Submitting to a venue when you are a member of the program committee My question is about submitting a paper to a venue (journal or conference) when some of the authors of the paper are also members of the program committee (PC) of the venue (i.e., they will review papers for the journal or conference). I call this a PC paper.

In any modern conference or journal management system that I have seen, PC papers don't seem to pose any particular issue: when logged in as a PC member, you do not see pending submissions of which you are an author, and of course you are never given one of your own papers to review. I have never participated to a PC board meeting (to decide on which papers to accept or reject), but I assume that PC members would be excluded from discussions about their own papers (as is routinely done for conflicts of interest). In conferences where the accept/reject decision is taken by a PC chair or editor, of course they are not allowed to submit papers, and this of course I can understand.

However, in my field (theoretical computer science), I have heard that submitting a PC paper is generally frowned upon. Further, there appears to be a tradition that, on borderline papers, papers by PC members will be rejected in priority.

Hence my question: Is there indeed a bias against PC papers in academia? If yes, is there any ethical or practical justification for this?
No is not frowned upon, at least in our field (TCS). I can provide numerous examples  for that. I saw it many times. PC members submit their papers, but they are handled of course by other members and, afaik, the whole process is not visible to them until the notification date.

Note that, some conferences (like IPCO) have strict rules. They explicitly say that no PC member shall submit a paper, alone or as a co-author. But if the Call for Papers does not mention, I guess a PC member is free to submit the paper.

What I have heard though is that even if a PC member submits a paper, it is claimed that higher standards apply to that paper (but I am not sure).