Please read thoroughly the following steps to have a good chance for a smooth progress from acceptance to publication. For questions not answered below, please reach out to the proceedings chairs (proceedings2026@iss.acm.org) about all publication matters.

ISS follows a hybrid model when publishing its proceedings. Full papers get published in a special ISS issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human–Computer Interaction (PACM HCI) journal. Posters, Demos, Workshops, Tutorials, and Doctoral Symposium contributions are published as Companion Proceedings of ISS. Both parts are published in the ACM Digital Library.

Full Papers – PACM Publication Ready Instructions

If you are an author of an accepted Full Paper, continue reading. If you are an author of an accepted Poster, Demo, Workshop, Tutorial, or Doctoral Symposium contribution, please refer to the Companion Proceedings Author Instructions.

PACM / Full Paper Publication Deadlines (all EoD AoE)

• Author PCS Confirmation deadline – Monday, 12 October 2026: Authors confirm PCS data is correct (eRights will be sent out after this deadline).
• eRights completion deadline – Wednesday, 14 October 2026: Authors complete the eRights form.
• Revised PDF Upload deadline – Friday, 16 October 2026: Authors upload self-compiled PDF to PCS (including auxiliary material).
• TAPS submission deadline – Monday, 19 October 2026: Authors upload their final sources to TAPS.
• Publication-Ready deadline – Wednesday, 21 October 2026: Authors upload the FINAL TAPS-approved version to PCS.
• Monday, 19 October 2026: Video Presentation and Supplementary Materials deadline.

Note: the Proceedings Chairs may still request production or metadata corrections until the end of October; substantive changes to the paper are not permitted after the TAPS submission deadline. For a detailed explanation of the deadlines and their requirements, see Explanation of Deadlines below.

Overall Procedure

The chart below outlines the publication process, from acceptance notification to camera-ready upload. There are three independent systems involved:

• Precision Conference Systems (PCS) is the main portal for the review process and for the final upload of all materials.
• eRights is a portal operated by ACM where authors of accepted papers confirm rights, correctness of metadata, and article processing charges (APC).
• TAPS is a portal operated by Aptara Corporation on behalf of ACM that generates the camera-ready PDF and HTML versions of all publications.

Please note that different ACM conferences and journals implement different workflows. Notably, ISS does not use an external vendor for preparing proceedings: all camera-ready materials need to be submitted to PCS.

• Confirm author information in PCS (contact the Publication chairs in case something needs to be updated). Once confirmed, you will receive an email to complete the eRights form. If you have issues with your author information and have not received the eRights form, publication chairs will contact you to confirm them; you may also contact publication chairs to check.
• Complete eRights. The link to it comes from rightsreview@acm.org (subject: “ACM Permission Release Form […]”).
  Warning: the data submitted to eRights will replace all information included in the source file. Names, affiliations, and email addresses (including private emails in the email field) entered into eRights will be used on your final TAPS-processed paper. Do not remove affiliations or even authors.
• Prepare source file:
  • Add requested edits, do a final proofreading following recommendations in the meta review.
  • Add eRights to the source file, together with the CCS concepts block, accessibility descriptions and keywords.
  • For LaTeX: change \documentclass[]{} to \documentclass[acmsmall]{acmart}
  • For Word: attach the template and follow the steps outlined in Additional Information for Word Authors below.
• Upload self-compiled PDF to PCS (by the Revised PDF Upload deadline).
• Add accessibility descriptions to PCS (detailed instructions are available in the Accessibility Guide for Authors).
• Upload the final source file to TAPS as soon as possible (latest by the TAPS submission deadline). The email for TAPS will be sent only to the corresponding author indicated in the ACM eRights form, and will come from tapsadmin@aptaracorp.awsapps.com (subject: “Notification to upload your paper to the ACM Pub Mgt Sys | …”).
• Review TAPS-processed files carefully for formatting or other issues (note: the TAPS-processed file will have the author details & title from eRights).
• Approve the TAPS version and upload the TAPS-processed files to PCS (by the Publication-Ready deadline).

All authors should ensure they are using the latest version of the template available on the ACM Templates page. Authors using Microsoft Word must complete additional validation steps and should factor in extra time to complete this work (see Additional Information for Word Authors below).

All authors must follow these guidelines:

• Use a filename that does not contain spaces and special characters. Filenames should only include upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, the dash “-” and underscore “_” characters. Filenames that contain a space will result in an error during processing (the period between the filename and the file extension, e.g. “figure7.png”, is fine).
• All images need to be of appropriate quality (for conversion into the required formats for the HTML5 version). We strongly recommend using vector graphics wherever possible.
• Provide accessible descriptions (instructions available in the template) for all figures, including those in the appendix.

Explanation of Deadlines

1. eRights completion deadline: authors complete eRights forms. Authors need to finalize their eRights by this date to receive the TAPS link. No further changes to author order, title, and affiliations (including email addresses) are possible after this date.
2. TAPS submission deadline: authors upload their final source to TAPS, and authors have uploaded accessibility descriptions to PCS. Authors must upload their final source, including all accessibility descriptions, to TAPS by this date – the source needs to be final (no changes to content anymore) so TAPS has enough time to process the paper and fix any processing errors before the camera-ready deadline. Authors additionally need to add all accessibility descriptions (main text and appendix) to PCS.
3. Publication-Ready deadline: authors upload the FINAL TAPS-approved version to PCS. This is the camera-ready deadline: authors need to have fixed all issues on the TAPS-generated versions (PDF + HTML), approve the TAPS-generated version by this deadline, and upload the final version to PCS (including supplementary materials).

Detailed Step-by-step Procedure

Be happy about the acceptance 🎉 congratulations!

Within 24 hours of acceptance (to ensure you receive eRights):

• Read the reviews if there are any changes requested.
• Read through the PCS final submission form.
• Check all authors’ PCS accounts (Account → Change contact information, affiliations at the bottom) for, non-exhaustively:
  • private email addresses in the affiliations,
  • typos in the email addresses or duplicate/identical email addresses shared by multiple authors,
  • missing ORCIDs (these need to be added to the PCS profiles),
  • correctness of your (and your co-authors’) full name in the system,
  • author names in all caps – these must be fixed (request authors to fix them); the system does not allow ALL CAPS,
  • whether you want this exact version of your affiliation on your final paper (no change/switch of complete affiliations allowed),
  • whether the second affiliation simply repeats the first affiliation (this is redundant and not necessary),
  • whether the contact author (the author who created the submission in PCS) has the correct email address to receive the eRights form in their chosen affiliation (the eRights form will be sent to this address, not the PCS account’s email address).
• In case of any discrepancy, or if you want to add an affiliation, please reach out to the proceedings chairs (proceedings2026@iss.acm.org) by the Author PCS Confirmation deadline, as the metadata from PCS is imported into the eRights system and needs to stay consistent.
• Check the layout of the authors’ complete affiliations (including e-mail addresses) as entered in PCS, as they will appear in eRights this way (department names, secondary affiliations, e-mail addresses, etc.) in your source code/LaTeX file – once the eRights form is completed, you can no longer make “cosmetic” affiliation changes.
• For Word users: you may use the Overleaf template, change the code in line 47 to \documentclass[acmsmall]{acmart}, and plug in title, names and affiliations including emails if you want to check it.

Until the eRights completion deadline:

• Check carefully whether the affiliations and associated emails (in the email field for each author) are what you expect and match what you have in PCS. The email address you put in the email field in PCS will be used by ACM for matching with TAPS, and should also be the one displayed in the paper.
• Check the title and names: weird symbols, accurate upper and lower case use, whether the middle name initial is in the correct field.
• Make sure the institutional email is correct (this will NOT be used for publication, only to associate your paper with an ACM member account and, if it is APC-eligible, to determine if and how much you have to pay).
• Complete eRights by reaching and clicking the button “finalize all data” (this will lead to you getting the link to TAPS) – this will replace information on title, authors and affiliations in your source file. If the link doesn’t arrive within a few days, check your spam folder; if it isn’t there, contact the proceedings chairs.

After the eRights completion deadline:

No changes to title, affiliations, or author names are possible anymore.

Until the TAPS submission deadline (preparing the TAPS source):

• Add all changes requested by reviewers to your source file.
• Make sure the format of your paper strictly adheres to the ACM format.
• For LaTeX:
  • Use version acmart v2.16 or newer.
  • Add the copyright details from eRights before \begin{document}.
  • If you use umlauts or other unicode characters, do not forget to add \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}.
  • Add the received-dates block before the \maketitle command, e.g.:
    \received{February 2026}
\received[revised]{June 2026}
\received[accepted]{July 2026}
• Do a thorough proof-reading (preferably have multiple co-authors proof-read). Check, non-exhaustively:
  • Is your work correctly de-anonymized (e.g., no anonymized institutions of where your research was done)?
  • Did you remove all change-track markers?
  • Did you add the CCS Concepts?
  • Did you add the Additional Keywords and Phrases?
  • Did you add your acknowledgements (e.g., funding)?
  • The sections at the end of the paper should be ordered as follows: first acknowledgements, then references, and last appendices.
  • Are your references okay (format, DOI, etc.)?
  • LaTeX: to highlight a corresponding author or shared first authorship, use \authornote{} and \authornotemark[] (and check later whether TAPS correctly compiled it).
  • Information in running heads (LaTeX): for authors, use the complete list of authors as long as it fits on one line; if longer, initial the given names (and use \shortauthors to declare the short version), if still longer use only surnames, and only as a last resort use “et al.” after the first author. For the title, it should not use more than one line in the running heads (from page 3); if too long, use the beginning of the title followed by an ellipsis (“…”), specifying the shorter title as an option argument for the \title command – a short, concise title is always a good idea.
  • For LaTeX: did you wrap all your URLs in footnotes etc. in \url{}?
  • Text, tables, and figures (also headings, program code, and formulas) must not run into the margins outside the text area and between the columns.
  • Did you add all required accessibility descriptions? Remember: captions ≠ descriptions.
  • Did you remove all non-supported LaTeX packages? (This is the source of most TAPS issues – see the list of accepted LaTeX packages.) The LaTeX package ‘subfig’ interferes with the layout of captions – if used, add \usepackage{subfig}, which disables the additional caption formatting.
  • Captions: tables should have their caption above; figures and listings should have the caption below.
  • If possible, avoid any self-defined commands.
  • Figures: are all diagrams embedded as vector graphics? (If not possible, use a high-resolution bitmap of at least 300 dpi; do not use JPG for diagrams, use a lossless format like PNG or GIF – JPG is fine for photos.) If using PDF figures created with Figma, check that they render correctly in different PDF viewers (Apple Preview can cause issues). Is all third-party material appropriately attributed (author, copyright holder, and origin)?
• Prepare the final source. TAPS will replace author and title in the source document with information from the eRights system, and will therefore ignore these fields in the source document.
  • LaTeX: the source must have a single “main” .tex file, although the project can be organized using a main .tex file that includes input from multiple .tex files. Remove all template sample files and any other .tex files that include a document class. Ensure the source compiles without errors (some editors, such as Overleaf, will tolerate errors and generate a PDF – this is not permissible for the final publication; check the error log and correct all compilation errors). Ensure the bibliography compiles: check the warning log, correct all errors, address warnings, and add DOIs wherever possible.
  • Word: see Additional Information for Word Authors below.
• Upload your complete and finalized source file to TAPS as soon as possible (latest by the TAPS submission deadline). During processing, some errors may occur – check for processing errors on the Dashboard that you might be able to fix without TAPS support, and regularly check the dashboard, as emails might get lost.
  • For errors in the PDF: download the TAPS-processed source files, fix the issues in the TAPS source files, and reupload your source via the dashboard.
  • For errors only in the HTML (PDF is fine): contact TAPS support via the dashboard you used for uploading.

After the TAPS submission deadline:

No changes to the content of the paper are allowed.

Until the Publication-Ready deadline:

• Respond to any messages by TAPS in case of processing errors.
• When you receive the proofs by TAPS, check the following in all formats (HTML, PDF), non-exhaustively: do all hyperlinks (web links, links to figures/tables/sections) work in all formats? Are your references okay in all formats? Are the colours correct on tables etc. in all formats? Are figures displaying correctly in all formats? Is the file size of your PDF reasonable given the content (if not, consider resizing or recompressing the source images)?
• If anything is not correct, either fix it in the source file from TAPS and re-upload, or reach out to TAPS to help you fix it. Give the proof to co-authors to check.
• Download the source file generated by TAPS.
• Last: only approve the TAPS version when you are 100% confident that this exact version of your paper can be published.
• The final publication PDF undergoes an ACM accessibility check. Authors must still provide all required accessibility descriptions in the source and in PCS.
• Optionally, prepare the accompanying video (.mp4 file, H.264 codec for video and AAC codec for audio, 1920×1080 px, 30 fps).
• Optionally, prepare a ZIP file with all supplementary materials (see guidance below).
• Upload all necessary files to PCS: final PDF, source files, and optionally video and supplementary materials.
• Done 🙂

Guidance for Preparing Supplementary Materials

• Include all materials requested in the meta-review (e.g., source code, raw data).
• Consider which additional materials may be helpful or necessary for others who want to verify/replicate your research or build upon it.
• Where appropriate, put materials into separate subfolders (e.g. “Study 1”, “Interview Transcripts”, “Demo app”).
• Remove personally identifiable information (PII) where necessary.
• Consider compressing large video files (100+ MB).
• Check for hidden directories and remove unnecessary files (.git / .vscode directories, cache files).
• Where appropriate, consider explicitly licensing materials under a Creative Commons License to ease re-use.
• Add a file “README.txt” (or “README.md”) with an overview of the materials and further information (e.g. links to source code repositories, contact information, copyright).
• Publication chairs will run some basic checks and may remove problematic content before uploading the supplementary materials to the ACM DL.

Additional Information for Word Authors

After downloading the ACM Master Article Template for Microsoft Word, authors need to follow the instructions to attach the ACM Template to their .docx file. More information and best practices for using Microsoft Word to prepare an article can be found in our video walkthrough. The basic steps are:

1. Attach the template to the submission file.
2. Add the line with applicable dates, “Received Month 2026; revised Month 2026; accepted Month 2026”, to your submission (copyright information from ACM eRights will be added during the TAPS process).
3. Apply the appropriate style to each element of Head, Body, and Reference – refer to Table 1 in the original Submission Template file, or the list below.
4. From the Template ribbon, run Crosslinking to auto-hyperlink all citations.
5. Press the “ACM Template” button and run “Manuscript Validation.” Authors must run the “Manuscript Validation” macro and achieve validation before uploading the Word document to TAPS.
6. If the validation process is successful, upload the files to TAPS. If validation does not work after following the steps above, contact confsupport@aptaracorp.com and proceedings2026@iss.acm.org.

Only the styles available in the Word template are to be used – see Table 1 of the ACM submission template for all available styles. Word authors should follow these instructions:

• Ensure that ALL content in the Word document is styled with the correct styles as listed in Table 1 (provided in the template).
• Text (with links) should be in black, not blue, and not underlined.
• Use numbered style for the bibliography.
• If a single figure contains multiple images, these must be inserted as a single image.
• All images are of appropriate quality and must be followed by a caption.
• Remove all blank lines.
• Apply one or more descriptors (“concepts”) from the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS) and add them to the document. CCS is a taxonomy for the computing field; authors can build a list of CCS descriptors at dl.acm.org/ccs/ccs.cfm. In Microsoft Word, adding CCS concepts is a three-step process:
  1. Select the formatted list of concept(s) from the CCS web interface and paste it into the document, styled with the “CCSDescription” tag (e.g., “Computer systems organization~Real-time operating systems”).
  2. Mac users: select “View CCS TeX Code” and check the “Show the XML only” box, copy the XML, then in Word select “Properties” from the “File” menu → “Summary” tab → paste the XML into the “Comments” area.
  3. Windows users: select “View CCS TeX Code” and check the “Show the XML only” box, copy the XML, then in Word select “Properties” from the “File” menu → “Advanced Properties” → “Summary” tab → paste the XML into the “Comments” area.

Further helpful resources

These Publication Ready Instructions are based on the CHI PLAY 2026 Guide and the CHI 2026 Guide, but have been significantly extended and adapted to the specific publication workflow used for ISS. The following external resources might help you when preparing the camera-ready version; please be aware that the publication workflow for ISS differs in some ways from these generic instructions – if in doubt, please contact the publication chairs.

• acm.org/publications/authors/submissions
• authors.acm.org – Preparing your article with LaTeX
• homes.cs.washington.edu/~spencer/taps

Authors

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