ACM Transactions on Computing Education

Thank you for your interest in submitting to ACM TOCE! We're excited to consider your submission for review. These guidelines are always evolving in response to new policies and feedback from authors, reviewers, the editorial board, and broader community, so if anything is confusing, please don't hesitate to email the Editor-in-Chief with questions.

What to Submit

Before submitting a manuscript or proposing a special issue, consult the journal scope to make sure your topic is in scope and read the call for papers for topics of particular interest. TOCE generally publishes anything that concerns the teaching or learning about computing concepts. However, we explicitly do not publish several types of papers. For example, TOCE does not publish:

• Experience reports. Any paper that focuses on describing a class or curriculum without grounding it in prior research, without a research question, or without the use of some research method to advance discovery, will be desk rejected. If you're not sure if your paper is an experience report, write the Editor-in-Chief for guidance.
• Educational technologies for non-computing topics. Papers that concern the use of computers in teaching or learning contexts, but do not concern learning about computing, are out of scope.

Where to Submit

All manuscripts and revisions should be submitted via the web using ACM's Manuscript Central interface. Note that Manuscript Central is far from intuitive; it is unconventional in many ways, uses popups liberally, and may not provide particularly clear instructions. If you have any questions, write our admin at [email protected] for assistance.

Preparing Your Submission

Authors

Authors listed on a manuscript must comply with the ACM Policy on Authorship.

Format

All ACM submissions, including Research papers, Opinions, and Editorials, use the ACM Journals format. See the Templates section below links to official ACM format files. Manuscripts not formatted according to the ACM Guidelines will be returned to their authors with a request to reformat the paper, thus delaying their review by at least one month. Be sure to check your fonts, layout, and figure and table design to ensure they comply.

Do everything you can to ensure that the PDFs you submit are accessible. Reviewers that rely on screen readers to read your submissions cannot read them if they are not properly tagged and if images do not have descriptions. See SIGCHI's guidance on accessible submissions for tips. If we recruit a reviewer that cannot read your submission, we will reach out to for an accessible version so that they may complete their review.

ACM journals do not provide copy editing support when preparing manuscripts for submission or publication. We'll try to ensure that reviewers and Associate Editors provide at least some guidance for major issues. But if there are pervasive issues (e.g., with English), and a submission is recommend for acceptance with minor revisions, we highly recommend working with professional copy editors to ensure it's ready for final publication.

Length

There is no page or word count limit for TOCE articles. We encourage authors to leverage the lack of a length restriction to liberally cite relevant work, include comprehensive appendices, thoroughly detail methodologies and results, and include any relevant appendices. The purpose of this journal is to thoroughly report and archive discoveries.

However, be mindful that undue length is rarely a feature of a submission. Be careful to avoid unnecessary verbosity, multiple disjoint contributions that could be published as two separate works, and unhelpful redundancy. Most submissions are between 15-25 journal pages in the format above, though some are longer, especially those needing more figures or tables or qualitative work that must report extensive quotes in order to substantiate claims. While length is not an explicit criterion, it may indirectly influence reviewer's ability to understand and evaluate your work if reading it fatigues them, so it's worth investing in every effort to reduce your manuscript's length as much as possible, while striving for the goals above.

Photographs

If you include photographs in your manuscript that contain people's faces, ensure you have permission to include their faces in publicly available research publications and that the manuscript states that you have such permission. If you do not have their permission, you must censor their faces to reduce likelihood of identification by people or machine vision.

Previously Published Work

As stated in the ACM’s policy on Prior Publications and Simultaneous Submissions, no paper submitted to TOCE may be under review elsewhere. A paper that is based on previously published work (e.g., a conference or workshop paper) is expected to contain at least 25% new material. When you submit, do the following:

• prominently cite the original paper.
• In your submission cover letter, include a detailed explanation of the differences between the previously published submission and the new submission, justifying the 25% new material.
• Include an anonymized copy of the previous publication so that reviewers may inspect it as part of their review.

Review the the ACM policy on plagiarism for more guidance.

Language and Terminology

When preparing your submission, play close attention to your terminology and language, especially when discussing education system and people.

• Education context terminology like "elementary", "school", "college", "university", and "higher education" are fairly western and/or North American terms and should be avoided unless precisely defined. More universal general terms for age-based learning tiers are "primary", "secondary", and "post-secondary", although these can also be imprecise as well, as age cutoffs vary significantly across systems and regions. Instead, it is best to be very precise about the systems you might be studying and how they are structured, rather than relying on these vague terms alone.
• Racial identity terms have a long history of harm, erasure, and weaponization. Focusing on the language that communities themselves prefer, rather than vague, imprecise terms, especially like "minority", "underrepresented minority", "non-traditional student", or "urban". These terms are not only imprecise, they are racist, as Tiffani Williams clearly explains on an ACM Blog Post. If you're not sure what term to use, that is likely a sign you are missing expertise on your team about the communities you are studying.
• Gender identity across culture and history has always been been non-binary, including many identities other than men and women. If you use the terms "men" and "women", but to not acknowledge the existence of other genders, recognize that you may be forcefully labeling people who do not have those identities without their consent, or erasing entire categories of people from your scholarship. Also recognize that "male" and "female" can be read as strictly biological words, implying that you are specifically referring to sex (which is also not binary or a single construct). Sex is also not something you were likely to have measured. At a minimum, acknowledge any limitations in your use of language, and its implications for your discoveries. See a helpful guide from Katta Spiel, Oliver L. Haimson, and Danielle Lottridge on language to use in surveys.
• Disability language has a long history of harm. Broadly accepted terms include "ability", "disability", "disabled", as well as "blind", "vision impaired", "deaf", "hard of hearing", "autistic", "person with autism". The National Center on Disability and Journalism has recommendations on phrases to use and not use; ACM SIGACCESS also has a helpful guide on writing about accessibility.

This guide is not comprehensive or necessarily authoritative, especially since language evolves. Write the Editor-in-Chief with suggestions.

Anonymizing Submissions

ACM TOCE's review process is double-anonymous. This means that authors should not know the identities of those who review their papers and that reviewers should not know the identities of the authors of the papers they review. Even when authors take great care to conceal their identities in a paper, a determined reviewer may still be able to identify who wrote the paper. Nonetheless, authors are expected to take reasonable measures to conceal their identities in their papers, so that reviewers have a reasonable chance of not knowing who the authors are. Reviewers are similarly expected to consider papers only on their merits, even if they believe they know who the authors are; reviewers should also not proactively attempt to infer the identity of the authors.

At a minimum, submissions should:

• Remove author names.
• Remove affiliations.
• Ensure PDF metadata does not include names or affiliations.
• Anonymize references to specific institutions.
• Anonymize the name of any systems, tools, or products that the work contributes that might disclose your identity.
• Anonymize, to the extent possible, any identifying links to external resources
• Rather than include external links to resources, include them in an appendix, anonymously, if possible
• When citing your own work, do not refer to it as your own, even indirectly (e.g., "Prior work found X [17]" is okay, but "We build upon our prior work [17]" or "This work was from this dissertation [18]" are not, because they reveal your identity). Note that it is not always possible to hide your identity; some work is too visible to be anonymized.
• Remove acknowledgements if they are identifying.

There may be other identifying information as well; do your best to anonymize it.

If the Editor-in-Chief determines that your paper is not sufficiently anonymized, it will be returned with a request to improve the anonymization and its review may be delayed by until the next review cycle.

Reporting Empirical Studies

TOCE publishes and values many kinds of contributions, not all empirical studies. But many are empirical studies, and so we provide some guidance here on reporting them.

First, CSEdResearch.org provides a detailed guide on how to report on activities in curriculum. Many of these data reporting guidelines can help ensure that future work can build upon and learn from your work.

Second, while not all countries have research ethics regulations, all research has ethical questions. If your empirical study involves people, explain in detail the ethical considerations of your work, including any ethics review processes you engaged, ethical choices you needed to make, and how you managed those choices. 

Third, if appropriate, we encourage papers to use the APA Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS). JARS provides standardized section headers, guidelines to promote consistency and clarity in reporting, and recommendations to aid both authors and reviewers. JARS applies to a wide variety of study types, broadly classified as quantitative, qualitative, and mixed designs. Note that structured abstracts are not suitable for all work; They can be helpful in making salient key aspects of a discovery; they can also be too constraining for a wide variety of epistemologies and methods. Use them if you think they're helpful to making key decisions and outcomes of your work salient.

Here are several custom templates for the three primary study types (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed) covered by JARS. We provide JARS templates for both LaTeX and Microsoft Word:

• LaTex
  1. LaTeX Quantitative Template
  2. LaTeX Qualitative Template
  3. LaTeX Mixed Template
• Microsoft Word
  1. Word Quantitative Template
  2. Word Qualitative Template
  3. Word Mixed Template

We recommend that you download the template that is the best match for your paper type and word processing preference, and then use the template as a starting point for your paper. (Note: You should still download ACM’s LaTeX or Word template and reference it as you write your paper. The ACM templates contain detailed advice and guidelines on a range of specific formatting issues not covered in the JARS templates. See below in the Templates section). Even if your paper is not a good match for the JARS, using a JARS template as a starting point for your paper can help make your paper more accessible to reviewers and the TOCE audience.

Cover Letters

When you submit a manuscript, you'll be asked for a cover letter. If you're resubmitting, see the section below on "Submitting Revisions" for guidance on what to include. For first time submissions, the cover letter allows the EiC to gain a sense of the importance of the work, the fit between the submission and the journal’s scope, begin thinking about reviewer expertise, and other more technical details such as conflicts of interest and related submissions.

Below is guidance on the essential components of a cover letter including a description of each component:

• A few sentences on why the work is important or significant, summarizing its contributions
• A few sentences on why these contributions are within the TOCE scope.
• Confirmation that the corresponding author has read the policy on previously published work and carried out any requirements applicable to the submission.
• Describe any other related submissions that the AE or reviewers should be aware of that aren't directly addressed in the manuscript draft itself.
• A description of the kinds of reviewer expertise is necessary to adequately review the paper, to ensure you get a fair evaluation.
• Any researchers that should not review or other conflicts the AE should be aware of, aside from institutional ones.
• Confirmation that the corresponding author has read the TOCE Author Guidelines.

There is no explicit enforcement of these guidelines, but following them will enhance the fairness of your review, so we highly recommend following them.

Registered Reports

The journal does not have an official process for reviewing registered reports. There was a detailed proposal and discussion in early 2023 about supporting this formally as as submission option, but sentiments were split between those that saw it as an important alternative and others who saw it as deterring submissions for which registered reports are not appropriate (e.g., a wide range of qualitative work). Our compromise was the following.

If you are an author who would like to submit a registered report, write the Editor, and they will collaborate with you to detail a review process that is appropriate for your work and potentially for other types of submissions. This will include defining the process, publicizing it, and including its details on this page, as well as socializing it with board members, particularly Associate Editors in charge of reviewing the work. This may also include new ways of marking or labeling publications as having followed a registered reports process.

Our goal with this process is to enable registered reports to be published in alignment with principles of open science, without directly or indirectly signalling their primacy. It will also allow us to grow a registered reports process in the context of specific submissions, rather than on hypothetical ones. If you're interested in such a collaboration with the journal, write the editor to discuss further.

Review Process

ACM TOCE operates on a monthly peer review cycle. The Editor-in-Chief reviews all submissions on or after the 1st each month; submit before the 1st of the month to ensure your paper is included in monthly editorial assignments to Associate Editors.

There are numerous things that may happen after that initial review, including returning the paper because it is out of scope of the journal, returning the paper for improved anonymization, or it may be assigned to an Associate Editor, who will seek expert reviews of the submission. For papers that are reviewed, we aim to return a decision within 90 days, though this is not always possible, as expert reviewers may be unavailable, delayed, etc.

For full details on our review process, refer to:

• How the Editor-in-Chief reviews submissions
• How Associate Editors select reviewers, make recommendations, and manage revisions
• How reviewers are asked to review your submission
• And most importantly, the criteria used to evaluate your submission.

We recommend reading the criteria closely and ensuring that your submission achieves all of those qualities before you submit.

If your paper is rejected, you should always feel free to write the Editor-in-Chief to discuss the reviews you received. Our goal is for our community to work together to advance discovery, and we want our peer review process to help researchers improve their work however we can.

Papers accepted for publication are eligible for the ACM TOCE Distinguished Paper Award, if nominated by a reviewer, Associate Editor, or member of the broader community. Details about the award process and criteria are on the journal's wiki.

Desk Rejection

You may be surprised to learn that only some papers that are submitted to ACM TOCE actually make it past the editor-in-chief's desk. A majority are desk rejected without going out for peer review because they are out of scope, or because they fail to meet the minimum standards for publication in ACM TOCE. However, it's actually quite easy to avoid desk rejection. Here are some tips:

1. Make sure that your paper falls within the scope of ACM TOCE. We routinely receive papers that have a clear focus on educational research or educational technology, but that have nothing to do with computing education. Such papers will be sent back with a recommendation that they instead be submitted to a more general education or educational technology journal such as Computers & Education or The Educational Researcher. In order for a paper to fall within the scope of ACM TOCE, it must clearly address some aspect of  the teaching and learning of computing. Simply using computing students to study a general educational phenomenon is generally not enough. 
2. Make sure that your paper presents research. We often receive papers that report on an instructor's experience with implementing some innovation in the classroom. Such papers may provide evidence that the course met its stated learning objectives, but may lack any particular research methodology, connection to prior work or theory, or have any implications for computing education more broadly. While such papers are often a welcome addition to practitioners' conferences, they are generally not published in ACM TOCE. Read our reviewing criteria to get a sense of what is expected of submissions.

When in doubt, contact the editor-in-chief. If you have any questions regarding the suitability of your paper for ACM TOCE, e-mail the Editor-in-Chief, who will be happy to review a preliminary title and abstract and provide feedback. A preliminary review by the editor-in-chief can save hours of work and waiting down the road.

Submitting Revisions

If your paper received a decision of Revise and Resubmit or Accept with Revisions, it is important that you communicate to the Associate Editor and the reviewers how you responded to their feedback. There are many different practices, but our community generally prefers the following:

• Highlight changes. Include a version of the revised manuscript that highlights what text has changed. This requires tracking your changes while you make them and generating a version that makes changes visible. Microsoft Word's track changes feature can do this. For LaTeX manuscripts, there are many ways to highlight differences, including using the latexdiff or changes packages. Using changes on Overleaf is straightforward. These packages allow you to generate two versions of your revised manuscript: one with changes highlighted and one with changes implemented (a “clean” version).
  • Use review mode to turn on line numbers in both the highlighted and clean versions of your revised manuscript by adding “review” to the following line near the top of your main LaTeX file: \documentclass[manuscript, review, anonymous]{acmart}
• Cover letter summarizing changes. Write a detailed document that restates the reviewers and Associate Editor's critiques. For each critique: 1) explain how you addressed the critique and why you believe the revision to be sufficient; or 2) justify why you chose not to address the critique. 
  
  • It is helpful to include a brief summary of the AE and Reviewer’s general sentiment. For instance, the section of the document reiterating and addressing R1’s comments could start with: “R1. Decision: Revise and Resubmit. R1 commented positively on x, y, and z. Their critiques and how we addressed them are below” The reviewers have access to their full prior review should they need it.
  • It helps to use an identification scheme such as “AE1” for the Associate Editor’s first critique, “R2A” for Reviewer 2’s first critique, etc. It is helpful to do this before addressing critiques. This will, for instance, allow you to refer to a given critique and your response when addressing another critique. An obvious case where this is useful is when more than one reviewer has the same critique. Also, the AE may reiterate some reviewers’ critiques, particularly if more than one reviewer had the same critique. For instance, if critique AE2 refers to critiques R1C and R3B, and you address AE2 first, in response to critiques R1C and R3B you can state: “addressed in response to AE2”. 
  • Refer to line numbers so that reviewers can quickly find where in the manuscript the critique/response is referring to. It is recommended that you tell reviewers that when you mention a line number you are referring to the highlighted version, unless you have good reason to be referring to the unhighlighted version. This helps avoid confusion between the highlighted and clean versions of the revised manuscript.
  • Not every critique requires a change: sometimes you know better than the reviewers on a topic and this is your chance to educate them on why a change is not necessary, appropriate, or feasible. And not every change needs to be addressed. For instance, reviewers don't need to know about every spelling correction. Focus on the core reasons for not yet accepting the paper. If you wish you can say something such as “we also addressed all of the minor grammatical issues raised by R2”. 
  • It is okay to thank AEs for their critiques if you found them helpful, but it is not required or expected. Some AEs find lengthy praise not directly pertinent to the revisions make it harder to read, and so focusing only on responding to critiques is acceptable as well.
• Submission. In your submission, be sure to include:
  • Your cover letter summarising changes
  • Revised manuscript with changes highlighted
  • Revised manuscript without changes highlighted (the clean version)

In some cases, you may need guidance on what to write in a summary or how to write it. Don't hesitate to write the Editor-in-Chief for guidance; they largely defer judgement to Associate Editors, as they can most often advise on ways to best communicate a revision decision so that reviewers and Associate Editors understand your revision rationale.

Lastly, in drafting your summary, remember the mindset of reviewers in reading a revision: they haven't read your paper in some time, and may not even remember their opinion of your paper. They have access to their initial review, but the cover letter, highlighted revised manuscript and the clean revised manuscript will help them remember their critiques, efficiently interpret your responses, and best position you to convince them that your paper is ready for publication.

Resubmitting Rejected Manuscripts

In general, after a manuscript is rejected from the journal, you may not submit it for another round of reviews. However, if your submission has undergone substantial revisions, to the point where the Editor, an Associate Editor, and potential reviewers would view it as a different paper, you may submit it for review. The Editor-in-Chief reserves the final judgement on whether the work is substantially different enough, so write them to discuss your revisions if you want to verify that it will be seen as a new work.

Sharing Your Work

ACM and ACM TOCE help you share your work, and enable pre-publication sharing as well.

Posting Pre-Prints

Authors may post pre-prints online while their manuscript is in submission. However, because our review process is double anonymous, this does come with some risk of reviewers discovering their identity. To mitigate this, we instruct reviewers to not proactively seek out author identity. After publication, ACM has several requirements about pre-print versions that interact with copyright policies.

Just Accepted Manuscripts

If your paper is accepted, there will be a phase where it appears on the ACM Digital Library as "Just Accepted". This helps get results out early, but it has one downside: the version made available isn't the final polished version, but whatever version is in Manuscript Central that has yet to be fully formatted and proofed. If you see typos, don't worry, you'll have a chance to correct them before the final version appears in the digital library.

Presenting at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium

Under an agreement with the ACM SIGCSE, authors of ACM TOCE articles with an Accept or Accept with Revisions decision before September 1st of the year prior to the next SIGCSE technical symposium are eligible to present at the following year's ACM SIGCSE conference. (And if a paper was Accepted with Revisions, it must be Accepted prior to January). The Editor-in-Chief identifies all eligible papers, solicits interest from authors, and then provides a ranked list to the SIGCSE Program Chairs, who select from the list at their discretion for inclusion into the program. (For example, if you paper was accepted in May, you would be eligible to present in the following year's SIGCSE symposium in March; but if your paper was accepted in December it would not eligible until the year after). If your paper is selected for presentation, you will be contacted by e-mail a few months prior to the SIGCSE conference at which you are eligible to present to confirm your attendance.

ORCID Requirements

ACM requires that all accepted journal authors register and provide ACM with valid ORCIDs prior to paper publication. Corresponding authors are responsible for collecting these ORCIDs from co-authors and for providing them to ACM as part of the ACM eRights selection process. For journals using the ScholarOne submission system, the submitting author will be required to provide their own ORCID upon submission. Authors are strongly encouraged, but not required, to include ORCIDs for all authors in their source files.  Please note: ACM only requires you to complete the initial ORCID registration process. However, ACM encourages you to take the additional step to claim ownership of all your published works via the ORCID site.

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission and supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities - ensuring that your work receives proper recognition. This requirement will also enable ACM to provide improvements to the normalization process of ACM Digital Library author profile data, aid in the detection of undeclared conflicts of interest and other publications-related misconduct in ACM Publications, assist with the implementation of ACM Open, and offer a host of other researcher benefits to ACM authors and the scientific community.

Before submission, the corresponding author should register for an ORCID.  Your co-authors should also create their individual ORCIDs at that time and add them to their accounts in the manuscript submission system. Otherwise, you will need to enter them manually into the ACM rights system upon paper acceptance and before publication in the ACM Digital Library. Simple instructions for complying with this mandate are provided inside the ACM eRights system.

ORCID information for all authors will appear on the article’s page in the ACM Digital Library. If ORCIDs are included in an article’s source files, they will also be linked in the published output.

The ACM ORCID FAQ should answer many of your questions.

ACM Policies

As a published ACM author, you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies.

ACM Policy on Authorship

The ACM Policy on Authorship and the associated list of Frequently Asked Questions cover the criteria for authorship and for submission, as well as acceptable and unacceptable authorship practices.

ACM Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy

The ACM Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy describes what a COI is, who is responsible for being aware of such conflicts, how to manage COIs, and how to report violations.

ACM Peer Review Policy

ACM recognizes that the quality of a refereed publication rests primarily on the impartial judgment of their volunteer reviewers. Expectations of reviewers and ACM, including key topics such as confidentiality, the use of large language models in the peer review process, and conflicts of interest, can be found in the ACM Peer Review Policy and its associated list of Frequently Asked Questions.

ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects

All authors conducting research involving human participants and subjects must meet appropriate ethical and legal standards guiding such research. These requirements are detailed in the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

Templates

Manuscripts accepted for publication in any ACM publication must be formatted using the ACM authoring template. Submissions must also use the ACM authoring templates. ACM style files will closely approximate the final output, enabling authors to judge the page-length of their published articles.

ACM authoring templates and detailed instructions on formatting can be found at http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. For both Word and Latex technical support, contact [email protected].

ACM Computing Classification System (CCS)

If your paper has been accepted, please read the HOW TO CLASSIFY WORKS USING ACM'S COMPUTING CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM for instructions on how to classify your document using the CCS and insert the index terms into your LaTeX or Microsoft Word source file. Providing the proper indexing and retrieval information from the CCS provides the reader with quick content reference, facilitating the search for related literature, as well as searches for your work in ACM's Digital Library and on other online resources.

Author Rights

ACM authors can manage their publication rights in either of the following ways:

• A license granting ACM non-exclusive permission to publish—allowing authors to self-manage all rights to their work by choosing to pay for perpetual open access from the ACM Digital Library.
• A publishing license agreement granting ACM exclusive publication rights—by granting ACM the right to serve as the exclusive publisher of a work and to manage ongoing rights and permissions associated with the work, including the right to defend it against improper use by third parties. (This license is roughly the equivalent of ACM’s traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement except that the author continues to hold copyright.)

As of January 2023, per decision of the ACM Publications Board, the traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement option is no longer available for ACM authors.  ACM will continue to defend all ACM-published works against improper use when allegations of publication-related misconduct are brought to light.  For more information please refer to this article in The Blue Diamond.

Additionally, ACM authors may post all versions of their work, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", to non-commercial repositories such as ArXiv. See the ACM Author Rights page for additional information.

Learn more, including about posting to pre-print servers and institutional repositories, by visiting the ACM Author Rights page.

Open Access

ACM has made a commitment to become a fully sustainable and Plan S compliant Open Access (OA) scholarly publisher within approximately five years. ACM offers a number of ways to achieve this goal, including Hybrid OA, Gold OA, and the ACM OPEN program.

Most ACM journals, with the following exceptions, are Hybrid OA.  ACM Gold OA journals are:

• ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)
• ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)
• ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
• ACM Transactions on Probabilistic Machine Learning (TOPML)
• ACM/IMS Journal on Data Science (JDS)
• Digital Government: Research & Practice (DGOV)
• Digital Threats: Research & Practice (DTRAP)
• Formal Aspects of Computing (FAC)
• Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL)
• Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering (PACMSE)

Click here to view the Article Processing Charges (APCs) to publish your article Open Access.

Additionally, all corresponding authors from an institution participating in ACM OPEN will have their research articles published OA at the time of publication at no cost to the authors.  Click here for a list of participating institutions. To ensure eligibility for the program, corresponding authors from participating institutions must use their institutional email address upon submission.

Language Services

ACM has partnered with International Science Editing (ISE) to provide language editing services to ACM authors. ISE offers a comprehensive range of services for authors including standard and premium English language editing, as well as illustration and translation services, and also has significant outreach in China. Editing is available for both Word and LaTeX files. As an ACM author, you will receive a generous discount on ISE editing services. To take advantage of this partnership, visit the Dedicated ACM Editing Service. (Editing services are at author expense and do not guarantee publication of a manuscript.)

Author-izer Service

Once your manuscript is published, this service allows you to generate and post a link on your home page or institutional repository to your published article. This link will let any visitors to your personal bibliography pages download the definitive version of the articles for free from the ACM DL. These downloads will be recorded as part of your DL usage statistics. A detailed description of the service and instructions for its use may be found at the ACM Author-Izer Service page.

LaTeX Collaborative Authoring Tool on Overleaf Platform

ACM has partnered with https://www.overleaf.com/, a free cloud-based, authoring tool, to provide an ACM LaTeX authoring template. Authors can easily invite colleagues to collaborate on their document. Among other features, the platform automatically compiles the document while an author writes, so the author can see what the finished file will look like in real time. Further information can be found at https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. The ACM LaTeX template on Overleaf platform is available to all ACM authors https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/acm-official#.WOuOk2e1taQ.

Kudos Article Sharing Platform

Kudos is a free service that you can use to promote your work more effectively. After your paper has been accepted and uploaded to the ACM Digital Library, you'll receive an invitation from Kudos to create an account and add a plain-language description. The Kudos “Shareable PDF” allows you to generate a PDF to upload to websites, such as your homepage, institutional repository, preprint services, and social media. This PDF contains a link to the full-text version of your article in the ACM DL, adding to download and citation counts.

Author Gateway

Please be sure to visit the ACM Author Portal for additional important author information.

Contact Us

For further assistance and questions regarding the journal editorial review process and paper assignment to an issue, contact the journal administrator ([email protected]).