Preparing Software and Data for Submission To JEA

In addition to articles, JEA publishes code, input and output instances, data files, and links to web pages that may be useful to implementors and other researchers. The ACM Copyright Policy covers articles published by JEA, which are made available to the public by subscription or by payment of a fee. However, software and data published by JEA are completely free, and available to anyone with access to the Internet.

Program sources for all code used in the work and developed by the authors are required for refereeing; if the authors' employer does not allow the release of codes to the public, the referees will review the source under a non-disclosure policy, and the code will not be published.

JEA prefers that code and data be submitted as a zipped tar file. The preferred programming languages are C and C++, although other languages will be accepted. The codes provided must be complete and should be buildable on some type of Unix platform.

Submitting Code to JEA

Referees are expected to verify:

That the code package is buildable on the system(s) indicated by the authors.
That the instructions for installation and use are reasonably easy to follow.
That the resulting binaries produce (some of) the results provided in the submitted article.

Authors should make every effort to simplify this verification process by including instructions for installing the programs, clearly describing platform dependancies, creating sample input and output files, fully documenting the source code, and organizing and labelling files neatly in subdirectories.

For advice about preparing software for public consumption, visit the following websites.

The GNU Coding Standards : guidelines for writing and documenting code for public use.
C and C++ Style Guides: several style guides developed for use at Bell Labs Indian Hill.
The Code Conventions for the Java (tm) Programming Language produced by Sun.

Submitting Input and Output Instances to JEA

Authors who submit software are requested to provide a few sample input and output files for testing and validation purposes. Furthermore, JEA welcomes submission of input instances and input generators that may be useful to other researchers who are developing algorithms for the same or similar problems.

Whenever possible, input and output data formats should match those in common use in the community; for example, the Dimacs Implementation Challenges have defined a number of standard formats for algorithms on networks and graphs.

Submitting Data Files

Manuscripts submitted to JEA are expected to be complete and self-contained: data that is relevant to the conclusions drawn in the paper should appear in the paper and not in separate data files. Authors are not expected to submit every data point generated in their experiments; referees are not expected to examine raw data files to verify the correctness of the results described in the papers.

However, data files describing experimental results may be submitted if other researchers will find it useful to download the data sets for comparative purposes. Data files should be in ASCII (text) format, and the purpose and meaning of the data should be clearly documented.

Submitting Links and Online Features

Authors are encouraged to make full use of the online nature of JEA by submitting Web links to existing suites of software whenever possible. These links can be provided within the submitted paper: upon publication, conversion to the final pdf form will produce links that are suitable for browsing. Alternatively, authors may wish to prepare a separate HTML page of useful links, which can be posted (uncopyrighted) at the JEA site, together with the manuscript and other files.

As most readers have access to color terminals, authors are invited to use color in their illustrations to improve readability. Static and even animated graphics (in particular using Java applets) may also be submitted.

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