Announcing the FAccT 2025 Call for Papers

Welcome to the new FAccT blog! This is the first in a series of posts that will help the community stay informed about the organization, processes, and program for FAccT 2025.

As Program Chairs coming from different disciplines and sectors, we have aligned on several key goals for the next conference. Our principal goal is to reinforce the broadly inclusive “big tent” vision for the conference laid out in the FAccT strategic plan. We will work to ensure that FAccT remains a top-tier publication venue that brings together a diverse community of scholars advancing research in responsible, safe, ethical, and trustworthy computing. Beyond that, our goals are to better standardize and document the full paper review process and related materials, and to increase the degree of engagement and transparency with the community through wider and more frequent communication. These blog posts will be one such mode of communication.

We are pleased to announce that the 2025 Call for Papers (CFP) has been released. While many of the logistical details remain as they were last year (e.g., page limit, paper format, use of the HotCRP platform), you will notice some changes too. Notably, in service of promoting FAccT’s “big tent” vision, we have updated the previous areas of interest with a more extensive list of subject areas related to the broad sociotechnical nature of computing. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give examples of research welcome at FAccT. We have also streamlined the CFP itself and released several accompanying documents that submitting authors and potential Reviewers and Area Chairs (ACs) can read to learn more about the review process and expectations for papers.

First, we’ve released an Author Guide. This guide contains a walk-through of the steps involved in the review process and the criteria that will be used to review papers. It is also the go-to source of information on details about things like submission length, formatting requirements, inclusion of end matter and appendices, archival vs. non-archival submissions, various policies, research integrity, and more. This document will be updated over time and includes a FAQ at the bottom where we will add answers to questions we frequently receive.

Next, we’ve released a Reviewer Guide and an AC Guide. These contain detailed guidance on what roles Reviewers and ACs are expected to play during the review process, what their responsibilities are, how to write a review or meta-review, when to flag a paper for potential ethical concerns, the importance of engaging in discussion, and more. Like the Author Guide, these are living documents that include FAQs that will be updated over time. The guides also contain links to the Review Form and AC Review Form that will be used this year. We chose to make these guides and review forms publicly available to avoid any information asymmetries between those submitting authors who are serving on the program committee and those who are not — everyone should understand how the review process works.

One of our next steps will be to kick off the process of recruiting Reviewers and ACs for 2025. We hope you will say yes if asked! The conference is only as strong as the community that supports it. In the meantime, happy paper writing!