sigir-camera-ready

name	sigir-camera-ready
description	Use when an accepted SIGIR paper must become the ACM Digital Library version of record — de-anonymizing the sigconf source, CCS concepts and keywords, the e-rights form, TAPS source upload and proof checking, restoring real system and dataset names, and the April camera-ready window before the July conference.

SIGIR Camera Ready

SIGIR publishes through ACM: the version of record is produced by ACM's pipeline (e-rights, then TAPS) from your source files, and it appears in the Digital Library as both PDF and HTML (SIGIR 2025's volume is DOI 10.1145/3726302). The 2026 camera-ready window sat in late April for the tracks whose dates were verifiable (April 29, 2026 for Resources / Low Resource Environments); take your own track's date from the acceptance email, and note the July conference leaves little slack.

What changes between the reviewed PDF and the record

Item	Reviewed submission	Version of record
Document class	sigconf + anonymous/review options	sigconf with rights commands from TAPS
Authors	Hidden	Restored; order frozen before e-rights
System name	Possibly a review alias	Real name, consistent with the public repo
Dataset/log provenance	Genericized for anonymity	As precise as data agreements allow
Repository link	Anonymous mirror	Public, licensed, stable (archival DOI best)
Acknowledgments	Absent	Restored — and they cost body pages at SIGIR
CCS concepts + keywords	Often placeholders	Final; they drive DL search forever
Leaderboard references	Scrubbed	Restorable — align run IDs with the paper

Two SIGIR-specific pressure points hide in that table:

• Acknowledgments and restored details consume the page budget, because SIGIR counts everything except references inside the limit. If the camera-ready allowance for your track is the same as submission (whether acceptance buys an extra page was not verifiable for 2026 — 待核实), something you wrote must shrink to make room.
• The anonymity aliases must be unwound consistently. A paper that called its system "ANON-RANK" in review must not leave one stale alias in a figure caption or a run-file name cited in a table. Grep, don't skim.

The ACM production sequence

1. e-rights: the contact author receives ACM's rights form; completing it stamps the copyright block, so title and author list must be final first.
2. TAPS upload: zip your LaTeX (or Word) source per the instructions in the acceptance email. TAPS compiles the DL's PDF and HTML5 — HTML is where homemade macros, \vspace hacks, and missing figure files fail loudly.
3. Proofs: check both renderings. Tables that were hand-tuned for two-column PDF are the usual HTML casualties, and IR papers are table-heavy.

# Sweep before zipping for TAPS
grep -rn "ANON\|anonym" *.tex sections/          # stale review aliases
grep -rn "4open\|anonymous.4open" *.tex          # anonymous mirror still linked?
grep -rn "vspace\|renewcommand{\\\\baselinestretch}" *.tex  # spacing hacks
ls figures/ | wc -l && grep -c includegraphics *.tex        # figure inventory match

Digital Library metadata that outlives the conference

• CCS concepts: pick from the ACM taxonomy deliberately (e.g., Information systems → Retrieval models and ranking / Evaluation of retrieval results). They are the DL's routing layer for your paper's entire life.
• Keywords: include the terms IR searchers actually use — task name, collection names, method family ("dense retrieval," "learning to rank," "conversational search"). Your future citers search the DL and Google Scholar with these.
• Author name forms: match each author's existing DL record; inconsistent forms split citation identities.
• ORCID and funding: attach ORCIDs; format grants the way the funder mandates.
• The abstract in TAPS metadata must equal the PDF abstract — the DL indexes metadata.

Artifacts at publication time

The camera-ready is the moment review-time artifacts become public commitments:

• Flip the repository public before the camera-ready deadline and test it from a logged-out browser; the paper will cite it for decades.
• Freeze the exact run files behind every table (runs/ with a manifest); IR replication requests are usually "can you send the run file," and yes should be easy.
• If the paper introduced judgments, topics, or a corpus and it was not routed through the Resources track, publish it with a license and a datasheet anyway — the community treats missing licenses as unusable resources.

Worked example: absorbing review debts into the budget

An accepted full paper carries two commitments from the review phase: a promised scope-limitation paragraph and a clarification of the tuning protocol. Camera-ready also restores acknowledgments (~0.15 pp) and real provenance details (~0.1 pp). With no verified extra page, the arithmetic forces trades:

1. Review commitments land first — they are quasi-contractual and reviewers of record may check.
2. The restored acknowledgments displace the weakest analysis sentence-by-sentence, not table-by-table: prose compresses, protocol does not.
3. Nothing new enters: results and claims not seen by reviewers do not belong in the version of record; they belong in the repository changelog or the next paper.

The heuristic: camera-ready pays debts and restores identity; it does not buy new real estate.

Registration and presentation

Author registration by the camera-ready date was confirmed for the Resources track in 2026 (April 29); whether every accepted full/short paper requires a registered, in-person presenting author — and the fee schedule — was not verifiable at build time (待核实). Read the acceptance email as the controlling document, and budget for Melbourne travel early: July is conference high season in the IR calendar.

Timeline discipline

• Week 0 (decision): settle author order; start e-rights; unwind aliases in source.
• Week 1: TAPS dry run with rights commands stubbed; fix class-file violations.
• Week 2: metadata pass (CCS, keywords, ORCID); repository public; proofs checked.
• Slack: TAPS support queues lengthen as thousands of ACM camera-readies converge — finishing a week early is the only reliable mitigation.

Output format

[Camera-ready status] on-track / blocked-at-rights / blocked-at-TAPS / not started
[Page budget] <pages>/<track allowance> (allowance verified from acceptance email? y/n)
[De-anonymization] aliases unwound y/n, repo public y/n, provenance restored y/n
[Metadata] CCS final / keywords final / ORCIDs attached / abstract == PDF
[Artifacts] run files frozen / license present / archival DOI minted
[Registration] requirement confirmed from acceptance email? y/n (fees 待核实)