Formatting
The submissions should be formatted using the following LaTeX style files and template. There is no page limit on submissions and final versions of accepted papers. We believe that the authors themselves are in the best position to choose how to best present their work so as to make it easy to read and review. We hope that instead of spending effort on formatting, space-saving tricks and version synchronization, the authors will focus on clear and concise presentation of their work.
It is expected that a statement and discussion of the key contributions appear early in the paper and certainly within the first 12 pages. It does not mean that contents of your paper beyond page 12 are unlikely to be read. As in previous COLTs, some reviewers will examine your work (or its parts) in detail. Your manuscript should make it easy to find the detailed statements, proofs and additional discussion of the results.
Your manuscript will be treated as being in close-to-final form and reflective of the final paper. Therefore significant issues with presentation (such as excessive typos and missing definitions) and incorrect, missing or unintelligible proofs can be grounds for rejection.
You (students especially) may also find the following advice for authors helpful: http://windowsontheory.org/2014/02/09/advice-for-focs-authors/
Dual submission policy
Submissions that are substantially similar to versions that have been previously published, accepted for publication, or submitted in parallel to other conferences may not be submitted to COLT. Submission is permitted of a short version of a paper that has been submitted to a journal, but has not yet been published in that journal. Authors must declare such dual-submissions either through the Easychair submission form, or via email to the program chairs. Submission is permitted for papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings.
Anonymization
COLT reviewing is not double-blind, and program committee members will have access to author identities. However, in order to aid in minimizing the effect of initial impressions based on author identity, and in order to allow program committee members to seek double-blind reviews from sub-referees, submissions should NOT include author names or other identifying information.
- Use the [anon] option, as in the LaTeX template, to suppress author names from appearing in the submission.
- To the extent possible, avoid including directly identifying information. You should still include all relevant references, discussion, and scientific content, even if this might provide significant hints as to the author identity. You should generally refer to your own prior work in third person.
- Avoid including acknowledgments in the submission (these can be added later).
- It is expressly allowed to make available online a non-anonymized version of the submission or any other material that might reveal the author identities, e.g. on the author’s web pages, on arXiv, or on any other site.
Submitting your paper
Papers should be submitted through Easychair by 11:00 PM EST on Feb. 12, 2016.
Please contact the COLT chairs at [email protected] in case of questions about the policy or technical issues with the submission process.
Looking forward to reading your submissions and good luck!