Workshop proceedings and other publications in
Operating System Review
Authors: Matthews Jeanna Neefe 
Published: March 2010

In the last few years, Operating System Review has published the full proceedings or best papers of workshops on a variety of operating systems related topics including storage, gossip-based networking, I/O virtualization and more. Most recently, we have been highlighting the nine workshops co-located with SOSP09. If you are organizing a systems related workshop, we would like to encourage you to consider publishing a summary of the event and a collection of its best papers in OSR. This gives the full SIGOPS community an opportunity to taste the work being done in its many focused sub-communities and gives workshop authors a good venue for publishing their work.

For new workshops, it can be great way to spread the word to potential attendees. For more established workshops, OSR can help you develop a regular publication strategy based on factors such as how often the workshop occurs, how many total papers/pages of material are produced, the number of attendees, the acceptance rate for papers, etc. In some cases, OSR itself may be able to publish the entire proceedings for your workshop and if not, we can help you explore alternatives for publishing all the papers including working with ACM to have the full proceedings placed in the ACM digital library.

There are some advantages to discussing publication in OSR before the call for participation is released. Specifically, ACM is working on some new policies regarding the collection of permission or copyright forms for workshop papers. If the call for participation specifically mentions that papers will be published in OSR, then it may be possible to avoid collecting permission or copyright forms.

In addition to workshop papers, we would like to remind everyone of the opportunity to publish other types of work in OSR. OSR regularly publishes special topics issues that are not organized around a particular workshop or event. Most recently, in April 2009, Mohamed Zahran and Kim Hazelwood put together a great issue on the interaction of operating systems and multicore chips. Organizing a special topics issue is a chance to focus the community's attention on a particular topic of interest and assemble a single body of work exploring the topic in more depth. Individual submissions on a wide variety of operating system related topics are also accepted. Papers are reviewed by our individual submission committee, which is chaired by John Chandy (University of Connecticut). We would especially like to encourage polemics that explore points of disagreement in the community, results of repeated research, memorials or historical accounts, novel approaches to systems education, works-in-progress and "the case for" papers. The review cycle for individual submissions is currently around 2 months and if accepted, publication is scheduled in the next issue of OSR.

We also regularly publish issues focused on systems work in industry. Recently, there has been one such issue per year - "Systems Work at Microsoft Research" organized by Mike Schroeder in 2007, "Systems Work at IBM Research" organized by Dilma Da Silva and Robert Wisniewski in 2008 and "Computer Systems Research at HP Labs" organized by Jay Wylie and Jeff Mogul in 2009. This year, David Belson and Erik Nygren from Akamai are organizing a collection of papers in the July issue and Steve Herrod, Ben Verghese, Julia Austin, Orran Krieger and Sharon Weber from VMware are organizing an issue in December. Michael Kaminsky, and Scott Hahn are organizing an issue on the systems work at Intel for 2011. We welcome suggestions for other industrial issues. We thank everyone who has contributed to OSR! We look forward to your submissions, suggestions for special topics issues, comments, and continued help in developing OSR into a great resource for the SIGOPS community.