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I have submitted a paper to the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2016. The submission and revision deadline has passed yesterday, but the system is still accepting new revisions. Is it OK to revise my paper now? Is there any chance that they will reject it for this reason?
UPDATE: I have revised my submitted paper.
Have I done something unethical here?
LATEST UPDATE on 5 Feb 2016: Revision deadline extended till 8 Feb 2016 :)
For most conferences, there is an informal grey area in the submission deadline. The conference typically states that nothing will be accepted after hour X on date Y in timezone Z, but often the system doesn't actually shut down submission at that time, but a little while later. This may be for any number of reasons, frequently including:
From my experience, the most important driver for all of this sloppiness about time is that the point of the submission deadline is not so much to stop submissions as to enable a fair and well-organized peer review process to start in a timely manner. Thus, as long as the submissions are shut down fairly promptly after the deadline and review assignments can be sent out on schedule, nobody really cares all that much about timestamps: there's nothing magic about 11:59pm in American Samoa. Likewise for a camera-ready / revision deadline: the point is not to stop submissions but to allow publication to begin.
As such, I see no issue with what you have done. The formal deadline is the point after which you have no grounds to complain if you can't change anything any more. If you happen to notice a further correction to make and the system is still accepting them, well, that makes things better for everybody, and it's likely the organizers won't even bother noticing, let alone be unhappy that you did so if they do notice.
Now, it's possible that you might run into a program chair who is unusually dedicated to precision and does not share this opinion, but I have never yet encountered such a person in my professional life.
Minor revisions are usually acceptable. I'm not sure in what context would this be unethical. Revisions occur all the time, even after publication. As your the conference committee permits it, its all right to submit the revision, especially if your revision were to increase the quality of your paper or validation of your results.
