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Help › Submitting a paper

Submitting a paper

Submitting takes four short steps. Your draft is saved at each step, so you can leave and come back from the Submit page.

Before you begin

  • You need an account with a verified university email address.
  • You can submit 1 new paper per calendar year. See the policies. We show your remaining allowance at the top of the submission page, and we check it before you start, so you will not fill in a form only to be refused at the end.
  • Have a PDF ready. TeX source is optional.

1. Subject and license

Choose the primary subject area and, when more than one area is open, any cross-lists. Choose a license and accept the submission agreement.

2. Upload

Choose one of two ways to provide the paper:

  • TeX source (recommended). Upload a .tar.gz, .tgz, .zip, .tar, .gz or single .tex file (at most 50 MB) with everything needed to build the paper. We compile it with pdflatex, running bibtex and as many passes as needed, and show you the result and the log. The PDF readers see is the one we built, and the source is offered as a “Download source” link. Figures should be PDF, PNG or JPEG (convert EPS to PDF first). LuaTeX/XeTeX, biber, makeindex and shell escape are not supported: include the generated .bbl instead of running biber. If your archive has several candidate main files, say which one to use. If compilation fails you see the errors, and nothing you uploaded before is lost.
  • PDF only, for work that was not written in TeX: not password-protected, at most 40 MB and 1000 pages.

3. Metadata

  • Title: plain text; LaTeX math between $ signs is typeset.
  • Authors: separate authors with commas, e.g. Jane Doe (MIT; Harvard), John Q. Smith (Stanford), Ada Lovelace. Affiliations go in parentheses; use semicolons to separate several affiliations of one author. We show you how we read the list.
  • Abstract: 100–3000 characters. Leave a blank line between paragraphs. See math syntax.
  • Comments, journal reference, DOI: optional.

4. Review and submit

You see the page exactly as readers will. Tick the confirmation box and press Submit paper. The paper is then scheduled: it becomes public at the next announcement (Sun 11 Oct 2026, 20:00 EDT if you submit now; the deadline is Fri 9 Oct 2026, 14:00 EDT), and receives its identifier (YYMM.NNNNN) then. Until the announcement you can un-submit it to make changes. See deadlines and the announcement schedule.

After submission

  • Replace your paper with a new version from its page: you go through the same steps, pre-filled, and the old version stays available. This is free, and the new version is announced on the same schedule.
  • Edit the journal reference or DOI at any time without a new version.
  • Withdraw if necessary. This does not return your yearly slot.