PACMPL Issue POPL 2026 seeks contributions on all aspects of programming
languages and programming systems, both theoretical and practical. Authors of
papers published in PACMPL Issue POPL 2026 will be invited to present their work
in the POPL conference in January 2026, which is sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN, in
cooperation with ACM SIGACT and ACM SIGLOG.
POPL 2026 Website:
https://popl26.sigplan.org/Call for Papers:
https://conf.researchr.org/track/POPL-2026/POPL-2026-popl-research-papersSubmission deadline: July 10 2025 AOE
Double-Blind Review FAQ:
https://conf.researchr.org/track/POPL-2026/POPL-2026-popl-research-papers#double-blind-reviewing### Organization
Conference Location: Rennes, France
Conference Dates: January 11-17, 2026
General Chair: Sandrine Blazy, University of Rennes
Program Chair: Suresh Jagannathan, Purdue University
Program Committee:
https://popl26.sigplan.org/committee/POPL-2026-popl-research-papers-program-committee### Scope
Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) is a forum for the discussion of all
aspects of programming languages and programming systems. Both theoretical and
experimental papers are welcome, on topics ranging from formal frameworks to
experience reports. We seek submissions that make principled, enduring
contributions to the theory, design, understanding, implementation, or
application of programming languages.
### Evaluation Criteria
The Review Committee will evaluate the technical contribution of each submission
as well as its accessibility to both experts and the general POPL audience. All
papers will be judged on significance, originality, relevance, correctness, and
clarity. Each paper must explain its scientific contribution in both general and
technical terms, identifying what has been accomplished, explaining why it is
significant, and comparing it with previous work. Advice on writing technical
papers can be found on the SIGPLAN author information page:
https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/.
Deadlines and formatting requirements, detailed below, will be strictly
enforced.
### Double-Blind Reviewing Process
POPL 2026 will use a full double-blind reviewing process (similar to the one
used in recent years (POPL 2023 - 2025) but different from the lightweight
double-blind process used before then). This means that identities of authors
will not be made visible to reviewers until after conditional-acceptance
decisions have been made, and then only for the conditionally-accepted papers.
The use of full double-blind reviewing has several consequences for authors.
* **Submissions**: Authors must omit their names and institutions from their
paper submissions. In addition, references to authors' own prior work should
be in the third person (e.g., not "We build on our previous work …" but rather
"We build on the work of …").
* **Supplementary material**: Authors are permitted to provide supplementary
material (e.g., detailed proofs, proof scripts, system implementations, or
experimental data) along with their submission, which reviewers may (but are
not required to) examine. This material may take the form of a single file,
such as a PDF or a tarball. Authors must fully anonymize any supplementary
material.
* **Author response**: In responding to reviews, authors should not say anything
that reveals their identity, since author identities will not be revealed to
reviewers at that stage of the reviewing process.
* **Dissemination of work under submission**: Authors are welcome to disseminate
their ideas and post draft versions of their paper(s) on their personal
website, institutional repository, or arXiv (reviewers will be asked to turn
off arXiv notifications during the review period). But authors should not take
steps that would almost certainly reveal their identities to members of the
Program Committee, e.g., directly contacting PC members or publicizing the
work on widely-visible social media or major mailing lists used by the
community.
The purpose of the above restrictions is to help the Program Committee and
external reviewers come to a judgment about the paper without bias, not to make
it impossible for them to discover the authors' identities if they were to try.
In particular, nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the
quality of the submission.
However, there are occasionally cases where adhering to the above restrictions
is truly difficult or impossible for one reason or another. In such cases, the
authors should contact the Program Chair to discuss the situation and how to
handle it.
The FAQ on Double-Blind Reviewing addresses many common scenarios and answers
many common questions about this topic. But there remain many grey areas and
trade-offs. If you have any doubts about how to interpret the double-blind rules
or you encounter a complex case that is not clearly covered by the FAQ, please
contact the Program Chair for guidance.
### Evaluation Process
POPL 2026 will have five Associate Chairs who will help the PC Chair monitor
reviews, solicit external expert reviews for submissions when there is not
enough expertise on the committee, and facilitate reviewer discussions.
As in previous years, authors will have a multi-day period to respond to
reviews, as indicated in the Important Dates table. Responses are optional. A
response must be concise, addressing specific points raised in the reviews; in
particular, it must not introduce new technical results. Reviewers will write a
short reaction to these author responses.
The Review Committee (RC) will discuss papers electronically, and will use
synchronous virtual meetings to discuss any papers for which there is
disagreement among reviewers, in some cases soliciting additional input from
other experts in the committee. There is no formal External Review Committee,
though experts outside the committee may be consulted for some papers. Reviews
will be accompanied by a short summary of the reasons behind the committee's
decision with the goal of clarifying the reasons behind the decision.
To conform with ACM requirements for journal publication, all POPL papers will
be conditionally accepted; authors will be required to submit a short
description of the changes made to the final version of the paper, including how
the changes address any requirements imposed by the Review Committee. That the
changes are sufficient will be confirmed by the original reviewers prior to
acceptance to POPL. Authors of conditionally accepted papers must submit a
satisfactory revision to the Review Committee by the requested deadline or risk
rejection.
For additional information about the reviewing process, see: [Principles of
POPL](
https://www.sigplan.org/Conferences/POPL/Principles/), a presentation of
the underlying organizational and reviewing policies for POPL. For POPL 2026,
policies specified in this Call for Papers supersede those in the Principles of
POPL document.
### Submission Site Information
The submission site is
https://popl26.hotcrp.com.
Authors can submit multiple times prior to the deadline. Only the last
submission will be reviewed. There is no abstract deadline. The submission site
requires entering author names and affiliations, relevant topics, and potential
conflicts. Addition or removal of authors after the submission deadline will
need to be approved by the Program Chair (as this kind of change potentially
undermines the goal of eliminating conflicts during paper assignment).
The submission deadline is 11:59PM July 10, 2025 anywhere on earth (AOE):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth### Conflicts of Interest
For each submission, the authors must make sure that they properly declare all
potential conflicts of interest for all of the authors of that submission. This
includes marking PC conflicts as well as "Other Conflicts (external)". A
conflict caught late in the reviewing process leads to a voided review which may
be infeasible to replace.
Conflicts should be declared between an adviser and an advisee (e.g., Ph.D.,
post-doc; forever), between an author and a co-author (papers and proposals; for
two years), between people at the same institution (branches of large companies
or different locations of research institutes are considered to be the same
institution; for two years after leaving an institution), between people with
financial conflicts of interest, and between friends or relatives.
If a possible reviewer does not meet the above criteria, please do not identify
him/her as conflicted. Doing so could be viewed as an attempt to prevent a
qualified, but possibly skeptical reviewer from reviewing your paper. If you
nevertheless believe that a reviewer who does not meet the above criteria is
conflicted, or if you are unsure about a possible conflict, you may identify the
person and send a note to the PC Chair. Declaring a spurious conflict with the
aim of excluding otherwise qualified reviewers can be grounds for desk
rejection.
### Submission Guidelines
Prior to the paper submission deadline, authors should upload their full
anonymized paper. Here are some key requirements concerning paper submissions:
* Each paper should have no more than **25 pages of text, excluding
bibliography**, using the PACMPL format (specifically, the `acmart` LaTeX
class with `acmsmall` option). It is a single-column page layout with a 10 pt
font, 12 pt line spacing, and wider margins than recent POPL page layouts. In
this format, the main text block is 5.478 in (13.91 cm) wide and 7.884 in
(20.03 cm) tall. Use of a different format (e.g., smaller fonts or a larger
text block) is grounds for summary rejection. The PACMPL template for LaTeX
can be found at the [SIGPLAN author information
page](
https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/), and further information
about PACMPL submissions can be found on the [PACMPL author guidelines
page](
https://dl.acm.org/journal/pacmpl/author-guidelines). PACMPL does not
support submissions in Microsoft Word.
* We strongly encourage use of the `review` and `screen` options in order to
make submissions easier to review.
* Authors may choose which citation format they wish to use, which can be either
author-year (the mandate for final versions in previous years) or numeric.
* Submissions should be in PDF and printable on both US Letter and A4 paper.
Papers may be resubmitted to the submission site multiple times up until the
deadline, but the last version submitted before the deadline will be the
version reviewed.
* Submitted papers must adhere to the [SIGPLAN Republication
Policy](
https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Policies/Republication/) and the
[ACM Policy on
Plagiarism](
https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism-overview).
Concurrent paper submissions to other conferences, workshops, journals, or
similar forums of publication are not allowed.
* Authors are free to submit supplementary material along with their
submissions, but it must be fully anonymized.
* Authors must list all their conflicts of interest (both PC conflicts and
external conflicts) in the HotCRP submission form.
* Authors may include additional information in a field of the HotCRP submission
form labeled "Confidential Comments for the Program Chair". This information
need not be anonymized. It can be used to inform the Program Chair, for
example, about sensitive issues concerning a conflict with a PC member or
about supplementary material that cannot be anonymized. It is left to the
discretion of the Program Chair what to do with this information.
* If for some reason an author feels uncomfortable discussing a sensitive issue
with the Program Chair (or communicating via the "Confidential Comments" field
in HotCRP), they should feel free to get in touch instead with any of the
Associate Chairs, with whom they can discuss the issue in confidence.
* Submissions from PC members and Associate Chairs (except the Program Chair)
are permitted and will not be handled any differently than other submissions.
This is in accordance with a recent change in policy approved by the SIGPLAN
Executive Committee: SIGPLAN conferences that use full double-blind review and
whose PCs have at least 50 members need not hold PC submissions to a higher
standard.
### Artifact Evaluation for Accepted Papers
Authors of conditionally accepted papers will be invited to formally submit
supporting materials to the Artifact Evaluation process. Artifact Evaluation is
run by a separate committee whose task is to assess how the artifacts support
the work described in the papers. Artifact submission is strongly encouraged but
voluntary and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers. Papers
that go through the Artifact Evaluation process successfully will receive a seal
of approval printed on the papers themselves. Authors of accepted papers are
encouraged to make these materials publicly available upon publication of the
proceedings, by including them as "source materials" in the ACM Digital Library.
### Copyright, Publication, and Presentation
As a Gold Open Access journal, PACMPL is committed to making peer-reviewed
scientific research free of restrictions on both access and (re-)use. Authors
are strongly encouraged to support libre open access by licensing their work
with the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY)
license](
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which grants readers
liberal (re-)use rights.
Authors of accepted papers will be required to choose one of the following
publication rights:
* Author licenses the work with a [Creative Commons
license](
https://creativecommons.org/), retains copyright, and (implicitly)
grants ACM non-exclusive permission to publish (suggested choice).
* Author retains copyright of the work and grants ACM a non-exclusive permission
to publish license.
* Author retains copyright of the work and grants ACM an exclusive permission to
publish license.
* Author transfers copyright of the work to ACM.
These choices follow from ACM Copyright Policy and ACM Author Rights,
corresponding to ACM's "author pays" option.
While PACMPL may ask authors who have funding for open-access fees to
voluntarily cover the article processing charge, payment is not required for
publication. PACMPL and SIGPLAN continue to explore the best models for funding
open access, focusing on approaches that are sustainable in the long-term while
reducing short-term risk.
All papers will be archived by the ACM Digital Library. Authors will have the
option of including supplementary material with their paper. The official
publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM
Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the
conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent
filings related to published work.
Authors of accepted papers are encouraged to give a short talk (roughly 25
minutes long) at the conference, according to the conference schedule. Authors
who wish to present but who cannot attend in person will be provided with some
option for remote presentation, as well as some mechanism for remote interaction
with conference participants.
### Important update on ACM's new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!
Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM
publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open
Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access
articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article
Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM
Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from
authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%).
Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC
to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary
waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the
list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and
Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on
specific criteria set by ACM.
Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has
approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time
for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer: $250 APC for ACM/SIG
members and $350 for non-members.
This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged
to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition
period.
This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for
2026.
### Distinguished Paper Awards
At most 10% of the accepted papers of POPL 2026 will be designated as
Distinguished Papers. This award highlights papers that the Review Committee
thinks should be read by a broad audience due to their relevance, originality,
significance, and clarity. The selection of the distinguished papers will be
made based on the final version of the paper and through an additional review
process.
