ISCA Camera-Ready

Acceptance starts a second, administrative project with real failure modes: papers have appeared with anonymization stubs intact, dead artifact links, and acknowledgments naming the wrong grant. The 2026 edition maintained a dedicated camera-ready guidelines page (iscaconf.org/isca2026/submit/cameraready.php — its detailed contents were not directly fetchable at verification time, so the specific instructions below marked practice are community-standard rather than quoted rules; the page itself is the authority — 待核实 per edition).

The publisher variable unique to ISCA

ISCA's ACM SIGARCH + IEEE-CS TCCA co-sponsorship shows up concretely at camera-ready: the publishing arrangement varies by edition (the 52nd edition's proceedings were ACM-published; the 2026 edition carried IEEE branding and pointed LaTeX users at an IEEE template). Everything downstream — rights forms, copyright blocks, final template, DOI issuer, submission portal for finals — follows the edition's publisher. Rule one of ISCA camera-ready: identify this edition's publisher workflow before touching the LaTeX, and expect it to differ from the last ISCA you published at.

De-anonymization is a checklist, not a mood

Work from the submission's blinding actions and invert each one deliberately:

# Final-PDF de-anonymization verification (inverse of the submission sweep)
pdfinfo final.pdf | grep -i author            # now SHOULD list authors
pdftotext final.pdf - | grep -ci 'anonym'     # expect 0
pdftotext final.pdf - | grep -nE 'blind review|under submission' # expect none
pdftotext final.pdf - | grep -oE 'https?://[^ )]+' | sort -u > links.txt
while read -r u; do curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %s\n' "$u" "$u"; \
  done < links.txt | grep -v '^200'           # every link in the paper resolves

Shepherds and required changes

If the acceptance carries a shepherd or a mandatory-revisions list, that list is a condition, not a suggestion. Practice that keeps this smooth: send the shepherd a change memo (item → what changed → where) with the revised draft, early enough for one round of disagreement; where you believe a requested change is wrong, negotiate in the memo — never silently skip an item and hope.

Content changes: repair, don't remodel

Camera-ready is for review-driven repairs and accuracy fixes. If numbers changed (a bug found post-acceptance, a rerun under the fixed seed), correct them and ensure abstract/intro claims still match the tables — publishing known- stale numbers because "it was accepted with them" is how errata happen. Do not add new contributions; the version of record should be the reviewed paper, healed. Any camera-ready page allowance beyond the submission's 11 text pages is edition-specific and was not verified — 待核实 before planning to grow.

Badges, statements, and the artifact block

Coordinate with the AE track (isca-artifact-evaluation): earned badges are applied to the published paper under the ACM badging framework, and the camera-ready typically carries an artifact-availability statement with the archival DOI. Get the DOI before the camera-ready deadline by depositing the evaluated snapshot early; retrofitting a DOI after the proceedings freeze is somewhere between painful and impossible.

The June obligations

The 2026 conference ran June 27 - July 1 in Raleigh. Between camera-ready and the conference, in rough order of deadline pressure:

1. Registration — whether a specific author-registration category is mandatory per paper was not verified (待核实, and commonly true at flagship venues); resolve it the week of acceptance, with visa lead times in mind for international authors.
2. Talk — the community's norm is mechanism-forward: motivate with your measured data, spend the middle on how the design works (the walk-through from isca-writing-style translates directly to slides), end on the honest limits. Rehearse against the session's time slot, not a guess at it.
3. Poster/lightning collateral if the edition uses them — 待核实.
4. Publicity — once the proceedings version exists: update the arXiv record if one exists, the lab page, and the repo README to cite the canonical DOI, so the version of record accretes the citations.

Sequence for the six-or-so weeks

Week 0   Read THIS edition's camera-ready page top to bottom; identify
         publisher, template, rights form, portal, true deadline (AoE?).
Week 1   Shepherd memo (if any) + content repairs; coauthor sign-off on
         author order and affiliations.
Week 2   De-anonymization checklist; acknowledgments with grant numbers;
         artifact DOI deposited.
Week 3   Publisher template pass; rights form executed by the authorized
         author; metadata (title case, abstract, keywords) entered exactly.
Week 4   Link check + verification script above on the actual final PDF;
         upload; download back and re-verify what the portal stored.
Buffer   Publisher back-and-forth (format rejections are routine, not
         emergencies) + registration + talk drafting.

Final gate before upload

• Publisher, template, and rights form identified from THIS edition's pages
• Author block, order, and affiliations signed off by every coauthor
• De-anonymization checklist fully inverted; verification script clean
• Shepherd/mandatory items all addressed with a change memo
• Artifact DOI live; badge coordination confirmed with AE chairs
• Acknowledgments carry exact grant numbers and required disclosures
• Portal's stored PDF downloaded back and re-verified
• Registration done; talk slot known; travel and visa in motion

Verified anchors (dates, sponsorship, AE arrangement, 2026 template flavor): ../../resources/official-source-map.md, checked 2026-07-08. The camera-ready page contents, page allowance, rights workflow, and attendance rules for the target edition are the controlling sources once posted.