osdi-review-process
GitHub解析OSDI论文评审流程，涵盖HotCRP双盲机制、无作者回复期的影响及重型指导模式。适用于分析评审周期、理解条件录用与拒稿风险，以及指导写作以应对终局性评审和后续 shepherd 修改要求。
Trigger Scenarios
Install
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill osdi-review-process -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "osdi-review-process",
"description": "Use when reasoning about how an OSDI paper is reviewed and decided — the double-blind HotCRP PC pipeline with no author-response period, the two tracks, conditional acceptance with heavyweight shepherding, co-chair recusal, notification timing, and the Jay Lepreau Best Paper lineage."
}
OSDI Review Process
Model the pipeline the paper enters at the December deadline. The process facts below are the OSDI '26 cycle (verified 2026-07-08); OSDI re-decides its process per edition — '26 itself removed the response period — so read the current CFP's process section before predicting anything.
The pipeline, author's-eye view
Dec 11 submission complete on HotCRP (osdi26.usenix.hotcrp.com)
| double-blind PC review, typically multi-round:
| early round -> low-scoring papers exit with fewer reviews
| later round(s) -> surviving papers gather more reviews
| online discussion + PC meeting
| (no author-response step existed in the '26 cycle)
Mar 26 notification: accept | conditional accept | reject
| conditional: shepherd assigned, mandated-change list issued
Jun 9 shepherd-approved final paper due (or the acceptance lapses)
Jul 13 open-access proceedings live as the event opens
Round structure and reviewer counts are PC-internal and vary; what is stable is the consequence: the first two or three pages decide whether the paper earns the later rounds, because early-round reviewers triage a large pile (capped at eight submissions per author, but multiplied across a big community).
What "no response period" changes about review
OSDI '26 eliminated the author response. Reading the decision process correctly means internalizing three shifts:
- Reviewer misunderstandings are terminal. A reviewer who misreads the threat
model or misses the baseline's tuning carries that reading into discussion
unchallenged. The only defense is prose that cannot be misread
(
osdi-writing-style's objection pass). - The PC discussion is where papers are saved or sunk — by other reviewers, not by you. A paper survives when its champion can answer objections from the paper's own text; write so a champion is armed.
- Conditional acceptance absorbs the dialogue. The conversation that a rebuttal would have hosted moves after the decision, into shepherding, where it has teeth: mandated changes, verified by a named shepherd, on a deadline.
Conditional acceptance and heavyweight shepherding
OSDI '26 stated the mechanism plainly: some papers are accepted conditionally, and will be rejected unless the authors make the changes the PC determined, completed by the final-paper deadline and approved by the shepherd. Treat it as:
| Property | Practical meaning |
|---|---|
| The change list is a contract | Scope it line by line; ambiguities are resolved with the shepherd, in writing, early |
| The shepherd is the gatekeeper | Their approval — not your opinion of completion — converts conditional to accepted |
| June 9 is the enforcement date | New experiments mandated in April need the frozen testbed from the review window (osdi-reproducibility) |
| It is not a negotiation to reopen | Relitigating the reviews with the shepherd burns the one relationship that can accept the paper |
osdi-author-response covers how to run the exchange itself.
Structural facts worth knowing
- Two tracks, one PC decision process: Research and Operational Systems papers are reviewed against different evidence expectations (novel design vs deployed experience) — know which bar your reviewers were told to apply.
- Co-chair recusal: OSDI '26 pre-committed that a submitting co-chair's papers are handled exclusively by the other co-chair under the same double-blind procedure — an unusually explicit conflict rule worth citing if conflict questions arise.
- Best-paper lineage: the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award (inaugurated at OSDI '08) is selected by the PC from the accepted program; strong artifacts and clean claims correlate with it, but it is not something authors apply for.
- Openness after decision: accepted papers become free PDFs the day the event opens (USENIX open access) — reviews themselves stay confidential; OSDI does not publish reviews or decisions OpenReview-style.
Surviving the triage round
Multi-round PC review means the paper's first job is to not exit early. What early-round reviewers can actually evaluate in a large pile:
- Pages 1–2 carry the whole argument — pain, gap, named idea, headline evidence with its cost. A reviewer who stops at page 3 should already be wrong to reject.
- The evaluation's table of contents — skimmers check that the strongest baseline appears and that a cost/limitations discussion exists before reading any numbers; their absence is a triage-round exit.
- Figure captions as a parallel paper — early readers walk the figures; captions that state takeaways ("recovery flat from 8 to 64 nodes; baselines linear") let the skim reach the right conclusion.
- Formatting smells — cramped spacing, page-13 spillover, or an appendix where
none is allowed mark the paper as careless before content is weighed
(
osdi-submission).
None of this is gaming; it is writing for the process that actually exists — one with early exits and no author response to recover from a bad first impression.
Reading a rejection usefully
Without a response phase, OSDI reviews are the only signal you get, so mine them:
recurring phrases across reviewers ("unclear workload realism," "incremental over X")
are the PC-meeting summary leaking through. Sort objections into fixable-by-writing,
fixable-by-experiment, and fit-level; the first two feed a SOSP/NSDI retarget within
months (osdi-workflow), the third sends you to osdi-topic-selection before any
retarget.
Decoding the decision letter
Three outcomes, three very different next moves: a clean accept still usually assigns a shepherd for lighter-touch final-version guidance — treat their suggestions seriously even when not framed as mandates; a conditional accept is a contract with a June enforcement date, decoded in the section above; a reject with substantive, convergent reviews is the system working — the reviews are the retarget's requirements document — while a reject with thin, scattered reviews usually means a triage-round exit, and the fix is the paper's first two pages, not its technical core.
Output format
[Phase] pre-decision / conditional / accepted / rejected
[Process facts confirmed live] response period? tracks? shepherding wording? (待核实 if unread)
[If pre-decision] top 3 misreadings the text invites (terminal without rebuttal)
[If conditional] change-list scoped? shepherd contact opened? June feasibility
[If rejected] objection triage: writing / experiment / fit + retarget call
Version History
- 9f86f09 Current 2026-07-19 17:11
