Since the fall of 2025, we—the 2026 OPCs Melanie Tory, Alex Endert, and Tobias Isenberg, along with our OPC assistant Shani Spivak—have been working toward organizing the full paper submission and reviewing process. As a first point we would like to remind everyone that the old blog posts by the previous years’ OPCs and by the VGTC/VEC are still available for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. You may consult them for excellent guidance on issues such as the VIS area model, the role of keywords for authors and reviewers, how to make your paper reviewer-friendly, replication studies, handling conflicts and reviewing ethics, reviewing revised papers, and an analysis of the VIS 2025 review process as well as many more topics. In this first edition of the blog posts for VIS 2026, however, we would like to raise a few points that are new for this year.
First, in the submission process this year we are making a few changes, which we hope will improve the process overall. Specifically, we are introducing a new optional upload field for the full paper including an appendix. Unlike the regular paper upload field that is limited to 11-page PDF documents, this field will not have such a limit in pages. The intention of this upload is that authors who include appendices in their papers and would like to cross-link these appendices to the main paper, should be able to do so. In the past you would have split off the appendix and would have uploaded it as an additional material file, losing the cross-linking between appendix and main document. Now you can—in addition to the main 11-page document without the appendix that you still must upload—also upload the whole document including the appendix, and reviewers can take advantage of this integrated file. The deadline for this additional upload file will be also March 31, like the main file, so that reviewers can be sure that nothing has changed in the paper after the deadline.
A second change we are making to the submission form is that we are introducing the option to suggest up to three external reviewers for a paper by providing their names, e-mail address, academic website, and reason for the suggestion. These suggested reviewers must not be in conflict with any of the authors, you as authors must not have contacted these reviewers about the submission, and they must not be members of this year’s IPC, area chairs (APCs) or overall paper charis (OPC). The secondary reviewer assigned to your paper may then consider these suggestions but is not required to pick from the list and can also assign a completely different person.
Finally, we maintain the program to involve and train younger members of our community in the reviewing process, but updated the name from “student reviewers” to “junior reviewers”. With this change we want to clarify that a junior reviewer does not necessarily have to be a PhD student but also includes anyone new to reviewing for IEEE VIS, whether they are Ph.D. students or seasoned professionals from other fields. For more details on this program please see the dedicated page on it.
In the coming weeks we will make a few additional blog posts on some dedicated issues, to help you prepare your papers for VIS in the best possible way.