This guide-line for conference chairs and authors explains the artifacts-publishing process with ACM, written from the viewpoint of Conference Publishing Consulting (ConfPub).
This procedure starts around the date when the artifact-evaluation chairs collect artifacts.
There are four important deadlines: the artifact-submission deadline (author's action), the notification deadline (chairs' action), the artifact-publication deadline (authors' action), and the delivery of final meta data, artifacts, and proceedings to ACM (our action).
For ACM publications, the ACM Policy on Artifact Review and Badging applies.
There are three categories in the process:
It is strongly recommended that a section in the paper (before the references) describes the availability of data and software. (For grant proposals, it is already a standard practice to provide such a declaration in many countries.) The artifact should be included in the references section and cited just like other archived literature. Note that this should be done before the camera-ready deadline, because the Availability badge is assigned independently from the artifact-evaluation process (and its outcome). The section in the paper should describe what should be used for reproduction (pointing to a specific version of an archive, e.g., at Zenodo) and what for reuse (a URL of, e.g., a GitLab or project home page). The badges for the evaluation results ("Functional", "Reusable", "Reproduced") will be added to the paper automatically during the paper processing. If data cannot be made available, this section should explain how the data and software necessary to repeat the experiments can be obtained. For some conferences, this section is treated like references and not counted against the page limit.
It might be good to use the following tagging system for artifacts. Zenodo offers a meta-data field for a version tag, one for each new version, which can be edited even after the publication of the artifact. Version tags can be overwritten: https://blog.zenodo.org/2017/11/02/version-field/.
If you use a library system different from Zenodo, please consider using the same tagging convention. The following tagging schema gives you a predictable naming schema to mention versions in your Data-Availability Statement.
For example, OOPSLA 2025 used the following tags:
This is especially useful if you need to cite an artifact that you have submitted for artifact evaluation, but you still wait for the feedback and might want to publish later a new version. If you use OOPSLA-2025-AEC-submission as version tag, then it will be clear for readers that this is the version you submitted. You should cite this version in the Artifact-Availability Statement.
If you later publish a new version, Zenodo will show a banner indicating that there is a new version available, but the various versions will be elegantly separated from each other using the tags.
Authors can even in the Data-Availability Statement explain that the version OOPSLA-2025-AEC-submission is the one they submitted, and the latest is available at [latest], where the reference points to the DOI that is a redirect to the latest version.
For each artifact, we deliver meta data to ACM, such that each artifact has an own landing page in the ACM DL. For example: The paper doi:10.1145/3540250.3549172 has a section "Related Artifact" on the landing page for the paper, and the corresponding artifact doi:10.5281/zenodo.7082407 also has an own landing page in the ACM DL, which points to Zenodo as well as back to the paper. This way, artifacts are treated as first-class bibliographic objects and are easy to find.
By submitting your artifact to the ACM or Zenodo digital library, you ensure long-term availability, open access, and immutability for your artifact, and receive a DOI (digital object identifier) for the artifact, such that your artifact can be cited as publication.
Publication of artifact via ACM DL: ACM requires only a permission to distribute the artifact in the ACM DL (not a copyright transfer or exclusive license), which is assigned as part of the publishing-rights agreement for the paper. Please make sure that you clicked that option (called Auxiliary Material) in your publishing-rights agreement. If you did not allow ACM to publish your material, please contact us (and we enable a new publishing-rights form).
Please contact us to obtain a DOI for your artifact, and then you can upload the DOI and other meta data via the submission page under heading "Optional Artifact Submission". We will publish the artifact in the ACM DL for you and link it to your article.
Publication of artifact via external provider (e.g., Zenodo): If you have published your artifact via Zenodo or FigShare already and you do not want to publish your artifact in the ACM Digital Library, you still need to complete the metadata fields for the record in the ACM DL.
The DOI is assigned by the external provider (Zenodo), just enter the DOI and metadata in the form that is linked from the submission page under heading "Optional Artifact Submission". We will publish the artifact meta data in the ACM DL for you and link it to your article.
GitHub or similar repositories are not sufficient to receive an "Artifact Available" badge. If you host your artifact on GitHub (or similar) so far, you can simply download the release zip archive from GitHub and upload this file to us (for the ACM DL) or to Zenodo. (Note that the zip file must contain a license and readme file.)
Or, even simpler, you can publish GitHub releases automatically via Zenodo: https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/
An appendix is a part of a main document, for example, of a research paper. If the appendix is too long (page limit) to be included in the paper, then the appendix turns into supplemental material.
Publication as supplemental material in ACM DL: There is no separate DOI for the supplementary material.
If you choose this option, we will publish it as part of the publication process for your paper, and it will appear below the paper abstract or paper full text in the Section "Supplementary Material" in the DL. The readers of your article will find it via the same DOI as your article. For example, scroll down to the heading "Supplementary Material" for this example: doi:10.1145/3704846.
To refer to this supplementary material, you would use exactly the same reference as for your paper, but add a prefix to your paper's title, like the following in your bib file:
title = "Supplemental Material for Article `Inference Plans for Hybrid Particle Filtering'",
Publication in open digital libraries, such as Zenodo or arXiv: The DOI is assigned by the other digital library (e.g., Zenodo or arXiv). Zenodo assignes the DOI immediately and makes it available, from arXiv, you would get the DOI three days later.
On an Own Home Page or Project Page Please do not choose this option. This is a very bad option, because your personal or project web page will not stay forever. At some point, it will vanish, and the appendix will be lost for the research community. Also, it does not have a DOI. We strongly recommend against this.
Best is to cite the artifacts using '\cite' just like other literature. Place the citation and a short description in the Data-Availability Statement, such that readers easily find it when looking for it.
If ACM is the publisher, use the following example:
@Misc{GreatApproach-artifact,
author = {John Smith and Max Musterman},
title = {Reproduction Package for Article `The Great Approach'},
howpublished = {ACM},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1145/3747406},
}
If Zenodo is the publisher, replace the 'howpublished' and use the DOI for the specific version of the artifact that you used to produce the results in the paper.
Let us know if you have any questions about this process.