Asking for a friend: We submitted our paper to ARR May 2026 and got decent scores from the reviewers - 2.5,3,3.5,4. The meta-reviewer gave an overall of 3.5. However, we missed the deadline to commit our work to EMNLP! On our Saturday (we live in the eastern half of the globe), we saw the EMNLP 2026 page on open review with deadline set as Aug3, 11:59PM UTC-0. Apparently, a mail had been sent by ARR on our Sunday regarding committing our work to EMNLP but we didn’t check our mail on the holi...