--- name: cscw-workflow description: Use when planning a CSCW submission timeline end to end — the PACMHCI journal model, the retired fixed cycles versus the rolling 2027+ pathway, Revise-and-Resubmit rounds that span months, and back-planning so an acceptance lands before the conference-year presentation cutoff. --- # CSCW Workflow CSCW is not a deadline sprint. Since 2017 its papers have been journal articles in PACMHCI, and since early 2026 the venue has been rolling out a fully journal-style pipeline: **submit whenever the paper is ready, expect a decision in roughly 3-4 months, revise on the editor's clock, and present at whichever conference your acceptance lands in front of.** Planning a CSCW project therefore means planning a *revision campaign*, not a submission night. ## The two regimes (as of 2026-07-08) | Aspect | Fixed cycles (through the May 2025 cycle) | Rolling (CSCW 2027 and beyond) | | --- | --- | --- | | Deadline | Hard cutoff (last: May 14, 2025, 12:00 EDT) | None — submit when ready | | Platform | PCS | Manuscript Central (mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pacmhci) | | Who handles the paper | Program committee (ACs) per cycle | Editorial board: EiC/AE by methodological track | | First decision | Batched (first-round decisions ~6 months in) | Rolling, ~3-4 months from submission | | Revision windows | Fixed dates (e.g., R&R due January 13, 2026) | Set per paper by the handling editor | | Conference tie | Cycle mapped to a specific conference year | Accepted papers invited to the *next* CSCW, pending space | The May 2025 cycle — the last of the old kind — is worth studying as a calibration anchor even though it will never recur: submissions May 14, 2025 → internal "Revise for External Review" resubmissions September 16, 2025 → first external decisions November 2025 (66.2% of papers got Revise and Resubmit; only a third got any final decision) → revised papers due January 13, 2026 → final decisions late March 2026 → presentation at CSCW 2026 (Salt Lake City, October 10-14, 2026). That is a **17-month arc from submission to podium**, and two-thirds of surviving papers went through the full R&R loop. ## Cycle-hopping, translated for the rolling era Under fixed cycles, authors managed risk by "hopping": if an R&R could not be turned around by the resubmission date, the revision rolled into a later cycle and a later conference. Rolling keeps the underlying skill and removes the calendar: the hop is now **a negotiation with time, not with a deadline table**. Practical consequences: - **Submission date is a strategic variable.** Count backward from the conference you want to attend: with ~3-4 months to first decision and a realistic multi-week revision round (PACMHCI revision periods are measured in weeks-to-months, not days), a paper submitted less than ~8-10 months before a conference is betting on a clean first decision. The exact cutoff by which a rolling acceptance is assigned to CSCW 2027 versus 2028 was 待核实 at check time — confirm it on cscw.acm.org/rolling.html before promising a travel year to anyone. - **Revision capacity is the bottleneck.** An R&R that demands new data collection (a second interview wave, another deployment period) costs a season. Budget the team's field access *before* submitting, not when the decision arrives. - **Nothing forces you to submit early — or lets you cram.** The rolling model rewards submitting a genuinely finished paper over hitting an arbitrary date with a rushed one; there is no deadline-night adrenaline to launder weak sections. ## Campaign plan skeleton ```text [T0] Internal full-draft review (simulate first-round: one skeptic per method tradition in the paper) [T0+2wk] Ethics/consent artifacts final; anonymization sweep #1 [T0+4wk] Submit via the current platform (verify regime first) [T0+4mo] Expected decision window opens — pre-book revision capacity: who re-codes, who re-runs analyses, who drafts the response letter [R&R] Treat as a project phase with an owner, not a chore (see cscw-author-response) [Accept] Camera-ready + PACMHCI production (see cscw-camera-ready); confirm which conference year the paper presents at [Confab] Registration, travel, talk prep for the assigned CSCW ``` ## Risks specific to this venue's shape - **Stale-regime planning.** Advice, blog posts, and lab lore calibrated to PCS cycles is now wrong. Verify the live pathway before every new submission. - **Indefinite-polish drift.** With no deadline, drafts can orbit forever. Set an internal submission date and treat it as real. - **Same-reviewers memory.** R&R rounds return to the same reviewers; a revision that quietly ignores a request will be caught by the person who made it. - **Presentation-slot ambiguity.** "Invited to present at the next conference, pending space" is a softer guarantee than a proceedings deadline; keep travel plans provisional until the assignment is explicit. ## Status-report format ```text [Regime] rolling / residual fixed-cycle (verified at cscw.acm.org) [Stage] drafting / submitted / R&R round n / minor changes / production [Clock] time since submission or since revision request [Bottleneck] [Conference target] CSCW — assignment confirmed? yes / no / 待核实 ``` Dates and statistics above are the 2026-07-08 snapshot of a venue mid-transition; recheck cscw.acm.org and the rolling CFP before treating any of them as current.