read the instructions-for-presenters page of the current edition rather than assuming either flexibility or rigidity.
• Spring-cohort papers surface on the public accepted-papers list well before the event; coordinate any press/blog timing with your institution against the venue's publication schedule, not against the symposium date alone.

Open access, and what it changes

USENIX proceedings are open access: the final PDF becomes a permanently free download on usenix.org, joining a record where every prior NSDI paper is equally free. Practical consequences:

• No paywalled-version hedging — the usenix.org PDF is the canonical citation target; sync any arXiv/preprint copy to the final text or clearly mark it stale.
• The paper will be read far outside the reviewing community (operators, OSS users, hiring committees); the abstract and figure captions carry more weight than at paywalled venues.
• Slides and talk materials commonly join the presentation page; treat them as part of the paper's permanent public footprint.

Production checklist

[ ] Authors/affiliations restored; ORCID/name spellings confirmed by each coauthor
[ ] Acknowledgments + funding numbers complete (grant offices care)
[ ] 12-page cap re-verified after de-anonymization
[ ] Employer/legal sign-off on restored deployment details
[ ] Revision-memo promises intact in final text
[ ] Artifact public with license + DOI before final-papers date (award clock)
[ ] All URLs in the PDF resolve and are permanent
[ ] Copyright/production forms submitted per authors' instructions
[ ] Presenter designated via the form; travel/visa started
[ ] Metadata (title/abstract) identical across HotCRP, PDF, and artifact README

After the symposium

The paper's public life is just beginning: keep the artifact's pinned dependencies buildable for at least the horizon on which one-shot-revision reviewers and follow-up work will consult it; route errata through the venue's published correction channel rather than silently editing preprint copies; and archive the talk recording/slides link alongside the repository README so the three public faces of the work — PDF, artifact, talk — reference each other.

Output format

[Deadline map] final-papers date + form dates (from notification email)
[PDF status] de-anonymized / cap verified / links live / memo honored
[Award clock] artifact public before final-papers date? y/n + date
[Presenter] designated? visa/travel risk level
[Open-access sync] preprint copies reconciled with canonical PDF
[Open items] owner -> item -> due date