camera-ready: Accepted Paper → Camera-Ready + Review Implementation

For a paper that has been accepted (no rebuttal stage): produce the camera-ready version and implement the reviewers' (typically minor) revisions. Distinct from strategic-revision --external, which handles R&R (rebuttal, DAG, resubmission strategy).

When to Use

• Acceptance notification arrived; reviews are final; you implement rather than argue.
• Triggers: "prepare the camera-ready", "implement the reviews for the accepted paper", "de-anonymize and finalize".

Operating Rules (read first)

• Overleaf-canonical: edit the Overleaf/paper/ symlink target, not any git mirror (overleaf-canonical-source.md). The .tex is a live edit surface — obey reconcile-before-rewriting.md (fresh-read, narrow edits, no replace_all/full-Write, mtime check).
• Phased-work: stop after each phase, summarize, await continue (phased-work.md) unless --autonomous.
• mark-unverified: never assert a reviewer-suggested citation/venue fact you haven't verified.
• Status logging: acceptance means the vault/atlas status should move to Accepted/camera-ready per multi-system-completeness.md — but if the formal decision letter hasn't landed yet (early prep), hold status changes until the user confirms. Once the camera-ready upload is confirmed (Phase 8), the Atlas output and the Vault submission move to In Press; the topic status stays Accepted.

Phase 0 — Setup & verify

1. File the venue correspondence per rules/submission-file-archive.md (names are fixed; never dated or venue-ID names):
   • decision letter → paper-{venue}/correspondence/editorial/{surface}-initial-decision.pdf (+ optional parsed .md);
   • reviews → paper-{venue}/correspondence/referee-reviews/{surface}-round1/{surface}-round1-reviews.pdf (original) + .md (verbatim transcription with score table); a text extraction goes in that folder's analysis/. Never a project-root correspondence/editorial/ or correspondence/referee-reviews/.
2. Snapshot the pre-edit source (main.tex, .bib, generated inputs, figures) → paper-{venue}/submission/camera-ready/pre-edit-source-<YYYY-MM-DD>/ with a SHA256SUMS. Not backup/: that is hook-generated, git-ignored state. The frozen as-submitted PDF already lives in submission/archive/<date>-initial/.
3. Verify reviewer-suggested citations before adding any (DOI/title via scholarly/paperpile); reviewers often mis-spell/mis-date (e.g. "Edelmann 1996" → Suchman & Edelman 1996). Stash verified new entries.
4. Build a reviewer-point → action table so nothing is dropped; confirm scope with the user.
5. Confirm the page-limit rule (see Phase 3) — [UNVERIFIED] until checked against the CfP/acceptance email.

Phase 1 — Camera-ready mechanics (low-risk)

• De-anonymize: replace \author{Anonymous Submission} with the real author/affiliation block.
• Copyright: AAAI auto-renders the slug from the style; set \copyrightyear{<proceedings year>}. ACM: set \setcopyright/\acmConference/DOI per the rights email. Never use \nocopyright for AAAI.
• Section numbering: AAAI submissions ship with \setcounter{secnumdepth}{0} → set to 2. This also fixes blank Section~\ref{} references (a common reviewer complaint).
• Compile; confirm 0 undefined refs and the copyright slug renders on p1.

Springer LNCS/LNAI (llncs ≥ 2.2x): author line Name\textsuperscript{(\Letter)}\orcidID{…} for the corresponding author (load marvosym), \authorrunning, \institute{…\\ \email{…}}. End matter goes in a credits environment before the references: code/data availability, \subsubsection{\ackname} (funding with grant number), \subsubsection{\discintname} (Disclosure of Interests — mandatory, even if none), and any AI-use declaration the venue requires. Confirm against the venue's camera-ready instructions whether these count toward the page limit. The signed Licence to Publish is a separate upload.

Phase 2 — Bibliography

• If adopting canonical (e.g. Paperpile) keys, invoke bib-rekey (DOI-safe remap + diff-verified \cite rewrite).
• Add the verified reviewer-suggested citations and any self-citations (camera-ready is de-anonymized, so self-cites are normal — use the published entry, not the arXiv preprint, when one exists).
• Compile; 0 undefined citations.

Phase 3 — Structure (appendix offload) — GATED on the page rule

• First verify whether the venue's page limit excludes the technical appendix (AAAI/AIES typically count body + figures; references and a post-references appendix are often exempt — confirm). This determines how aggressively to offload.
• If excluded: move full proofs / long derivations / worked-example arithmetic to \appendix after references; leave each result's statement + a 3–5 sentence proof sketch + appendix pointer in the body.
• Equation-label coupling: if a proof you are moving defines equations the body references, lift those equations into the body first (else body text points at appendix equation numbers). Verify 0 undefined after.

Phase 4 — Reviewer revisions + intuition aids

• Implement each row of the Phase-0 action table.
• Common high-value additions for broad-audience venues: a plain-language mechanics paragraph, a notation table, a results-at-a-glance table, one-line Reading glosses, and a mechanism figure/boxed causal chain (covers "more visualization" and "more plain-language" asks at once).
• Apply any consistency fixes surfaced in Phase 0 (e.g. clamped first-best, index-vs-probability clarifications) — flag any that touch a theorem's math for author sign-off before editing.

Phase 5 — QA

• latexmk clean (exit 0); 0 undefined refs/citations; no large overfull boxes; no placeholders/TODOs.
• Page-budget check: locate where references/appendix begin (pdftotext + form-feed page count, or per-label pages from .aux); confirm body ≤ limit (appendix/refs exempt per Phase 3).
• Visual render key pages (pdftoppm) — de-anon header + copyright slug, new tables/figures, appendix.
• Run proofread scoped to the new prose only.
• Token conservation vs the submitted version — uv run python .scripts/check_token_conservation.py --source backup/<submitted>.tex --revision <current>.tex per edited file: every advisory row (changed number, dropped/added citation) must map to a Phase-0 action-table row or a Phase-3 appendix move. Spot-check reworded claims against the claim-strength ladder (docs/reference/claim-strength-ladder.md) — no silent strength moves between the reviewed version and camera-ready.
• Arithmetic forensics (empirical papers) — uv run python .scripts/check_stat_forensics.py <main>.tex: recomputed p-values, df-vs-N, t-vs-descriptives, GRIM. Any HARD finding gets resolved or explained before upload — reviewers approved the numbers as submitted; the camera-ready must not introduce (or ship) an arithmetic impossibility.

Phase 6 — Package for upload

Work in paper-{venue}/submission/camera-ready/:

camera-ready/
├── build-package.sh                 # stages + verifies the upload package
├── pre-edit-source-<date>/          # Phase 0 snapshot
├── package/
│   ├── <venue><year>-paper<ID>-source/      # staged source tree
│   ├── <venue><year>-paper<ID>-source.zip
│   ├── <venue><year>-paper<ID>-camera-ready.pdf
│   └── SHA256SUMS
├── licence/<venue><year>-paper<ID>-licence-to-publish-filled.{docx,pdf}
└── zenodo/                          # only when Phase 7 runs

build-package.sh must: stage exactly the files the publisher needs (main.tex, .bib, the built .bbl, generated inputs, figures, class and style files); fail if any placeholder remains (PENDING, TODO, \CiteTodo, anonymous author block); compile the staged copy in isolation; check it against the canonical build (cmp the .bbl, diff pdftotext output); then write the zip, PDF and SHA256SUMS. Fill the licence form from the venue template; the human signs it.

Phase 7 — Public artifact (when the submission had an anonymous artifact)

If the vault submission or atlas output carries anonymous_repo/anonymous_url:

1. De-anonymise the artifact repository (LICENSE holder, README title/author line, BibTeX note = {To appear}, docstrings, any anonymity scanner → public-release check). Do not change its visibility. Verify the paper's generated inputs are byte-identical to the artifact's copies.
2. If the repo's git identity is anonymous, rewrite author/committer with a backup branch first; confirm the tree hash is unchanged; push with --force-with-lease=<branch>:<old-sha> after git remote -v.
3. Build git archive of the release commit → zenodo/<repo-name>-v1.0.0.zip; write zenodo/form-values.md (resource type, licence matching LICENSE, version, funder/grant, conference fields, description). Reserve the DOI, cite it in the paper's availability statement, and after the human publishes, verify the DOI resolves and the file's MD5 matches.

Phase 8 — Author-side handoff

Report what remains for the human: acknowledgments (now un-anonymized — offer a funding stub), signed copyright/rights form, reproducibility checklist, registration, and the presentation.

When the user confirms the upload, archive the files they say they uploaded per rules/submission-file-archive.md (human-supplied only) into submission/archive/<date>-camera-ready/ as {surface}-camera-ready-{manuscript.pdf,source.zip,licence.pdf} with a README (provenance, sizes, SHA-256). Then run ONE atomic writeback (multi-system-completeness.md: show every diff, confirm once, apply all-or-none):

In Press is an output and submission status, never a topic status (atlas-status-vocabulary.md): leave the topic status: and the CLAUDE.md status line that mirrors it at Accepted, and move the .context/projects/_index.md row to In Press with the other project docs. The upload is the trigger; do not wait to be asked (both 2026-10-10 PRIMA camera-readies sat at Accepted until the author asked the next day).

If another output of the same venue cycle exists (e.g. two accepted papers at one conference), compare its camera-ready archive and records and keep the two consistent.

Verify before reporting done. Then check that no project document still says the camera-ready is pending:

grep -rnE 'camera-ready (paper )?.*(due|pending)|not yet (been )?uploaded' CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md README.md MEMORY.md .context/

Anti-Patterns

• Don't move proofs to an appendix before confirming the appendix is page-exempt. If it counts, you've just relocated, not saved, space.
• Don't replace_all or full-Write the live .tex. Narrow edits; for bulk citekey work defer to bib-rekey's diff-verified flow.
• Don't add a reviewer-suggested citation from memory. Verify it — reviewers mis-cite.
• Don't chain all phases in one response. Checkpoint per phased-work.md.
• Don't log acceptance to vault/atlas if the formal decision letter hasn't arrived — confirm with the user.
• Don't name correspondence by date or venue paper ID, and never file it in a project-root correspondence/editorial/ or correspondence/referee-reviews/.
• Don't treat the vault writeback as frontmatter-only. The body Status paragraph, project docs and papers.yml notes go stale too; the 2026-10-10 PRIMA camera-readies missed all three until a manual sweep.

Verification

• All reviewer points map to a concrete edit (action table fully checked off).
• Build clean, 0 undefined, body within page limit, copyright slug present, author block de-anonymized.
• Pre-edit source preserved in submission/camera-ready/pre-edit-source-<date>/; the as-submitted PDF stays frozen in submission/archive/<date>-initial/.
• Upload package built by build-package.sh (isolated compile matches the canonical build); archive README hashes match the uploaded files.
• Writeback verified: both schema modes, the portfolio validator, generate-paper-history --check, and the stale-wording grep are clean; the Atlas output and the Vault submission read In Press, the topic Accepted.

Cross-References