This policy applies to all AAMAS conferences, except where an individual track or a special program unambiguously overrides it in its Call for Papers.

Authors may not submit any paper to AAMAS that has already appeared in an archival forum (see "Archival and Nonarchival Publications" described below). Authors must ensure that no submission to AAMAS is under review for another archival forum between the AAMAS submission and decision dates.

Authors must identify any overlap between their submission and any other works, including nonarchival publications of others, or authors' own concurrent submissions to any archival forums. Authors should provide references to such works and identify the overlap within the submission itself.

If the overlap is to the authors' own previously work published in an archival forum, cite it in the third person. For example, say "The prior work of Jones (2011) demonstrated..." rather than "Our prior work (Jones, 2011) demonstrated...".

If the overlap is to the authors' own concurrent submission to an archival forum, cite it as "Anonymous", and provide a copy of the overlapping work to the AAMAS PC chairs.

Regarding extended abstracts and subsequent submissions of the full idea, see "Extended abstracts and later elaborations".

Archival and Nonarchival Publications In principle, we consider any publication with ISSN or ISBN as archival. Whether a publication is available online or printed is not significant to determining if it is archival.

The followings are examples of archival publications:
1. journals, such as JAAMAS, JAIR, Artificial Intelligence,
2. conference proceedings, such as those of AAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, and
3. books, chapters in books, including Springer Lecture Note series.

The following are some examples of nonarchival publications:
1. informal collections of conference/symoposia papers,
2. workshop notes, such as those of AAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, and
3. working/discussion papers, technical reports.

There can be a gray area in the above classification. If the author has difficulty judging in a particular case, the author should ask the AAMAS PC chairs. We list some complicated cases below.

• Workshop notes that are published as books, including Springer Lecture Note series, are considered as archival.
• AAAI's technical reports for its symposium series are considered nonarchival, since they are not intended to constitute formal publication.

Sanctions for Violation The IFAAMAS Board reserves the right to apply any or all of the following penalties on any authors violating this policy.

• Rejecting the submission, if not yet published.
• Posting a public notice of the violation of this policy on the IFAAMAS archive of the conference proceedings, disseminated through any medium.
• Including the authors in a blacklist and rejecting their future submissions for up to five years.

Extended abstracts and later elaborations The board decided that AAMAS will accept an extended abstract (rather than a short paper), whose length is very short so that the publication of an AAMAS extended abstract will not prohibit the publication as a full paper in a later AAMAS.

The purpose of an extended abstract is to give the authors the chance to present promising work as a poster, which is not fully matured as a full paper, so that it can be polished through the discussion at AAMAS, and hopefully can be accepted at a later AAMAS.

For such a later publication that elaborates an extrended abstract, there is of course overlap with the extended abstract. Therefore, the rules stated above apply.