March 17, 2026
Initial Paper Submissions Due
L-CSS with CDC Option

March 31, 2026
Initial Paper Submissions Due
Regular and Invited Session

INITIAL FULL PAPER PREPARATION

Submission and Registration Policies

All papers submitted to the CDC 2026, whether for review or publication upon acceptance, must be written in English and formatted in the standard 2-column format provided on PaperPlaza. The submission site opens in January 2026.

For “review”, all regular and invited papers are limited to eight (8) pages if submitted to CDC only, to six (6) pages if submitted jointly to L-CSS and CDC.

PaperPlaza will not permit longer papers to be uploaded. The decision regarding the acceptance of each paper is at the discretion of the conference’s Technical Program Committee. 

Authors may upload longer manuscripts up to a maximum of eight (8) pages total. However, each page over six will incur an additional overlength page charge. Please note that the eight pages option is not available for joint L-CSS and CDC papers. 

If the paper is accepted, at least one of the authors listed on the paper must attend the conference and present the paper according to the schedule decided by the conference’s Technical Program Committee. 

If the presenter is unable to attend the conference for any reason, it is his/her responsibility to ensure that the paper is presented by a qualified colleague. 

At least one of the authors listed on the paper must register for the CDC 2026 to upload the final manuscript. 

Student registrants may upload one final paper. Regular registrants may upload up to three final papers.

Additional papers can be uploaded with an overlength page charge.

All submissions will be tested for similarity and overlap with prior published material using the iThenticate tool. The results of such overlap will be made available to the Program Committee for evaluation. In case of possible violations of the IEEE ethics rules in publishing, the case will be investigated by a committee that reports to the VP for Publications.

Large Language Model (LLM) Policy 

Please note that CDC 2026 will follow the IEEE CSS Generative AI Guidelines.

Paper Submission Instruction  

All papers must be submitted electronically using PaperPlaza. The submission site opens in January 2026.

Only PDF files will be accepted. A maximum file size of 2MB for all uploaded papers is enforced. Click here for information on creating IEEE Xplore-compatible PDFs.

Page size requirements 

Caution: US Letter and margins settings below are required for the final submission.

L-CSS with CDC option

Note also that the journal, IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS) now allows one to submit and publish a paper in the Journal, but present it at CDC. 

The submission will be through the L-CSS link on PaperPlaza.

To submit a contribution to L-CSS with CDC option, you must follow the steps to submit a paper to L-CSS through PaperPlaza:

After login, enter the IEEE L-CSS Workspace;

Click on “Submit a new paper to IEEE L-CSS”;

Now, you will be able to choose the type of submission.

All details are provided on the journal website, in the section of L-CSS and CDC. Note that the submission deadline for such joint contributions is March 17, 2026. It can be submitted as a regular paper or an invited session paper.

Margins, Formats & Templates

Caution: Style files and templates provided here have been created to ensure that the margin requirement is adequately met. 

REMINDER: Authors are responsible for submitting their papers in the required format. All papers that are accepted will be published as submitted by the Author. The Conference is NOT responsible for editing or correcting errors in the paper. 
 

MS WORD

LaTeX

MS Word Template 
ieeeconf_letter.dot

LaTeX style file 
ieeeconf.cls

Sample Documents 
sample_letter.doc

LaTeX sample document 
sample.tex

Create IEEE Xplore-Compatible PDF

The Paperplaza CDC 2026 system supports compliant conversion of PDF files. Upload the pdf file of your submission and the system converts it to a compliant pdf, satisfying all technical requirements regarding the pdf version and font embedding.

Be sure to use the Word template or LaTeX style file provided by the conference and follow the conference instructions concerning paper size, number of pages, and page margins while preparing your contribution. 
 

If needed, more instructions can be found here.

PDF compliance can also be tested here before uploading. 

IEEE COPYRIGHT NOTICE

If authors would like to post their papers electronically on any website, any FTP site, or any other electronic dissemination technique, they must include the IEEE Copyright notice on the initial screen displaying the IEEE-copyrighted material.

IEEE Copyright Form

Each accepted contribution to CDC 2026 must be accompanied by a signed Copyright Form. The copyright form should be filled out and signed by one author, preferably the primary author.

PREPRINT

Authors who have submitted or plan to submit their articles to IEEE may post their preprints in the following locations:

  • arXiv.org, TechRxiv.org, or any not-for-profit preprint server approved by the Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB)
  • Author’s employer’s website or institutional repository
  • Author’s personal website
  • IEEE does not consider this to be a form of prior publication. The following statement must be included on the initial screen:

“This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.”

Upon acceptance of the article by IEEE, the author must replace the posted preprint article with either (1) the full citation to the IEEE work with the DOI, or (2) the accepted version of the article with the DOI and an appropriate copyright notice (as described in the “accepted article” section below). No other changes may be made to the accepted article.

Please note that once the article has been published by IEEE, preprints on locations not specified above should be removed if possible.