The Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) seeks papers on the topic of measurement-based research in data communications. The focus of IMC 2025 will be on research that improves the practice of network measurement, illuminates some facet of an operational network, or both. Please see the Call for Papers for a list of topics of particular relevance.

To submit a paper to the IMC 2025 conference, please read the rest of this document regarding paper formatting, registration, ethics, anonymity, and other important issues relevant to your submission.

For the Replicability track, an earlier Expression of Interest (EoI) is necessary (see the Call for Papers). The submission deadline for the EoI will be announced later, since there will be only one full paper deadline for the replicability track and it will be the one on May 15th, 2025.

For full papers use the paper submission site to:

The above are hard deadlines and no extensions will be given.

Paper Formatting

All submissions, including invited papers on the Replicability Track, must obey the following formatting requirements.

Submissions that do not comply with these requirements will be rejected without review. The ACM template style file satisfies the formatting requirements, provided you compile your source with options that produce letter page size and 10-point fonts. The following settings in your LaTeX source should achieve that (but please verify the output):

\documentclass[10pt,sigconf,letterpaper,anonymous,nonacm]{acmart}

Note that the above example includes an option (nonacm) that removes the copyright block; this should only be removed for submissions. Camera-ready formats may change.

As an example, we also provide a sample template for ACM conference proceedings, which you can make use of.

After the submission deadline, we will use the HotCRP format checking tool to check the conformance of papers. The format checking tool uses heuristics and can make mistakes. The PC chairs will manually inspect and possibly reject those papers with evident format violations.

Please make sure that your submitted paper satisfies the following:

Appendices

Although there is no page-limit to the appendices, they may not be used to abuse page limits. The page-limited body of the paper should be self-contained. Apart from the Ethics section, reviewers are not required to read any of the appendices—and in fact will be discouraged from reading them except for relatively minor clarifying points. Papers will be evaluated based on what is in the main body of the paper.

A good rule of thumb is to think of the appendix as slightly more than a preemptive rebuttal: it should clarify details that, while not major enough to merit inclusion in the main body of the paper, may help clarify. Unlike a rebuttal, appendices can contain experiments and data that are not in the main body of the paper, but cannot count towards the paper’s main contributions.

Examples of appropriate use of appendices includes:

Examples of inappropriate use of appendices includes:

Authorship and Conflicts

As part of the paper registration, authors will be required to provide paper metadata which includes title and abstract, author names, affiliations, contact email addresses, topics matching the subject matter of the paper, track (main or replicability), and conflicts with program committee (PC) members.

Broadly, we define conflict of interest with a PC member using the following principles:

  1. You are currently employed at the same institution, have been previously employed at the same institution within the last 12 months, or are going to begin employment at the same institution.
  2. You have a professional partnership as follows:
    • Past or present association as thesis advisor or advisee.
    • Collaboration on a project, publication, or grant proposal within the past 2 years (i.e., 2022 or later).

The PC chairs and members will review conflicts to ensure the integrity of the reviewing process, adding conflicts where necessary and sanity checking cases where conflicts do not appear justified. If there is no basis for PC conflicts provided by authors, those conflicts will be removed. Improperly identifying PC members as a conflict to avoid individual reviewers may lead to your paper being rejected. If you have concerns, please contact the PC chairs.

As an ACM conference, all authors are required to adhere to ACM’s policy on authorship. For definitions and clarifications, please see ACM Policy on Authorship.

Anonymity Guidelines

IMC will use double blind submissions, per the following guidelines:

In addition to submitting an anonymized paper, double-blind reviewing requires that both authors and reviewers take care while reviewing is happening.

IMC recognizes that measurement research sometimes leverages unique capabilities that are publicly known, but not available for general use (e.g., measurement platforms, unique vantage points, tools, datasets, etc.). Revealing access to these capabilities or knowledge of them which could be interpreted as only being possible for their originators/authors, will de-facto de-anonymize a submission. However, attempts to anonymize these capabilities will not allow authors to leverage previous work on developing sound measurement capabilities, leaves reviewers without a full understanding of the new work, and may also be essentially impossible in some cases. IMC recognizes an exception for authors referring to such capabilities—even though this may de-anonymize submissions. The PC will not penalize submissions for these breaches of anonymization. We make several important comments on this exception:

Illustrative examples of anonymity policy

While the program committee will allow for breaches of anonymization to name unique capabilities where important, authors are encouraged to be judicious in their use of this exception. Specific questions should be forwarded to the program committee chairs.

Further information on anonymity policy
The IMC Steering Committee has also released a statement on double-blind review.

Ethics

The program committee may raise concerns around the ethics of the work, even if it does not involve human subjects. All papers must include, in a clearly marked appendix section with the heading “Ethics”, a statement about ethical issues; papers that do not include such a statement may be rejected. This could be, if appropriate for the paper, simply the sentence “This work does not raise any ethical issues.” If the work involves human subjects or potentially sensitive data (e.g., user traffic or social network information, evaluation of censorship, etc.), the paper should clearly discuss these issues, in the ethics section.

Research that entails experiments involving human subjects or user data (e.g., network traffic, passwords, social network information) should adhere to community norms. Any work that raises potential ethics considerations should indicate this on the submission form. The basic principles of ethical research are outlined in the Belmont Report: (1) respect for persons (which may involve obtaining consent); (2) beneficence (a careful consideration of risks and benefits); and (3) justice (ensuring that parts of the population that bear the risks of the research also are poised to obtain some benefit from it). Authors should further consult the ACM policy on research involving human subjects for further information on ethical principles that apply to this conference.

Research involving human subjects must be approved by the researchers’ respective Institutional Review Boards before the research takes place. Authors should indicate on the submission form whether the work involves human subjects. If so, the authors must indicate whether an IRB protocol has been approved for the research, or if the research has been determined exempt (either self-determination or IRB determination). We expect that any research follows the practices and procedures of the institution(s) where the work is being carried out; for example, some universities require separate approval for the use of campus data. We expect researchers to abide by these protocols.

We recognize that different IRBs follow different procedures for determining the status of human subject research, and approval or exempt status from a single institution may not align with community norms. To help the Ethics Committee review cases of concern, there is a need for more information about the research protocol. To this end, if the work involves human subjects, the authors must include with their submission a copy of the form that was used to determine IRB status (approved or exempt), sufficiently anonymized to preserve double-blind review.

If the submission describes research involving human subjects and none of the authors are at an institution with an IRB (or equivalent), the authors are nonetheless expected to follow a research protocol that adheres to ethical principles, as stated in the ACM policy on research involving human subjects. In such cases, the authors must use the Ethics section of their appendix to explain how their research protocol satisfies the principles of ethical research.

Some research does not involve human subjects yet nonetheless raises questions of ethics, which may be wide-ranging and not necessarily limited to direct effects. We encourage authors to be mindful of the ethics of the research that they undertake; these considerations are often not clear-cut, but often warrant thoughtful consideration. Discussions of these issues should be placed in the “Ethics” appendix section mentioned above, or in the main body of the paper where appropriate.

Additionally, the program committee reserves the right to conduct additional evaluations and reviews of research ethics and reserves the right to independent judgment concerning the ethics of the conducted research.

Contact the program committee co-chairs at imc2025pcchairs@acm.org if you have any questions.

Paper Novelty

Under no circumstances, except where noted below, should authors submit previously-published work, submit the same work simultaneously to multiple venues, or submit papers that plagiarize the work of other authors. Like other conferences and journals, IMC prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have engaged in them. In some cases, the program committee may share information about submitted papers with other conference chairs and journal editors to ensure the integrity of papers under consideration. If the PC discovers a violation of these principles, sanctions may include, but are not limited to, contacting the institutions of the authors and publicizing the details of the case.

The ACM policy on simultaneous submissions does not consider technical reports (including arXiv) to be concurrent publication or submission.

Paper Acceptance

The IMC 2025 PC will notify authors of acceptance/rejection decisions by March 26, 2025. All accepted papers may be shepherded by members of the PC. Authors of accepted papers should plan to interact with their shepherds immediately after notification, and to budget sufficient time between acceptance notification and the camera-ready deadline (April 26, 2025) to coordinate with their shepherd. It is a requirement that the paper be considered acceptable to the assigned shepherd so that the updates to the paper reflect the issues raised by the PC (conflicts will be mediated by the PC chairs) before the paper is considered “accepted” to appear in the conference proceedings. In addition, the publisher of the IMC proceedings will review all accepted papers submitted for the camera-ready deadline. Authors should also budget sufficient time immediately after the camera-ready deadline to be available and responsive to any editing changes requested by the publisher.

After acceptance, substantive changes to paper titles require approval by the PC chairs. Only in exceptional circumstances should authors change their author list, and only with the approval of the PC chairs.

Authors of accepted papers will also need to sign an ACM copyright-release form. All rejected papers will be treated as permanently confidential.

Use of Generative AI

While generative AI systems—such as large language models (LLMs)—are powerful and useful tools, there remain open questions as to how and which data they use to train, raising potential concerns over integrity and confidentiality. The ACM has established a set of guidelines pertaining to how authors and reviewers can use generative AI. We summarize some of the main points below, but we refer authors to the following links. Failure to adhere to these guidelines can result in paper rejection.

By authors: The ACM’s author guidelines state that authors are allowed to use generative AI in limited ways, and that their use must be acknowledged in the paper. For small portions of text (phrases or sentences), papers must include a footnote stating that it was generated by AI; for larger portions of text, graphics, and other content, authors must disclose in the Appendix what content was generated by an AI, along with the specific tools and versions used. Please refer to the ACM guidelines for more specific instructions.

By reviewers: Reviewers are not allowed to upload any portion of the submitted papers to generative AI tools. However, according to the ACM’s peer review guidelines, reviewers may upload the content of their own reviews to generative AI “with the sole purpose of improving the quality and readability of reviewer reports for the author, provided any and all parts of the review that would potentially identify the submission, author identities, reviewer identity, or other confidential content is removed prior to uploading into third party tools.”

If you have any questions pertaining to the use of generative AI by either authors or reviewers, please write to the IMC 2025 PC chairs imc2025pcchairs@acm.org