It is possible that a TOCS paper of interest to a large segment of the computing community would be published in Communications in order to keep the general ACM membership apprised of developments in the systems area. TOCS publishes research and technical papers, both short and long. It includes technical correspondence to permit commentary on technical topics and on previously published papers.

Carla Ellis, Editor-in-Chief Duke University Department of Computer Science Levine Science Research Center Durham, NC 27708-0129 Phone: +1-919-660-6523 Fax: +1-919-660-6519

Dejan Kostic, Information Director EPFL School of Computer & Communication Sciences Office INN 320 - STATION 14 CH - 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Fax: +41 (21) 693 8130

The Editorial Board
Ozalp Babaoglu University of Bologna Department of Computer Science Mura Anteo Zamboni 7 Bologna 40127, Italy Phone: +39-051-2094504 Fax: +39-051-2094510	Maurice Herlihy Brown University Computer Science Department Providence, RI 02912 Phone: +1-401-863-7646 Fax: +1-401-863-7657
Peter M. Chen Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Michigan 2225 EECS, 1301 Beal Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2122 Phone: +1-734-763-4472 Fax: +1-734-763-4617	Mark D. Hill Computer Sciences Department Office: 6373 CSS University of Wisconsin-Madison 1210 West Dayton Street Madison, WI 53706-1685 USA Phone: +1-608-262-2196 Asstnt: +1-608-265-3402 Fax: +1-608-262-9777
Peter Druschel Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85 Room Number 601 D-66123 Saarbrücken Germany Phone: +49 681 9325-690 Fax:: +49 681 9325-299	Todd Mowry Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Phone: +1-412-268-3725 Fax: +1-412-268-5576

Information for Authors

[How to Submit Papers] Please submit papers electronically in postscript with a cover letter to tocs@cs.duke.edu. Receiving postscript submissions expedite the review process. To ensure proper indexing, classification, retrieval and dissemination, authors must include the following in the manuscript: Descriptive title Author names and affiliations Abstract Content indicators Citations to relevant literature For the full classification scheme, see The ACM Computing Classification System. If a postscript file is not possible, then please send five copies of the manuscript to the Editor-in-Chief: Carla Ellis, TOCS Duke University Department of Computer Science D324 Levine Science Research Center Box 90129 Durham, NC 27708-0129 with a cover letter. Machine reproduced copies of manuscripts will not be returned to the author(s) unless specifically requested. [Formatting] Before you submit your paper, you might wish to consider the software you will be using to develop your paper and thus save you time at the publication end. When the paper is accepted for publication ACM requires the following files of all accepted papers: source files to convert to SGML (i.e. ACM can handle the following papers in either frame, latex, microsoft word, or wordperfect, ascii, and, at the very, very last resort, hardcopy); full paper in postscript; and (eps) encapsulated individual postscript files for all graphics (eps of all figures are needed in case ACM may need to resize the figures after the source file conversion). Authors may bundle the above files and just send one file to the Editor-in-Chief. Please let us know how you bundled them so that we can unbundle the files here for final examination before forwarding to ACM Headquarters for publication. You can also refer to ACM's Guidelines for Submitting Accepted Articles.

[Prior Publication Policy/Self-plagiarism] Manuscripts submitted to ACM Transactions on Computer Systems based on the author's own previously copyrighted work (e.g., appearing in a conference proceedings) must be disclosed at the time of submission and an explicit reference to the prior publication must be included in the submitted manuscript.  The norm for ACM Journals and Transactions is that the submitted manuscript must contain at least 25% new content material (i.e., material that offers new insights, new results, etc.).  For more details see http://www.acm.org/pubs/sim_submissions.html

[Copyright and Use] Authors whose papers are accepted must sign a form that transfers the copyright to the ACM. This form will be sent by ACM Journal Staff. The completed form should be returned as indicated on the form. Authors retain liberal rights to material published by the ACM. The following is the standard copyright notice used by ACM journals : Copyright (c) 199x by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. Further details can be found at the ACM Interim Copyright Policies. Submittal of an algorithm for consideration for publication in Transactions on Computer Systems implies that unrestricted use of the algorithm within a computer is permissible.

[Page Charges] Author's institutions or corporations are requested to honor a page charge of $100.00 per printed page or part thereof, to help defray the cost of publication. Page charges apply to all contributions. Payment of page charges is not a condition of publication; editorial acceptance of a paper is unaffected by payment or nonpayment.

Guidelines for Referees

Papers must be of high quality and fall within the scope of the journal. There are four main ingredients to an acceptable paper: technical quality is high; relevance to significant computations is high; interest and novelty is high; and presentation is effective. Few papers excel in all of these, but a substandard level in any of the four ingredients is sufficient ground for rejection. Many papers require substantial revisions before acceptance, and reviewers should not hesitate to recommend that a paper be rejected pending changes that are required for completeness, correctness, or to substantially improve clarity. More specific criteria apply to papers presenting theoretical results, which has been a particular issue in distributed or parallel computing. ACM TOCS does not accept papers that belong in more theoretical journals (e.g. JACM, Springer-Verlag's "Distributed Computing", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing). This does not imply that all theoretical papers are to be rejected; rather it implies that theoretical papers that cannot establish their direct relevance to current issues in the development of computer systems will generally be rejected. An acceptable paper of this type should contain: motivation and technical analysis of the method; evidence of effectiveness and practicality; and demonstration of superiority compared to alternative approaches. In addition, reviewers should be aware that because of the relative rarity with which such papers are accepted, the standards for originality and impact are unusually stringent in these cases. * * * The best format for a referee's report is a plain ASCII e-mail message to tocs@cs.duke.edu Thank you. * * *

ACM Journal Staff
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Mark Mandelbaum Director of Publications	Jono Hardjowirogo Associate Director of Publications
Roma Simon Managing Editor, ACM Journals	Irma Strolia - Editorial Assistant, ACM Journals

Access to Articles

Online Access Full text of all individual articles (from Volume 1 No1) are now available online to subscribers. These are formatted as PDF files. Viewer may download at no cost from Adobe Systems Inc. Note that articles from 1991-1995 are stored as scanned images. This leads to PDF files typically of a megabyte or more in size (roughly 60 kilobytes per page). PDF files for articles from 1996 onward, which are generated using a modern publishing system, are roughly half this size.

Complete Issues You may subscribe to ACM TOCS or obtain copies of individual issues or back volumes.

Last change : January 21, 2003