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SOSP is the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, a conference sponsored by ACM SIGOPS where researchers present work on operating systems and the systems built on them. If you are deciding whether to submit, how a submission is handled, or how to find and cite a SOSP paper, the sections below answer each point using the SOSP 2025 call for papers and edition page. Rules change between years, so confirm the current year’s call for papers before you submit.
What SOSP is
SOSP is a research symposium, not software: the acronym stands for Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. It is sponsored by ACM SIGOPS (the Special Interest Group on Operating Systems), and its proceedings are published by ACM through the ACM Digital Library. Computing venues of this kind sit alongside journals as a primary publication route; see computer science conference versus journal authorship credit for how that affects credit. Its closest relatives in this site’s coverage are USENIX and the NDSS Symposium.
History and schedule
According to the Wikipedia summary of the series (read 2026-11-08), the first SOSP was held 1-4 October 1967 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the series ran every two years from 1967 to 2023 (alternating with USENIX’s OSDI), and it became annual from 2024.
The SOSP 2025 edition page (sigops.org, read 2026-11-08) gives the following for the 31st symposium:
| Item | SOSP 2025 |
|---|---|
| Workshops | 13 October 2025 |
| Main conference | 14-16 October 2025, Lotte Hotel World, Seoul, Republic of Korea |
| Paper submission deadline | 17 April 2025 (no extensions) |
| Author notification | 15 July 2025 |
| Camera-ready | 1 September 2025 |
| Artifact evaluation: intent and artifact due | 1 August 2025 |
Scope: what counts as a SOSP paper
The SOSP 2025 call for papers (read 2026-11-08) lists operating systems, storage, distributed systems, cloud computing, mobile and edge computing, security, big data and machine-learning systems, embedded and real-time systems, virtualization, networking, and the management of complex systems. It also notes that the boundaries with computer architecture, networking, programming languages, verification and databases are fuzzy. Reviewers are asked to weigh novelty, significance, interest, clarity, relevance and correctness.
Submission and review process
The following rules are taken from the SOSP 2025 call for papers; check the current year’s call before relying on them.
- Format. Submit a PDF through HotCRP: up to 12 pages of technical content excluding references, in two-column 10-point format. Supplementary material is optional.
- Anonymity. Review is double-blind: the paper ID appears on the first page and prior work by the authors is cited in the third person. See double-anonymized peer review for the general concept.
- Originality and prior posting. Only original, unpublished work is accepted. Workshop papers and arXiv postings are allowed if the SOSP submission has significant additional content.
- Author response. The response is limited to correcting factual errors and answering reviewers’ questions, ideally under 500 words, with no new experiments.
- Resubmission. Rejected papers may be resubmitted if substantively improved, with a description of the changes of at most one page.
- After acceptance. Accepted papers are posted online before the conference, and the official publication date is when the proceedings become public. Papers of merit may be forwarded to ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) and to CACM Research Highlights.
Artifact evaluation
For SOSP 2025, accepted papers were encouraged to provide code and data for artifact evaluation, run through the sysartifacts site, with intent and artifact due 1 August 2025. ACM’s labels for evaluated artifacts are described in ACM artifact review and badging.
Finding and citing SOSP papers
Look in the ACM Digital Library for the year’s proceedings, which is the published record. Cite the paper’s title and authors, the proceedings (SOSP, with year), and the DOI shown on the ACM Digital Library record. Because the official publication date is when proceedings become public, a paper posted online earlier is not yet formally published.
FAQ
What does SOSP stand for?
Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, sponsored by ACM SIGOPS.
Is SOSP double-blind?
Yes. The SOSP 2025 call for papers requires double-blind submissions.
Can I submit a paper already on arXiv?
The SOSP 2025 call allows arXiv and workshop versions if the SOSP submission has significant additional content.
How long can a SOSP paper be?
Up to 12 pages of technical content excluding references in the SOSP 2025 call.
Is SOSP held every year?
Per the Wikipedia summary, it was biennial from 1967 to 2023 and annual from 2024.
Sources
- SIGOPS, SOSP 2025 edition page, https://sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2025/ (read 2026-11-08)
- SIGOPS, SOSP 2025 call for papers, https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2025/cfp.html (read 2026-11-08)
- Wikipedia, Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_on_Operating_Systems_Principles (read 2026-11-08; history only)
