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Publication Ethics

 

Authors

Authors submitting their work to ICML need to agree to the following.

Research ethics

Authors submitting their work to ICML must follow the following guidelines, adapted from the NeurIPS Ethics Guidelines.  Specifically, when there are risks directly associated with the proposed methods, methodology, application, or data collection and usage, authors are expected to make a reasonable effort in identifying these risks and provide a thoughtful discussion including a rationale of their decisions. Authors are strongly encouraged to propose mitigation strategies for risks identified whenever feasible. However, it is understood that some risks—particularly those arising from general-purpose methods being applied in unforeseeable or speculative ways—may fall outside the reasonable scope of the research and need not be addressed comprehensively.

The following categories will be used for flagging potential ethical issues during the review process.

  • "Discrimination / Bias / Fairness Concerns",
    • Example: Papers about applications where bias, fairness, and discrimination are a concern (e.g. hiring algorithms) should acknowledge these risks and, ideally, include analysis that directly addresses the relevant area of concern, with the expectation that such analysis is feasible and within a reasonable scope.
  • "Inappropriate Potential Applications & Impact  (e.g., human rights concerns)"
    • Example: Papers about applications that have a direct connection to human rights issues (e.g. weapons) should provide a thoughtful discussion of the risks of the application. Where appropriate and within the scope of the work, authors may also suggest reasonable recommendations for mitigating these risks. 
  • "Responsible Research Practice (e.g., IRB, documentation, research ethics, participant consent)"
    • Example: While we acknowledge that standards for IRB vary across borders and institutions, research involving human subjects should provide evidence that it adhered to the authors’ home institution’s procedures for obtaining IRB approval or was eligible for an exemption. 
  • "Privacy and Security (e.g., personally identifiable information)"
    • Example: Papers that rely on data that includes personally identifiable information should make reasonable efforts to ensure that individuals are not identifiable in the research outputs.  
  • "Legal Compliance (e.g., GDPR, copyright, terms of use)"
    • ICML is an international conference, and legal requirements will vary. Where appropriate, papers should provide evidence that local laws and regulations were followed. 
    • The issue of fair use of copyrighted material for training generative AI models is controversial. Submissions utilizing datasets that contain copyrighted material should acknowledge and address this in the impact statement.
  • "Research Integrity Issues (e.g., plagiarism, collusion rings, etc.)",
    • Flagged issues in this category will bypass the ethics review process and be escalated to the Program Chairs for adjudication.

For a fuller discussion of these categories, see https://neurips.cc/public/EthicsGuidelines. 

Paper submissions

Authorship

Authors should comprise exactly those individuals who made a significant contribution to the research. Other contributors should be acknowledged upon the acceptance of the paper in the final camera ready submission. The submitting author must ensure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Originality, citations

The submitted paper is entirely written by the authors of the paper. If the work of others have been used, the work used must be properly cited or quoted. Publications that have significantly influenced the nature of the work must be cited. However, only relevant publications can be cited and self-citation should be kept at minimum.

Dual submissions

The rules concerning dual submissions are described in the call for papers.

Fraud, correctness

Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements are unacceptable, including but not limited to the use of fabricated data. If before the publication of the final version of the paper, an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in the submitted paper, the author needs to promptly notify the program chairs (program-chairs@icml.cc) and either retract the paper, or correct it if a correction is feasible.

Conflict of interest

Financial or any other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of the manuscript must be disclosed to the program chairs and upon the acceptance of the paper, information pertaining to the conflict must be made available in the final version, including all sources of financial support.

 

Program committee and reviewers

Aims and goals

The program committee (i.e., Program Chairs, Senior Area Chairs, Area Chairs, Reviewers) must strive to meet the expectations/needs of conference participants, readers and authors; conference participants and readers have expectations/needs of a high quality and intellectually stimulating program, while the authors have expectations/needs of a fair and professional review process.

Confidentiality

All information pertaining to individual submitted manuscripts must be kept confidential. The program committee and reviewers need to protect the author's ideas.

Fairness

All submissions must be evaluated only for their contents, as explained on the review form.

Prudence

Reviewers must bring to the attention of the Area Chair handling a paper any information that may be a reason to reject the submitted paper, such as the violation of these guidelines.

Conflicts

Program committee members must disclose any conflicts of interest through OpenReview (or, for reviewers, notifying the cognizant Area Chair; for Area Chairs, notifying the cognizant Senior Area Chair; etc). Any program committee member who is conflicted with a paper due to close ties to the authors of the paper cannot participate in deciding the fate of that paper. Program chairs are not exempt to this rule. In case a program chair is conflicted, the non-conflicted program chairs must make the decisions without the involvement of the conflicted program chair.