Announcing the FAccT 2026 Call for Papers

Greetings! We’re the Program Chairs for the 2026 edition of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, or FAccT. We’re so excited to share the Call for Papers (CfP) for FAccT 2026! To help shed light on the CFP, we’re sharing this first blog post in a series explaining our thinking and decisions behind the processes and program for FAccT 2026.

One of the strengths of FAccT is its deep interdisciplinarity, with participation from researchers and practitioners from many different fields contributing to advancing research on responsible, safe, ethical, and critical computing. As Program Chairs from a variety of disciplines who have done interdisciplinary work before, we know how difficult it can be to place interdisciplinary research in top-tier publication venues. Previous years’ FAccT PCs have worked hard to help achieve the vision for a “big tent” laid out in the FAccT Strategic Plan, and we’re building on that groundwork, with some small changes and one big change — a substantial Revision process, which we’ll explain in detail below.

If you’re reading this post and wondering whether FAccT is the right venue for you, we want to strongly encourage you to submit your best work and join the community! Although FAccT is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference, we explicitly encourage participation from scholars and practitioners in the humanities, law, philosophy, policy, the social sciences, and more.

New for this year, we’re introducing a full-fledged revision process to FAccT for the first time! We’ve heard from the community that some submissions in past years might not have had the opportunity to adequately respond to feedback from reviewers, thus leading to papers that could make a strong contribution to the conference not being accepted. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, we feel it’s critical for authors to have the opportunity to address reviewers’ concerns in a revision process. At the first stage, papers will receive a decision to either Accept (with minor revisions), Reject, or Revise. Papers with the Revise decision will have time to make revisions to their paper to address reviewers’ and Area Chairs’ concerns, and will have an additional page of content (up to 15 content pages, excluding References and Endmatter) with which to do so. Then, Reviewers and Area Chairs will re-review the revision, update their reviews, meta-reviews, and decision recommendations. Final decisions will go out, with either Accept (with minor revisions) or Reject. See the Author Guide for more details about this process.

We will assign reviewers whose disciplinary expertise aligns with the Focus Area(s) that authors list when they submit their paper (see Call for Papers), but we recognized that in the past, there have been miscommunications when papers are highly interdisciplinary. And, although we will still have a brief period for rebuttal, this is more for correcting any factual errors in reviews, rather than debating substantive disagreements. In addition, data from other conferences (e.g., ACM SIGCHI) has shown that rebuttals often do little to change reviewers’ minds. In other words, it is more convincing to show (in a revision), rather than tell reviewers how you’ll address their concerns.

We wanted this first introduction of a revision process to be minimally disruptive this year (i.e., not dramatically changing the submission deadline to be several months earlier than usual, without sufficient notice). This does mean, though, that some stages of the submission and review process may be a little shorter than in previous years. We aim to be as transparent as possible as early as possible about all required dates for authors on the Call for Papers, and to be clear with reviewers about all deadlines when they join the program committee, so that everyone can prepare in advance. This may also mean that the final notification may not be as early as we all would want it to be (i.e., to accommodate visa applications), although we are planning for the time between the final notification and the conference to be longer than the last 4 years—and there is an initial acceptance notification deadline in early March for a subset of papers that get accepted in the first round. We acknowledge that this year is an experiment in trying to make a revision cycle work for FAccT, and it may not work perfectly right away.

We’re recruiting reviewers and Area Chairs! Please sign up to review for FAccT this year! Please note that not everyone who signs up will be selected as a reviewer. We are looking for reviewers who have had experience reviewing before, either for FAccT, or for similar conferences (e.g., EAAMO, AIES) or for conferences or journals in your home discipline(s). We are also looking for Area Chairs whose role it is to synthesize reviews, guide reviewer discussions, and make recommendations for paper acceptance decisions. Please sign up on the same sign-up form, and indicate your prior experience as an Area Chair at FAccT or other conferences (or as an editor for a journal), and you may be selected to be an Area Chair for FAccT 2026. Please share this sign-up form with people you think would be a good fit to review!

If you’ve never submitted a paper to FAccT before, don’t worry! We have an Author Guide to walk you through all the steps involved, and we’ll be publishing more blog posts like this along the way to explain other parts of the process. One major way we want to make FAccT amenable to fields that typically publish in journals is through an option for a non-archival submission. We anticipate that the majority of submissions to FAccT will be “archival,” which is to say, the paper will be published in the Proceedings of the FAccT Conference, and indexed and hosted on the ACM Digital Library. However, if you want to get rigorous feedback on your work and present it at an impactful conference before writing a law review or journal article, or if you have a law review or journal article under review elsewhere, we have the option for non-archival submissions. You will still submit a full (i.e., 14 page, excluding references) paper to FAccT, it will get the full review process as archival papers, and you will be invited to present your paper at the conference. In an effort to make this process easier for authors from disciplines outside of computer science, we have the option for submissions to be formatted via a Microsoft Word template, and we will allow non-standard reference formats (e.g., Bluebook) for non-archival submissions.

We will be releasing more blog posts along the way with more details on navigating the submission process, including how to use our new submission platform, and details about reviewing. Stay tuned!