Call for Participation | Papers
Important Dates
May 25, 2012: Title and Abstract requested (to improve reviewer match)
June 1, 5:00 p.m. PDT: Submissions due
July 27: First-round notification (Revise & Resubmit or Reject)
August 27, 5:00 p.m. PDT: Revised papers due
October 19: Final notifications
See Important Dates for a detailed look at the papers submission, review, and notification process.

Submissions of Title and Abstract, and the Papers themselves, must be made via the Precision Conference System. A link to the submission site will be made available by early May.

CSCW is an international and interdisciplinary conference focused on how technology intersects with social practices. Important Notes: CSCW 2013 uses the two-phase review process introduced by CSCW 2012, which is intended to increase paper diversity and quality and is described in detail below. Please see this statement concerning the two-phase review process from a number of CSCW research leaders.

We invite submissions that detail existing practices or inform the design or deployment of systems. The scope of CSCW includes, but is not limited to, social computing, technologically-enabled or enhanced communication, collaboration, information sharing, and coordination. It includes socio-technical activities at work, in the home, in education, in healthcare, in the arts, for socializing and for entertainment. New results or new ways of thinking about, studying or supporting shared activities can be in these and related areas:

Social Computing. Studies, theories, designs, mechanisms, and software infrastructures addressing social networking, user-generated content, online gaming, crowdsourcing and collective intelligence, virtual worlds, collaborative information seeking, etc.
Theories and models. Critical analysis or organizing theory with clear relevance to the design or study of social and collaborative systems.
System design. Hardware, architectures, infrastructures, interaction design, technical foundations, or toolkits that enable the building of new social and collaborative systems.
Empirical investigations. Findings, guidelines, ethnographic studies of technologies, practices or use of communication, collaboration and social communication technologies.
Methodologies and tools. Novel methods or combinations of approaches and tools used in building systems or studying their use.
Domain-specific social and collaborative applications. For healthcare, transportation, gaming (for enjoyment or work), ICT4D, sustainability, collective intelligence or global collaboration, or other domains.
Collaboration systems based on emerging technologies. Mobile and ubiquitous computing, game engines, virtual worlds, and sensor-based environments.
Crossing boundaries. Studies, prototypes, or other investigations that explore interactions across disciplines, distance, languages, generations, and cultures, to help better understand how to transcend social, temporal, and spatial boundaries.
Papers should detail original research contributions. Papers must report new research results that represent a contribution to the field. They must provide sufficient details and support for their results and conclusions. They must cite relevant published research or experience, highlight novel aspects of the submission, and identify the most significant contributions. Evaluation is on the basis of originality, significance, quality of research, quality of writing, and contribution to conference program diversity.

Paper length (new for CSCW 2013)
There is no arbitrary minimum or maximum length imposed on papers. Rather, reviewers will be instructed to weigh the contribution of a paper relative to its length. Papers should report research thoroughly but succinctly: brevity is a virtue. Many research papers will be 10 pages long (the previous length limit for papers) but may be shorter if the contribution can be described and supported in fewer pages. While we will review papers longer than 10 pages, the contribution must warrant the extra length: the more you write, the more work for reviewers! Shorter, more focused papers (called Notes in years prior to 2013) are encouraged and will be reviewed like any other paper. Papers whose length is incommensurate with their contribution will be rejected.

Papers will be presented at the CSCW conference and will be included in the conference proceedings archived in the ACM Digital Library. CSCW does not accept submissions that were published previously in formally reviewed publications or that are currently submitted elsewhere.

Submissions must be in the HCI Archive Format.

Send queries about Paper submissions to papers2013@cscw.acm.org.

Papers are subject to blind reviewing. Your submission should have authors' names and affiliations removed and avoid obvious identifying features. Citations to your own relevant work should not be anonymous, but please cite it without identifying yourself as the author. For example, say "Prior work by [author]" instead of "In my prior work."

Papers must include an abstract of no more than 150 words. Titles and Abstracts that are uploaded to PCS early will be used to find the best possible reviewer matches. Consider submitting a video that illustrates your work, either as a video figure judged as part of the submission (no more than two minutes long and 30MB in size) or as a longer stand-alone submission to the video track (Call for Videos). Videos are not required for submission of papers.

CSCW 2013 Papers submissions must be uploaded online at the PCS submission system by 5:00 p.m. PDT on June 1, 2012 to be considered. Confidentiality of submitted material will be maintained. Upon acceptance, the titles, authorship, and abstracts of Papers will be used in the Advance Program. Submissions should contain no information or material that will be proprietary or confidential at the time of publication, and should cite no publication that will be proprietary or confidential at that time.

Final versions of accepted Papers must be formatted according to the detailed instructions. Copyright release forms must be signed for inclusion in the proceedings and ACM Digital Library.

CSCW 2013 will continue the "Best of CSCW" awards program, in accordance with SIGCHI guidelines. Upon acceptance, some Papers will be nominated for additional review to identify "Honorable Mention" and "Best" awards. Approximately 5% of submissions may be nominated and 1% of total submissions awarded Best Paper.

Review process (new as of CSCW 2012)
Papers will undergo two review cycles. After the first review a submission will receive either a "Revise&Resubmit" or "Reject" notification. Authors of papers that are not rejected have about 4 weeks to revise and resubmit them. The revision will be reviewed as the basis for the final decision. This is like a journal process, except that it is limited to one revision with a strict deadline.

The primary contact author will be sent the first round reviews. Revise&Resubmits will require significant attention to prepare the resubmission for the second review. Authors of Revise&Resubmits will be asked to provide a description of how reviewer comments were addressed. Submissions that are rejected in the first round cannot be revised for CSCW 2013, but authors can begin reworking them for submission elsewhere. Authors need to allocate time for revisions after July 27, when the first round reviews are returned. Final acceptance decisions will be based on the second (revised) submission.

The revision cycle enables authors to spend a month to fix the English, integrate missing papers in the literature, redo an analysis, adopt terminology familiar to this field, and perhaps even gather more data, problems that in the past could lead to rejection. It also provides the authors of papers that would have been accepted anyway the opportunity to make their submissions even stronger contributions to the CSCW research literature. The revision is submitted with a letter where the authors explain how the paper was revised, allowing more interaction between authors and reviewers.

This review process is not an effort to change the “quality bar” for CSCW, either to raise or lower it! Instead, the intent is to give more authors a chance to clear the bar. This process may lead to more diverse kinds of papers qualifying. Reviewers have more time to consider the significance as well as the technical quality of submissions. Authors from related disciplines have an opportunity to adjust to the literature and terminology found in CSCW.

This is not an invitation to submit extended abstracts or incomplete papers. As in the past, submit the paper that you would like to have published. Incomplete submissions will not be reviewed. Nearly half of submissions may be rejected on the first round, enabling the reviewers to focus on papers that have a good chance for acceptance. The strongest first round submissions will receive reviews that make it clear to the authors that few or no revisions are required for acceptance Acceptance is not guaranteed for papers making the second round; however, the CSCW 2012 experience showed that the majority of papers that made it to the second round were accepted. As a specific data point, nearly all submissions that received an average review score of 4 (out of 5) or higher were accepted.

Additional author benefits: The rebuttal, which was focused on pointing out reviewing flaws, is replaced by a revision, which can be more appealing to read and actually improve your work. Authors of papers not making it through the first round benefit from a very quick turnaround.

The CSCW 2012 program was the largest in the history of the conference, and reactions from the community were largely very positive. CSCW 2013 expects to build on this success.

For more on the review process, please see this statement from the CSCW 2012 and CSCW 2013 program chairs, the CSCW Steering Committee Chair, and the ACM SIGCHI Vice President of Publications.

Papers Co-chairs
Loren Terveen, University of Minnesota
Cliff Lampe, University of Michigan
papers2013@cscw.acm.org