Submission guidelines

Submission process

Submissions to the Proceedings track consist of an 8-page PDF plus associated metadata submitted via the OpenReview platform.

Each submission requires at least one author to register as a Reciprocal Reviewer. You are an eligible Reciprocal Reviewer if you have received a PhD. The manuscript will not be considered for a Contributed Talk if the Reciprocal Reviewer fails to fulfill their reviewing responsibilities with due diligence, and the CCN-P paper is desk rejected. Reviewers will be asked during review how certain they are of their judgment, and their level of expertise in the particular subfield of this paper.

Papers undergo rigorous peer review and will have a rebuttal period during which authors and reviewers discuss, overseen by area chairs and senior area chairs. Acceptance rate targets approximately 25%, informed by reviewer ratings.

Accepted Proceedings papers receive a publication in CCN Proceedings (CCN-P) with DOI assignment, are presented as posters, may be selected for a Contributed Talk, and have reviews that will be made public on OpenReview. Rejected Proceedings papers will be converted to a regular poster, if within scope and if the authors submit a 2-page abstract. These papers may also be selected for Contributed Talks, for which the reviews of the Proceedings process will be used. For rejected Proceedings papers, the original Proceedings submission and the reviews will not be made publicly visible.

Formatting requirements

The text, tables and figures of a CCN proceedings submission can be no longer than 8 pages, excluding references.

Abstract

The abstract should not exceed 300 words. CCN has an interdisciplinary audience. Hence a good abstract should (a) give context about what the problem is and why it matters (b) give the contents and explain what was done and what was found (c) give a clear conclusion including what we learned and how it changes the way we think about the universe.

Templates

Download: CCN 2026 LaTeX Template (zip)

If you encounter any issues with the template, please file an issue on GitHub.

Double-blind review

CCN's reviewing process is double-blind, and it is the authors' responsibility to anonymize their submissions. Do not include any identifying information, such as author names, affiliations, or acknowledgments, in the abstract, main text, figures, or metadata. When citing your own work, ensure anonymity to maintain double-blind review standards (e.g., write "In previous work by Author et al. [1]…" instead of "In our previous work [1]..."). If citing a non-anonymous preprint (e.g., from arXiv, social media, or other websites), use anonymized phrasing (e.g., "Author et al. [1] concurrently demonstrate…"). Reviewers are instructed not to actively seek out such preprints, but their discovery does not constitute a conflict of interest. Alternatively, authors may choose not to cite their own non-anonymous preprints, such as those on arXiv. However, prior publications on related topics must be appropriately anonymized when cited.

We encourage including links to code and artifacts in the spirit of open science, but please ensure that the linked material is anonymized; e.g. create a dedicated account to host your material rather than the account of one of the authors. Reviewers are not required to review linked material.

Reciprocal reviewer policy

One author from each submission will be added to the pool of eligible reviewers (so that there are at least as many eligible reviewers as submissions). Any reviewer will review at most 4-5 papers.

Authors in this category who fail to finish reviews by the author response stage may have their paper submissions desk-rejected and may not be considered for Contributed Talk when converted to the Extended Abstracts track. Authors are exempt from the reviewing requirement if they are serving as an AC, an SAC, or a CCN 2026 Organizing Committee member.

Use of large language models

The use of LLMs is allowed as a general-purpose assist tool. Authors and reviewers take full responsibility for the content written under their name, including any content generated by LLMs and any content that could be construed as plagiarism or scientific misconduct (e.g., fabrication of facts). LLMs are not eligible for authorship. Additionally, papers that make extensive use of LLMs and do not disclose this usage will be desk-rejected.

Dual submission policy

Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, accepted for publication, are not allowed and violate our dual submission policy. Further, for the eight-page Proceedings track, this also applies to works that have been submitted in parallel to this or other conferences or journals. Such parallel submission will however be considered for the two-page Extended Abstracts track.

However, papers that cite previous related work by the authors and papers that have appeared on non-peer reviewed websites (like arXiv) or that have been presented at workshops (i.e., venues that do not have publication proceedings) do not violate the policy.

Frequently Asked Questions

I can no longer attend CCN 2026. Can my co-author present my poster?

Please reach out to the Technical Programme Committee (tpc@ccneuro.org) to request to change the "Presenter" to your co-author on your submission. Presenters are identified via submission metadata on OpenReview.

Please note that Presenters need to be unique across both tracks at CCN 2026 (i.e., an individual can be listed as Presenter on no more than one Proceedings paper or Extended Abstract). Each Presenter must pay for a registration at CCN 2026.

We acknowledge that things come up: In the event that the Presenter can't attend CCN 2026 in person, we won't withdraw the work and a co-author can put up the poster. However, the Presenter must stay registered.

I can no longer attend CCN 2026. Can my co-author present my talk?

Talks selections are determined based on submissions and their Presenters jointly. As such, we won't be able to transfer a talk to a different Presenter, unlike with a poster (see the above question).

What is the timezone for the deadlines?

"Anywhere on Earth" or AoE (UTC-12). This is the last timezone on Earth, so the deadline is the end of the specified date no matter where you are in the world. For most timezones, the deadline will be several hours after your local midnight.

How should I format the anonymized author block?

Please use the anonymized title-author block included in the templates. Do not duplicate this block (e.g., according to the number of anonymized authors of the manuscript). In particular, each anonymized submission to either CCN track should have a similar-length title-author block (modulo a single- or double-line title).

Can we have shared first or last authorship?

Yes. You still must choose a fixed ordering of authors in the submission form.

Can I include keywords?

These are not necessary. We match reviewers and categorize submissions according to your full-text abstract.

Can I include acknowledgments?

In the post-decision, "camera-ready" version, yes. Please omit this from the anonymized submission to be reviewed. If acknowledgments are inadvertently included in the anonymized submission, we may have to desk-reject it for failure to meet the double-blind reviewing requirements of CCN 2026.

Can I link to my code?

Yes, we encourage code submissions as evidence of reproducibility. However, note that a code repository takes extra effort to anonymize, and we will desk-reject submissions that accidentally de-anonymize their authors via a linked code repository with identifying information.

We recommend Anonymous GitHub as a service that helps to anonymize a GitHub-hosted code repository, but we allow links to any hosting service as long as they maintain anonymity. We suggest including a link to the anonymous repository in a footnote in the PDF.

Please remember to avoid naming the repository or the exact package name if it is already publicly available. You can add the name and repository URL back in during the post-decision / camera-ready phase.

How should I format equations?

We don't prescribe a particular format. The APA standard is OK, for example.

Can I preprint the manuscript that I plan to submit to CCN?

Papers to both tracks must be submitted fully anonymized. Authors may disseminate their work publicly under their names (e.g., on a preprint server), but are asked to refrain from publicizing (e.g., on social media) work under review at CCN until CCN decisions are released for all tracks (all-decisions) to prevent accidental de-anonymization during the review process.

There seem to be two deadlines, which one…

tl;dr: On abstract-deadline we need your title, author list, and abstract (paper summary), but you have until submission-deadline to upload the PDF. If you are unsure, we advise you to keep abstract-deadline as an internal deadline.

Everything in the OpenReview submission form is due by the "abstract registration deadline" abstract-deadline, anywhere on earth, except for the PDF. The PDF is due by the "full submission deadline" on submission-deadline, anywhere on earth. It will not be possible to edit the author list, the presenter, or the reciprocal reviewer of a submission after abstract-deadline. It will be possible to make edits to other submission metadata (including the title and the \~300-word abstract) from abstract-deadline-plus-one to submission-deadline, but any major edits (that substantially change the evidence or contributions of the paper) will result in a desk rejection.

Why are there two deadlines?

The two deadlines exist for us to have time to recruit and onboard reviewers signing up as part of a submission, while keeping the final (PDF) deadline as late as our timeline allows. We suggest thinking about the overall deadline as abstract-deadline so you don't miss the abstract registration deadline.

Can I include supplementary material?

Yes, you can include these in the PDF that you submit for review; by appending it after the References. However, reviewers are not obliged to take this material into account. Make sure any linked material is anonymized. The supplementary material does not need to adhere to the 2-column format of the main text (i.e., it can be single-column).

Do references count towards the 8-page limit?

No.

Can I submit my manuscript to another venue or submit a previously published manuscript?

The Proceedings track does not allow the submission of manuscripts that have been published or are under review elsewhere ("concurrent" or "dual" submissions). However, after we have made a decision on your submission (proceedings-decisions), you may decide to submit the manuscript to another venue which may have its own policy on prior publication. Accepted CCN Proceedings papers will have an assigned DOI, which may affect this decision.

Contact Info

If you encounter a situation that you are unable to resolve on your own, please contact the Technical Program Committee (TPC) at tpc@ccneuro.org.

If the issue is technical issue related to the OpenReview platform, email the OpenReview support team directly at info@openreview.net and CC the TPC.