ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

About ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (abbreviated Oper. Syst. Rev. (ACM), ISSN 0163-5980, CODEN OSRED8) is the official publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS). Published by the Association for Computing Machinery in New York, it has served since 1969 as the community forum of the world's leading researchers in operating systems, distributed systems, and computer systems research. Some of the most-cited guidance papers in systems research — including the famous "How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper" — first appeared in its pages.

This profile corrects a common misconception: Operating Systems Review did not cease publication around 2013–2014. While it stopped appearing as a quarterly periodical after volume 47 (2013), it continues today as a venue for themed special issues published through the ACM Digital Library. Its most recent announced issue, volume 54, no. 1 (2020), carried special topics on formal methods and verification and on synchronization and locking mechanisms, and the SIGOPS website continues to solicit submissions for upcoming themed issues.

Overview

Operating Systems Review (OSR) is a publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS), the ACM special-interest group that sponsors the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), EuroSys, APSYS, and other premier systems venues. Rather than a conventional archival journal, OSR has historically functioned as the SIGOPS community's periodical: a mix of research papers, vision and position papers, retrospective pieces, abridged versions of strong conference and workshop papers, and special-topic collections that capture the state of emerging areas.

The journal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), based in New York, NY, USA, and distributed in print to SIGOPS members and electronically through the ACM Digital Library. Its print ISSN is 0163-5980 and its CODEN is OSRED8. Full archives of the journal are available in the ACM Digital Library at dl.acm.org/journal/sigops, and the venue's history is documented on the official SIGOPS website at sigops.org.

Because SIGOPS' flagship research appears at its conferences (SOSP, OSDI, EuroSys, ASPLOS), OSR has played a complementary role: it publishes the kind of material that does not fit neatly into a conference program — workshop selections, extended papers from regional symposia, surveys of industrial research labs, retrospectives, and influential how-to essays. That role explains both its longevity and its evolution: from a quarterly newsletter-bulletin into a curated series of themed special issues.

Publication History

The lineage of Operating Systems Review begins in the mid-1960s, and the official chronological history published by SIGOPS traces it precisely:

• 1965: The Special Interest Committee on Time-Sharing (SICTIME) is founded by Henriette Avram.
• 1968: Peter J. Denning (then at Princeton University) is appointed editor of the quarterly SIGTIME newsletter. Later that year, SIGTIME becomes SIGOPS — the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems — following ACM approval at the Fall Joint Computer Conference.
• February 1969: The SIGTIME Bulletin becomes the SIGOPS Bulletin.
• November 1969: The newsletter is renamed Operating Systems Review, effective with the November issue (volume 3, no. 4). This is the founding issue of the journal under its current name.

From 1969 onward, OSR appeared quarterly — typically in January, April, July, and October — carrying a mix of short papers, experience reports, announcements, and discussion pieces. For four decades it was the regular printed voice of the SIGOPS membership.

The quarterly rhythm continued through volume 47 (2013). After that point, OSR transitioned to an irregular schedule of themed special issues rather than fixed quarterly publication. Subsequent volumes documented in dblp and the ACM Digital Library include:

• Volume 48 (2014): special-topic issues including extended papers from the Brazilian Symposium on Computer System Engineering, HotDep 2013, HotPower 2013, and PLOS 2013.
• Volume 50 (2016): selected extended papers from the Asia-Pacific Systems Workshop (APSys 2015), the Brazilian Symposium on Computer System Engineering (2015), and the Workshop on Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems (WOPSSS, October 2016).
• Volume 52, no. 1 (2018): "Selected Papers on Heterogeneous Computing and Virtualization Techniques," edited by Mark Silberstein and Christopher J. Rossbach.
• Volume 54, no. 1 (2020): special topics on "Formal Methods and Verification" and "Synchronization and Locking Mechanisms," with seven papers, edited by Robbert van Renesse, Christopher J. Rossbach, Kishore Pusukuri, John Chandy, Antônio Fröhlich, and Ashvin Goel.

The venue remains active: the SIGOPS publications page continues to announce upcoming special topics — including a recent call on "Intelligent Software Systems" covering systems for machine learning and machine learning for systems — and invites authors to propose new themes to the editors.

Aims and Scope

The official SIGOPS description of Operating Systems Review states that it is a publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, "whose scope of interest includes: computer operating systems and architecture for multiprocessing, and time sharing; resource management; evaluation and simulation; reliability, integrity, and security of data; artificial intelligence; computer system modeling and analysis; large-scale systems; storage systems; and internet of things."

In practice, each issue of OSR is organized around a theme, and submissions are solicited for that theme. In addition to special-topic content, individual submissions are also considered; these may be collected into a single issue or included in a separately designated section of a special-topics issue. SIGOPS states that it is interested in a broad range of special topics reflecting both academic and industrial interests.

The venue accepts several kinds of contributions:

• Abridged versions of published conference or workshop papers
• White papers and vision statements
• Retrospective papers
• Papers on current research

According to the editors, a good OSR paper motivates a significant problem, proposes an interesting and compelling solution, demonstrates the practicality and benefits of the solution, draws appropriate conclusions, clearly describes the paper's contributions, and clearly articulates advances beyond previous work. For abridged conference or workshop publications, the paper should encourage the reader to read the full version.

Editorial Leadership

The current editors of Operating Systems Review, as listed on the official SIGOPS publications page, are:

• Christopher J. Rossbach — The University of Texas at Austin
• Robbert van Renesse — Cornell University
• Kishore Pusukuri — University of California, Riverside

Earlier editorial leadership documented on archived SIGOPS pages includes Jeanna Matthews (Clarkson University), who served as editor in the 2000s and 2010s, and Thomas Bressoud (Denison University), who co-edited with Matthews and served as guest editor for the January 2014 special issue. The very first editor of the precursor newsletter was Peter J. Denning (appointed 1968, while the publication was still the SIGTIME newsletter), and Michael M. Gold (University of Pittsburgh) served as newsletter editor when the SIGOPS Bulletin became Operating Systems Review in 1969.

Special issues are typically steered by guest editors drawn from the community — for example, Miguel Correia (INESC-ID/Technical University of Lisbon) and Neeraj Mittal (University of Texas at Dallas) for the Dependability Issues in Cloud Computing workshops (DISCCO), Eric Eide (University of Utah) for the 2015 issue on repeatability and sharing of experimental artifacts, and Gernot Heiser, Kenji Kono, KyoungSoo Park, and Robbert van Renesse for the APSys 2015 selections.

Peer Review and Submission Process

OSR's review model is editorial rather than a traditional double-blind peer-review process. The official SIGOPS guidance states: "The submitted papers will undergo an editorial review process." This reflects the venue's character as a community publication: many contributions are invited, solicited for a theme, or selected from workshops whose papers have already been through a program-committee review.

Formatting guidelines published by SIGOPS specify single-spaced 8.5″ × 11″ pages, 10-point type on 12-point leading, two-column format in Times Roman or a similar font, within a 6.5″ × 9″ text block. OSR does not enforce strict minimum or maximum page limits; 2–6 pages is suggested as a rough guideline, though authors may devote more space as needed. Pages should not be numbered, and figures and tables should be legible in black and white without magnification. Authors are invited to prepare drafts using standard systems-conference templates (e.g., USENIX ATC, OSDI, SOSP, NSDI).

Submissions are sent directly to the editors by email in PDF format. Because each issue is theme-driven, SIGOPS publishes calls with specific deadlines — for example, a call for the "Intelligent Software Systems" special topic set a submission deadline of April 20, 2025, covering topics from GenAI backend systems and scaling LLM techniques to intelligent edge systems and responsible AI. Authors interested in proposing a new special topic are invited to contact the OSR editors directly.

Indexing and Abstracting

Operating Systems Review is indexed in Scopus, where its coverage history is recorded as 1980–1991, 1993, 1996–2010, and 2013–2022 (per Scopus-derived aggregations). Its entries appear in the SCImago Journal Rank listings under Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems, and Hardware and Architecture. The journal's volumes are also comprehensively indexed in the dblp computer science bibliography, which catalogs every issue from the early volumes through the recent special issues.

The complete archive is preserved in the ACM Digital Library, and the journal is archived for long-term preservation by Portico, which lists "ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review" (ISSN 0163-5980) among its preserved ACM titles. Library cataloging identifiers include LCCN 80649636, CODEN OSRED8, and OCLC 01460456.

Impact Metrics

Because Operating Systems Review is a SIG community publication rather than a conventional Clarivate-indexed journal, readers should treat its metrics with care. The following figures are Scopus-derived and vary by year and aggregator; they are included with attribution rather than as an official journal impact factor:

• h-index: approximately 106–111 across Scopus-derived sources (106 per ResearchBite; 111 per SCImago journal-ranking tables)
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 0.518 (ResearchBite, Scopus-derived); historical SCImago ranking tables show yearly SJR values ranging from 0.209 to over 1.6 depending on category and year
• Best quartile: Q2 (Computer Networks and Communications; Information Systems), per Scopus-derived aggregation
• Total indexed citations: over 32,000–36,000 citations to roughly 1,600–1,900 indexed papers, per third-party aggregations

Not verified / left blank: no Clarivate Journal Citation Reports Impact Factor is confirmed for this venue; the journal is not in the Web of Science Core Collection journal lists verified for this profile. Acceptance rate figures are not published by the editors and are not included here. An e-ISSN is not confirmed from an official source.

Open Access Policy

Operating Systems Review is not an open-access journal. It is a subscription-based SIG publication distributed to SIGOPS members and institutional subscribers through ACM. It is not listed in the DOAJ (a DOAJ API query for ISSN 0163-5980 returns zero records).

Its author-rights policy is, however, unusually author-friendly for a traditional publication. Per the official SIGOPS note to authors: by submitting an article for distribution in this Special Interest Group publication, the author grants ACM non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights to publish in print on acceptance, to digitize and post the article in the electronic version, to include it in the ACM Digital Library and related services, and to allow users to make personal copies for non-commercial, educational, or research purposes. Crucially, the contributing author retains copyright to the article, and ACM refers requests for republication directly to the author.

Relationship to SIGOPS and Community Venues

OSR sits at the center of the SIGOPS publication ecosystem. SIGOPS sponsors some of the most selective venues in computer science:

• SOSP (Symposium on Operating Systems Principles) — held since 1967 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee; historically biennial (alternating with OSDI), annual since 2024; one of the most prestigious single-track systems conferences
• EuroSys — the European Conference on Computer Systems
• ASPLOS — Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (co-sponsored)
• PODC — Principles of Distributed Computing (with SIGACT)
• SoCC — Symposium on Cloud Computing
• VEE — Virtual Execution Environments (with SIGPLAN)
• APSys — Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems
• SYSTOR — ACM International Systems and Storage Conference

OSR has historically amplified these venues: special issues have republished the proceedings of EuroSys, ASPLOS, and SOSP (for example, the December 2007 SOSP proceedings issue), and extended papers from workshops such as HotDep, HotPower, PLOS, LADIS, DISCCO, and WOPSSS. SIGOPS also runs a Hall of Fame Award (started 2005) recognizing influential papers from ten or more years past — with recipients including Leslie Lamport, Barbara Liskov, Richard Rashid, and Dennis Ritchie — and OSR has been one of the channels through which the community's landmark work circulates.

Landmark Papers and Legacy

For a venue that never chased conventional journal prestige, OSR's pages contain an outsized share of the systems field's canonical reading:

• Roy Levin and David D. Redell, "How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper" — OSR 17(3), July 1983, pp. 35–40. Generations of systems PhD students have been assigned this essay; it remains one of the most-circulated pieces of writing advice in computer science.
• Butler W. Lampson, "Protection" — OSR 8(1), January 1974, pp. 18–24. A foundational treatment of protection mechanisms that still appears on graduate operating-systems reading lists.
• Galen C. Hunt and James R. Larus, "Singularity: Rethinking the Software Stack" — OSR 41(2), April 2007, pp. 37–49. The manifesto of Microsoft Research's Singularity project, one of the most influential language-based OS designs.
• Sara Bouchenak and Gregory Chockler, "Verifying Cloud Services: Present and Future" — OSR 47, 2013, pp. 6–19. A widely cited survey-style paper from the journal's final quarterly volume.

Beyond individual papers, OSR's special issues have repeatedly served as the published record for workshops and regional symposia — from the Brazilian Symposium on Computer System Engineering to the Asia-Pacific Systems Workshop — giving archival visibility to communities outside the main North American and European conference circuit. Its issues on systems work at industrial labs (Microsoft Research, IBM Research, HP Labs) and on the Linux kernel documented the field's industrial turn in the 2000s.

Why It Matters

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review matters for three reasons. First, longevity and continuity: few computing publications have run continuously since 1969, and OSR's archive is a primary source for the history of operating systems — from time-sharing and the ARPANET era through distributed systems, the web, cloud computing, and now AI-native systems. Second, community function: as SIGOPS' own periodical, it has been the venue where the systems community talks to itself — through vision papers, retrospectives, workshop reports, and essays that would not survive conventional peer review but shaped how the field thinks. Third, adaptation: by evolving from a quarterly bulletin into curated themed special issues, OSR found a sustainable role alongside the conference-centric culture of systems research, and it continues to solicit new themes from the community today.

For researchers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: OSR is the place to publish a timely vision, a retrospective, a workshop's best work, or an abridged version of a strong paper for a broader audience — with an editorial (not double-blind) review process, author-retained copyright, and distribution through the ACM Digital Library to the entire SIGOPS membership.

Key Facts at a Glance

• Full title: ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
• Abbreviation: Oper. Syst. Rev. (ACM)
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY, USA
• Published on behalf of: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS)
• ISSN (print): 0163-5980
• CODEN: OSRED8
• Founded: 1969 (as Operating Systems Review; newsletter lineage from 1965/1968)
• Frequency: Quarterly through 2013 (vol. 47); irregular themed special issues since
• Status: Active — themed special issues continue; latest documented issue vol. 54, no. 1 (2020)
• Language: English
• Editors: Christopher J. Rossbach (UT Austin), Robbert van Renesse (Cornell), Kishore Pusukuri (UC Riverside)
• Indexed in: Scopus, dblp, ACM Digital Library; preserved by Portico
• Open access: No (subscription; not in DOAJ); authors retain copyright
• Official sites: dl.acm.org/journal/sigops · sigops.org

Sources: ACM Digital Library journal page (dl.acm.org/journal/sigops); ACM SIGOPS official website — Publications page, History page, and archived Operating Systems Review pages (sigops.org); dblp computer science bibliography venue listings; SCImago Journal Rank listings (Scopus-derived); Portico title coverage list; DOAJ API query for ISSN 0163-5980 (zero records, October 2026). Impact metrics are Scopus-derived third-party aggregations, attributed in the text, and should be verified against primary sources before citation.