Call for papers

The ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) is the premier venue for human-centered research in the design, use, and evaluation of technologies that support or affect social, cooperative, and collaborative practices in groups, organizations, communities, and networks. Bringing together top researchers and practitioners, CSCW 2025 will explore topics across sociotechnical domains of work, home, education, healthcare, the arts, design, entertainment, and ethics, including social computing and social media, crowdsourcing, and technologies for co-located or remote collaboration, communication, education, work articulation, coordination, awareness, and information sharing.

Papers are expected to report on novel results from human-centered research discussing the design, development, use, and/or analysis of CSCW and social computing systems; or introduce new human-centered approaches to the conceptualization or critical analysis of such systems. Submissions exploring how computing technologies — including those linked to recent developments in AI, machine learning, robotics, and AR/VR — relate to questions of race, indigeneity, gender, and the environment are particularly encouraged, providing they are properly contextualized within cooperative, collaborative, or social computing issues. Submissions by members of underrepresented groups are particularly welcome. Authors exploring historical and sociotechnical perspectives on CSCW systems are also encouraged to submit.

We invite contributions to CSCW across a variety of human-centered research techniques, methods, approaches, and domains, including:

  • Social and crowd computing. Studies, theories, designs, mechanisms, systems, and/or infrastructures addressing social media, social networking, wikis, blogs, online gaming, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, virtual worlds, or collaborative information behaviors.
  • CSCW and social computing system development. Hardware, architectures, infrastructures, interaction design, technical foundations, algorithms, and/or toolkits that are explored and discussed within the context of building new social and collaborative systems and experiences.
  • Methodologies and tools. Novel human-centered methods, or combinations of approaches and tools used in building collaborative systems or studying their use.
  • Critical, historical, ethnographic analyses. Studies of technologically enabled social, cooperative, and collaborative practices within and beyond work settings illuminating their historical, social, and material specificity, and/or exploring their political or ethical dimensions.
  • Empirical investigations. Findings, guidelines, and/or studies of social practices, communication, cooperation, collaboration, or use, as related to CSCW and social technologies.
  • Domain-specific social, cooperative, and collaborative applications. Including applications to healthcare, transportation, design, manufacturing, gaming, ICT4D, sustainability, education, accessibility, global collaboration, or other domains.
  • Ethics and policy implications. Analysis of the implications of sociotechnical systems in social, cooperative and collaborative practices, as well as the algorithms that shape them.
  • CSCW and social computing systems based on emerging technologies. Including mobile and ubiquitous computing, game engines, virtual worlds, multi-touch, novel display technologies, vision and gesture recognition, big data, MOOCs, crowd labor markets, SNSs, computer-aided or robotically-supported work, and sensing systems.
  • Crossing boundaries. Studies, prototypes, or other investigations that explore interactions across fields of research, disciplines, distances, languages, generations, and cultures to help better understand how CSCW and social systems might help transcend social, temporal, and/or spatial boundaries.

Send queries about paper submissions to papers2025@cscw.acm.org.

To promote work-life balance, we have set all deadlines on Tuesdays to avoid weekends at any time zone.

SUBMISSION PROCESS

SUBMISSION MODEL

To support diverse and high-quality contributions, CSCW uses a two-cycle review process with the opportunity for major revisions reviewed by the same reviewers. Accepted papers are published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACM HCI) Journal.

CSCW 2025 will follow the half-yearly submission model implemented in CSCW 2022. Thus, new paper submissions will be only possible for the July 2024 and October 2024 deadlines. We have four additional deadlines in December, March, April, and July for revisions only. Failure to submit a revised version of a paper by the associated deadline means that the paper has been withdrawn.

Below is an overview of the submission timeline. All accepted papers from these two cycles will be invited to present at CSCW 2025.

JULY 2024 CYCLE

  • July 2, 2024: New paper submissions due 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time.
    • Expected notification date: Oct 9, 2024 AoE.
    • Possible outcomes: Major Revisions, Minor Revisions, Reject.
  • October 22, 2024: Resubmission of papers that received a Minor Revision recommendation due 23:59 AoE.
    • Expected notification date: Nov 13, 2024.
    • Possible outcomes: Accept or Reject.
  • December 10, 2024: Resubmission of papers that received a Major Revision recommendation due 23:59 AoE.
    • Expected notification date: Feb 12, 2025.
    • Possible outcomes: Accept with Minor Revisions, Reject.
  • March 4, 2025: Resubmission of papers that received a Minor Revision recommendation after Major Revisions due 23:59 AoE.
    • Expected notification date: Mar 26, 2025.
    • Possible outcomes: Accept or Reject.

OCTOBER 2024 CYCLE

  • October 29, 2024: New paper submissions due 23:59 AoE.
    • Expected notification date: Feb 12, 2025.
    • Possible outcomes: Major Revisions, Minor Revisions, Reject.
  • March 4, 2025: Resubmission of papers that received a Minor Revision recommendation due 23:59 AoE.
    • Expected notification date: Mar 26, 2025.
    • Possible outcomes: Accept or Reject.
  • April 15, 2025: Resubmission of papers that received a Major Revision recommendation due 23:59 AoE.
    • Expected notification date: Jun 11, 2025.
    • Possible outcomes: Accept with Minor Revisions, Reject.
  • Jul 1, 2025: Resubmission of papers that received a Minor Revision recommendation after Major Revisions due 23:59 AoE.
    • Expected notification date: Aug 6, 2025.
    • Possible outcomes: Accept or Reject.

PROCESS DETAILS

CSCW 2025 uses the Precision Conference System (PCS) 2.0: https://new.precisionconference.com. Authors submitting papers for peer-review to ACM publications must comply with the SIGCHI Submission and Review Policy, including, but not limited to:

  • That the paper submitted is original, that the listed authors are the creators of the work, that each author is aware of the submission and that they are listed as an author, and that the paper is an honest representation of the underlying work.
  • Occasionally, a paper may have some overlap with a prior publication (for example, there is some overlap with the datasets used, but the analyses in each paper are considered to be a completely different and substantial contribution). This must be disclosed to the editorial team at the time of submission. Authors must provide a detailed explanation of the overlap and distinct contribution of each paper in the “Comments (optional)” field on the submission form. Please make sure to refer and adhere to the ACM policy in reuse of content from prior publications available at:
    https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/simultaneous-submissions 
  • Similarly, for parallel submissions (authors submitting multiple papers related to the same study), authors also need to provide information about the relationship between submissions, as well as how they are different from one another in the “Comments (optional)” field of the submission form. Please make sure to refer and adhere to the ACM policy in simultaneous submissions available at:
    https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/simultaneous-submissions
  • That the work submitted is not currently under review at any other publication venue, and that it will not be submitted to another venue unless it has been rejected or withdrawn from this venue.

For information about re-publication in English of work previously published in another language, please refer to section 1.5.4 of the ACM SIGCHI policy.

Confidentiality of submitted material will be maintained. Upon acceptance, the titles, authorship, and abstracts of papers will be used in the Advance Program. Submissions should contain no information or material that is or will be proprietary and/or confidential at the time of publication and should cite no publication that will be proprietary or confidential at that time. Final versions of accepted papers must be formatted according to detailed instructions provided by the publisher. Copyright release forms must be signed for inclusion in the PACM HCI and the ACM Digital Library.

Authors should adhere to the new ACM policy in authorship, available at https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/new-acm-policy-on-authorship.

PAPER GUIDELINES REGARDING SCOPE

CSCW is a broad and interdisciplinary field, covering many methods, theories, and epistemologies. It is difficult to draw explicit disciplinary boundaries of what counts and what does not count as CSCW research. Nonetheless, in the spirit of welcoming those new and not as familiar to CSCW, we believe it is beneficial to offer some guidelines when deciding whether your submissions are appropriate for CSCW.

In general, contributions must have a focus on social aspects of technology mediation and be properly contextualized in the CSCW literature, with clear reference to CSCW concepts and/or theories informing, being affected or being proposed. Please note that papers whose research contributions are primarily of relevance or benefit to individual users will be considered out of scope. For example, this would include papers whose major contribution is on user research findings that inform the design of a system primarily focused on benefiting a sole, individual user. Also, systems-based or algorithmic research not making explicit how it involves aspects of cooperative, collaborative or social computing are not within the scope of CSCW.

Therefore, authors should clearly answer yes to the following:

  • Does your work build upon, bridge, discuss, or cite prior CSCW work in a significant manner? Does it make clear how it offers new knowledge of benefit to the CSCW community?
  • Have you clearly elaborated on how the results of your work are useful for thinking about the design of computing technologies to support cooperative/collaborative work or social interactions?

Authors must make sure that their submission is within the scope of the conference. During the submission, authors will be asked to write a short paragraph explaining how this is the case. Contributions out of scope will be desk rejected.

ANONYMOUS REVIEW POLICY

Papers are subject to anonymous reviewing. Submissions must have authors’ names and affiliations removed, including references to universities, companies, labs, and cities. Any grant information that identifies the author(s) and their institution should be removed as well. Furthermore, obvious identifying statements and information that might confuse reviewers regarding the authors (e.g., mock authors’ names originally in templates provided to demonstrate formatting) should be removed. Images used in the paper must NOT disclose the authors identity or suggest affiliation. This policy includes all submitted materials, including supplemental materials. Papers that violate this policy will be desk rejected.

Please check in particular the first page, headers and footers, images, the acknowledgements section, AND meta-data of all submitted files. For resubmissions, make sure that the authors’ identities are not disclosed in the annotated document submitted in addition to the clean version. If possible, check the document with tracked changes in different PDF readers. It is possible that some tracked-change information that is visible in a reader (e.g., Adobe Acrobat) is not visible in others (e.g., Preview).

Citations to authors’ own relevant work should NOT be anonymous, but rather should be done without identifying the authors. For example, “Prior work by [authors]” instead of “In our prior work…”

CSCW does not have a policy against uploading preprints to SSRN or arXiv before they are submitted for review at the conference. Nevertheless, to ensure the integrity of the peer review process, we ask that no authors publicize the work until the review process is complete. Please do not share any confidential information specific to a current review process publicly or on social media, with the exception of doing public exhibitions, festivals, and performances as part of the research where the name is integral to the work.

We also ask reviewers to refrain from taking steps to learn about authors’ identity during the peer review process.

FORMATTING AND LENGTH

Word authors: Because CSCW papers are published in PACM HCI, which uses the Sheridan service, authors need to use the old interim ACM Small template, which is ONLY available at the  following link:
https://dl.acm.org/journal/pacmhci/submission-templates

LaTeX authors need to use the template at
https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions, and insert the acmsmall call.

Overleaf authors need to use the template at
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/acm-journals-new-master-template/vgtfrcvmrvxf, and use the acmsmall call.

Papers that use a completely different template will be desk rejected. Small variance on font styles, which is possible when authors do not have particular fonts installed in their computers, will be tolerated for the initial submission but will have to be fixed in case the paper is accepted for publication.

Note: In preparing revisions, authors should continue using the template they had used for their original submissions. Reviewers will be instructed to weigh the contribution of a paper relative to its length. If a paper is shorter than 5000 words or exceeds 12,000 words, it will be submitted to additional scrutiny. Papers whose length is incommensurate with their contribution will be rejected. Note that additional materials can be submitted as appendices but be aware that reviewers are not bound to decide based on these materials.

DECISIONS AND DEADLINES

CSCW will be returning submissions to the primary contact author with one of the following decisions, along with the reviews, roughly 2-4 months from the initial submission (depending on the cycle). For the July 2024 submission deadline, we hope to send out all final notifications by Mar 26, 2025, i.e., after final acceptance of papers that receive a Major Revisions notification after initial submission. For the October 2024 submission deadline, all final notifications should be out by Aug 6, 2025, i.e., after final acceptance of papers that initially received a Major Revisions recommendation for that cycle.

  • Accept: Submissions that receive this decision are ready or nearly ready for publication, though they may require a few small changes. The final version of the paper must be submitted for verification by the corresponding Associate Chair (AC). The submission will appear in an upcoming issue of the PACM HCI.
  • Minor revision: Submissions that receive this decision will require some revisions before being accepted for publication. The revised submission MUST be submitted along with a brief response to the reviewers’ comments. The revision will be verified by the corresponding AC and if approved, the submission will be promoted to an accepted paper.
  • Major revision: Submissions that receive this decision have real potential, but will require major portions rewritten or redone, then re-reviewed. For July 2024 submissions receiving a Major Revision decision must be resubmitted by the December 2024 deadline. For October 2024 submissions, major revisions are due in April 2025. The authors must ensure that the paper has been revised sufficiently to warrant re-review. To the extent possible, resubmissions will be assigned the same AC and reviewers for re-review. Upon re-review, submissions can receive one of two decisions: Accept with minor revisions or Reject. Unlike most journals, the current CSCW review process does NOT allow for more than one major revision recommendation due to reviewer availability and time constraints.
  • Reject: Authors of rejected papers are allowed to resubmit their papers under special conditions. Please refer to the section Resubmission of Rejected and Withdrawn Papers. 
  • Desk / Quick Reject: Authors should only submit completed work of publishable quality and within the scope of ACM CSCW. Editors will desk reject papers that do not comply with such requirements. Incomplete or otherwise inappropriate submissions will also be desk rejected without review. Finally, the ACs, in cooperation with the Editors, may Quick Reject any submission that they believe has little chance of being accepted if it goes through the peer review process.

RESUBMISSION OF REJECTED AND WITHDRAWN PAPERS

Papers in the following categories can be resubmitted at the next submission deadline:

  • Papers that have been desk or quick rejected
  • Papers that got Minor Revisions but missed the resubmission deadline (considered withdrawn)
  • Papers that gets rejected after resubmitting Major Revisions

On the other hand, papers that fall in one of the following categories must wait an extra deadline to be resubmitted:

  • Papers that get rejected in first review round
  • Papers that got Major Revisions but missed the resubmission deadline (considered withdrawn)

For example, if a paper was rejected after the initial submission in July 2024, authors cannot re-submit in the October 2024 cycle, but can re-submit the paper after the October 2024 cycle. On the other hand, if the paper was desk rejected after being submitted to the July 2024 deadline, it can be resubmitted in the October 2024 deadline.

Please notice that all resubmitted papers will be treated as a new submission, meaning that they will most likely be assigned to a new Editor, new ACs, and new reviewers, who are expected to provide new and fresh reviews based on the revised resubmission. This means that the new review team is not bound to the previous assessment of the paper. Papers resubmitted with no or marginal changes (except resubmission of minor revisions papers that missed the resubmission deadline) will be desk rejected.

Authors must describe the paper’s submission history and briefly outline the changes in a designated field in PCS when resubmitting. Failure to disclose the paper’s submission history may lead to a desk reject decision. ACs and reviewers will have access to this description of the paper’s submission history and may also request to review the detailed submission history.

DECISION APPEAL PROCESS

We recognize that authors may sometimes feel a review is unfair, inappropriate, or problematic in other ways. CSCW has implemented the following process for authors who wish to appeal a decision:

  • Either:
    • Authors directly contact the Papers Chairs to officially appeal a decision
    • A committee member (1AC / 2AC / Editor / Papers Chair) raises an issue about the decision or decision-making process, possibly in response to a communication from an author
  • The appeal involves motivating the case with evidence
  • Papers Chairs assess the situation and make an initial call to bring it up for discussion with the Editors
  • The Editor assigned to the submission reviews the paper, the reviews, and the discussion in PCS to determine if the case is valid. The Editor may choose to involve the ACs at this stage
  • Other Editors weigh in and review the case
  • The Editors come to a collective decision and share their decision with the Papers Chairs
  • The Papers Chairs discuss the Editors’ decision. If a change is agreed, Papers Chairs record the updated decision in PCS
  • The Papers Chairs communicate the final decision to the authors. Decisions are final and further appeals will not be pursued.

Appeals must be submitted no later than seven days after the decision notification is out. Any appeal submitted after that time limit will not be pursued.

PRIMARY RESEARCH PARADIGM

When uploading the paper to the PCS reviewing system, authors will be asked to indicate the primary research paradigm of their paper for appropriate reviewer assignment. Currently there are six paradigm choices available:

  • Technical/Systems, e.g., building novel CSCW systems, algorithms, implementing novel features in existing systems, etc.
  • Empirical–Qualitative, e.g., ethnography, workplace studies, qualitative user studies, etc.
  • Empirical–Quantitative, e.g., “big data,” quantitative user studies, statistical methods, etc.
  • Mixed Methods, e.g., combined qualitative and quantitative empirical research, design explorations combined with technical feature development.
  • Design, e.g., design implications, guidelines, methods, techniques, etc.
  • Theoretical, e.g., conceptual frameworks, theory underpinning CSCW studies/domains, theoretical analysis, literature reviews, and essays.

OPEN AND TRANSPARENT SCIENCE

Authors are encouraged to submit supplementary material when possible and when aligned with their methods. Authors are encouraged to submit links to pre-registrations on the Open Science Framework (OSF) when appropriate for their work. Authors are also encouraged to use open access repositories and make their data and other material FAIR when appropriate for their work. Authors are encouraged to describe efforts to make their work more reproducible. Reviewers are encouraged to support evolving approaches to supporting open and transparent research practices.

VIDEO FIGURES

Authors may consider submitting a video that illustrates their work as part of the submission (no more than three minutes long). Videos are not required for paper submissions, but are encouraged, particularly for papers contributing novel systems or interaction techniques.

PRESENTING AT THE CONFERENCE

Accepted papers are invited to present at the corresponding conference, and authors can choose whether or not they wish to present. If a situation arises and an author who is scheduled to present at the conference is no longer able to, they should immediately reach out to the Papers Chairs to discuss alternative options. Presenting at the conference is strongly recommended but not required.

PAPERS CHAIRS

Contact: papers2025@cscw.acm.org

  • Xiaojuan Ma (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR)
  • Xinru Page (Brigham Young University, USA)
  • Chiara Rossitto (Stockholm University, Sweden)
  • Norman Makoto Su (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)

GENERAL CHAIRS

Contact: chairs2025@cscw.acm.org 

  • Fabiano Pinatti (University of Oslo, Norway)
  • Jessica Vitak (University of Maryland, USA)
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