Middleware 2026 invites authors of accepted papers to submit their research artifacts for evaluation by the Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC).
Artifact Evaluation is an important part of good scientific practice. It helps the community assess, reuse, and build upon the software, data, scripts, and documentation associated with accepted papers. It also gives authors the opportunity to receive ACM artifact badges that recognize work whose artifacts are available, functional, and, where applicable, capable of reproducing the results reported in the paper.
The evaluation process may lead to one or more of the following badges:
All submitted artifacts will be reviewed by the Middleware 2026 Artifact Evaluation Committee. The committee will assess whether the submitted package satisfies the requirements for the badge(s) requested by the authors.
Authors may submit either:
Successful artifact evaluations will be recognized as part of Middleware 2026.
The artifact submission site will be announced soon.
Submission site: TBD
When submitting your artifact, please clearly indicate in the submission abstract which badge(s) you would like the artifact to be evaluated for:
The AEC will evaluate the artifact only for the badge(s) explicitly requested in the abstract.
The goal of the Artifact Evaluation process is to help verify and, whenever possible, reproduce the results of papers accepted at Middleware 2026. To support this process, authors are encouraged to submit the most complete and well-documented version of their artifact.
Authors should also be available during the evaluation period to answer questions from reviewers if clarification is needed during installation, deployment, execution, or result verification.
Please consider the following guidelines when preparing your artifact.
Your submission should include a clear and detailed README file. The README should explain:
If the artifact supports reproducing experimental results, the documentation should also explain how to:
If any step must be performed manually, please provide precise step-by-step instructions. However, authors are encouraged to automate as much of the process as possible.
Whenever possible, please include scripts that automate the full evaluation workflow, including:
If some figures, tables, or results from the paper cannot be reproduced from the submitted artifact, please clearly explain why. In such cases, also explain how the core claims of the paper can still be evaluated using the submitted materials.
Before submitting, authors are strongly encouraged to test their instructions on a clean machine or fresh environment. This helps identify missing dependencies, undocumented assumptions, or configuration issues before reviewers encounter them.
Please include a detailed description of the hardware and software environment used to produce the results in the paper.
If the experiments require large-scale, specialized, or difficult-to-access hardware, please explain this clearly in the submission. In such cases, the AEC may not be able to fully reproduce every experiment. When possible, authors should consider providing reviewers with access to the required hardware or with a smaller-scale version of the experiments that still demonstrates the main functionality and claims of the paper.
Further information about artifact packaging, reproducibility best practices, and the artifact evaluation process are available here.
All deadlines are AoE unless otherwise specified.
TBD