Information about Electronic Submissions for WDAG '97

Last update: Fri Feb 20 1997

Contents


Introduction

This is a working document describing the electronic submission procedure for the 11th International Workshop on Distributed Algorithms (WDAG '97). All electronic submissions must be sent via electronic mail (no ftp); they must be in printable PostScript form and arrive by

April 26, 1997, 23:59 GMT

This is the same as the hardcopy deadline. Questions about the submission process may be sent to wdag97-help@mpi-sb.mpg.de.

The electronic submission of papers is made possible by some experimental software being developed by Sam Rebelsky (samr@cs.dartmouth.edu) and SIGACT's Electronic Publishing Board. Many of you have used a variant of this server for past conferences (FOCS, PODC, SODA, STOC, WDAG, etc). Because of the experimental nature of the software, because email can be at times unreliable, and because "good" postscript files can fail to print on "good" postscript printers, the program committee cannot assume responsiblity for technical problems, although we will do our best to make sure that no such problems occur. For this reason we request that you submit your paper as early as possible.

In addition, please keep in mind the following:


Basic Procedure

The electronic submission procedure involves sending commands via email to a server at

wdag97@wdag.mpi-sb.mpg.de.

All commands must be placed in the subject line of the message.

Please note:

The basic procedure to submit your paper by email involves two steps:

  1. REGISTER your paper with the server by sending a "register" command and waiting to receive an acknowledgement from the server that contains a key to use to refer to your submission later on. (It is a good idea to register your paper a few days before you submit it, so that you will have plenty of time for the acknowledgement to reach you and that you are included in the list of people to be notified of any last moment problems.)

  2. SUBMIT your paper by sending to the server a "submit <key>" command, including the postscript version of your paper in the message body; the server in response does a quick check for postscript errors, and sends you an acknowledgement with the results of this check.

Please be patient and wait at least several hours for the acknowledgement of your last request before repeating any action with the server (or sending mail to wdag97-help@mpi-sb.mpg.de). Network delays can be significant at times. Email is rather reliable and will try delivery for up to 5 days before giving up. This is yet another good reason why you should not wait until the last minute for registering and submitting.

Since electronic submissions have no cover letter, please put information that would normally be in a cover letter on the first page of your paper. In particular, the call for papers requests that the first page of each paper must include the title of the paper and the contact author's name, address, phone number, fax number and e-mail address, if available.

After you have submitted your paper, you can revise your paper by sending a "revise <key>" command to the server, or you can withdraw your paper by sending a "withdraw <key>" command.

It is a good idea to test early in advance the printability of the postscript your text formatter is generating by sending a "test print" command to the server containing the postscript file in the message body. You will receive an acknowledgement containing the result of the test. (This is the same quick check for postscript errors performed when you submit your paper with the submit command.)

At any time, you can ask the server for help by sending a "help" command, and you can ask the server for the current status of your paper in the database (i.e., registered, submitted, revised, withdrawn; not its reviewing status) by sending a "status <key>" command.

It is possible to practice submitting a paper before doing the real submission. First you send a "test register" command to the server and wait for it to acknowledge the test registration and provide you with a test-key; then you send a "submit <test-key>" command containing the test postscript file.

See the section on Server Commands for a detailed description the commands available.
If for some reason you need some extra help with email submission, please send mail to wdag97-help@mpi-sb.mpg.de .


Server Commands

This section defines the commands that can be sent to the server via email. All commands must be sent to the address wdag97@wdag.mpi-sb.mpg.de. All commands must be placed in the subject line of the message. Many commands require additional information that must be placed in the body of the message. Please make sure that each time you send a new message to this address (i.e. without using the "reply" function).

Case is not significant in commands to the server. The commands available are: register, submit, revise, withdraw, status, test register, test print, help.


(*) PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Credits

The software used to manage electronic submission to WDAG'97 is a collection of perl scripts written by Sam Rebelsky (samr@cs.dartmouth.edu) and SIGACT's Electronic Publishing Board. The present instruction document was greatly based on the prototype help file which accompanies the system and on the respective document which was used for WDAG'96 and was maintained by Özalp Babaoglu. We gratefully acknowledge all their help.

The SIGACT Electronic Publishing Board Committee Membership

The board maintains a WWW page and can be contacted via e-mail at epubs@hercule.csci.unt.edu.


Last Updated: Fri Feb 20 1997
( Marina Papatriantafilou and Philippas Tsigas)