Originality: Papers must be original contributions. They cannot have been published elsewhere or currently submitted for publication anywhere else. All relevant work, including direct quotations from your own work, should be cited.
Paper format: Papers must be formatted using the ISMIR 2026 templates (LaTeX/Overleaf or Word). Authors are required to submit their papers in PDF format. Submissions that manipulate the template (e.g., by decreasing margins or font sizes) may be rejected without review. All fonts need to be embedded within the PDF. Submitted PDF files must be at most 10MB in size. Please compress images and figures as necessary before submitting.
Paper length: Papers must conform to a 6+N format: 6 pages of scientific content (including figures and tables) and any number of additional pages that contain only references, an optional ethics statement, an optional AI usage statement and an optional Acknowledgements section (after acceptance). An appendix is not allowed in the PDF. Overlength papers or papers that do not conform to the required format will be rejected without review.
AI Usage Statement: In line with the ISMIR 2026 AI Usage Policy for authors, if authors need to declare and explain the use of AI tools in the work described in the paper, they can do so by adding a section titled "AI Usage Statement" at the end of the paper. The declaration should be placed directly in the submission PDF and can be included both at submission time and in the camera-ready version (if accepted). This section does not count towards the 6 page limit for scientific content.
Ethics statement: With the goal of encouraging more discussion of ethical considerations in the ISMIR research community, authors may choose to include an ethics statement section in their submissions in addition to the 6 page limit for scientific content. Ethics statements are optional, though they are encouraged especially for work related to MIR technology with the potential for broad social impact, such as recommendation or generation. A good ethics statement should candidly discuss both positive and negative ethical considerations of the work, including but not limited to (1) the potential societal implications of the work, (2) the ethical manner in which the work was conducted (especially for work with user studies), and (3) the prior societal context before the work. Any cultural, economic, or broader societal risks posed by the work should be mentioned (though not necessarily resolved). Ethics statements should be placed directly in the submission PDF and do not count against the 6 page limit for scientific content. Information regarding approval from the Institutional Review Board can also be presented in this section although the names of institutions should be redacted for blind review. In most cases ethics statements would be 0-2 paragraphs, and certainly not longer than a page.
Accessibility: For this year's submissions, we strongly encourage authors to include alt text (or alternative text) as a first step to make your manuscript more accessible. Also, we strongly encourage the authors to adopt a color-blind friendly color palette when making plots. Please refer to the guidelines for accessible submission on how to incorporate alt text and the color palette in the manuscript accessibility section below.
Anonymity of authors: ISMIR reviews are double-blind; authors and reviewers will be anonymous to each other. Do not put your names under the title. Avoid using phrases such as “our previous work” when referring to earlier publications by the authors. Likewise, make any self-citations in the third person, although self-citations should be kept to a minimum. Acknowledgements should not be included in the initial submission for review since they may contain identifying information about authors (e.g. co-workers and grant IDs), but can be optionally added in the camera-ready submission after acceptance. Check supplementary material for information that may reveal the authors’ identity. Avoid providing links to websites that identify the authors. Anonymized materials may be uploaded as “Supplementary material”.
Preprints: To maintain the legitimacy for our double-blind review process, we strongly discourage authors from posting near duplicate manuscripts on public archives (technical reports, arXiv, etc.). In the same spirit, to protect our double-blind review process, authors need to make sure they do not promote their work in any way during the review process (social media, blog, mailing-list, etc.), since this may prevent preserving anonymity.
External Materials: If the paper promises to make the code, dataset, or other materials available after the acceptance, our research community relies on the research ethics of the authors to fulfill their promise.
