2015Q1 Reports: TACL Journal
This year was a good and busy year for TACL.
Personnel updates:
- the addition of Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson (former editorial assistant for JACM) has been fantastic for keeping the normal processes on track, being able to streamline procedures, and to be able to do informative and diagnostic data collection.
- Retired action editors: Johan Bos, Pascale Fung, Mirella Lapata, Diane Litman, Bob Moore, Ellen Riloff, Giorgio Satta. Many thanks to them for their service!
- New action editors: Tim Baldwin, Katrin Erk, Mark Johnson, Diana McCarthy, Chris Potts, Sebastian Riedel,
- We've aggressively cleaned up the reviewer rolls to keep reviewing centered on an elite standing pool of of approximately 230 reviewers who have signed on to the "TACL oath" to accept reviewing assignments and be timely. The fact that these excellent reviewers are also quite familiar with the system and philosophy has also helped with turn-around time.
See https://tacl2013.cs.columbia.edu/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam for full lists
Policy updates:
- We seem to be converging on a standard agreement with star-ACL meetings that the acceptance deadline for TACL paper -> conference presentation will be approximately one week before the conference notification deadline, which allows for the conference program chairs to have the number of TACL papers to be presented affect the acceptance rate for the conference, should that be relevant.
- Additionally, we have repeatedly agreed that the ratio of oral/poster presentation for TACL-route papers should be the same as for those of conference-submitted papers, with the TACL editors-in-chief making advisory recommendations but the ultimate oral vs. poster decisions being in the hands of the conference PC chairs. Whether this should be ensconced as official policy remains open to debate.
Selected procedure and system updates:
- We've migrated the all the main TACL pages from a Wordpress site to the Open Journal System installation at Columbia (currently named tacl2013.cs.columbia.edu). Once all the remaining bits and pieces of this are cleaned up, we could do a wholesale domain-name shift.
- TACL is now indexed by Google Scholar.
- Many small system and procedure hacks that have improved workflow.
Some 2014 statistics:
Of 234 papers submitted, 166 came to a decision/conclusion:
(a) Acceptance for publication as is: 20% (34) (b) Acceptance w/ conditions: 19% (32) (c) Rejection with Encouragement… 30% (49)* (d) Rejection with no possibility…. 31% (51)
Of the (c) papers, 10 were resubmitted this year; 3 were subsequently accepted for publication, 1 was subsequently rejected, and the rest remain in process.
141 papers went through 1 round of reviews and were assigned a decision (the remaining 166-141 come from desk rejects and submissions with technical problems); of these, the average days from submission to reviews completed was 43, and the average days from reviews completed to editor's decision was 6.
Looking at all 166 papers decided on in 2014:
0-45 days 85 papers 51% 46-60 days 39 papers 24% 61+ days 42 papers 25%
Compare this to 2013's rates:
0-45 days 30 papers 24% 46-60 days 29 papers 24% 61+ days 64 papers 52%
Conference presentation:
19 papers' authors chose to present at ACL 2014. 9 papers' authors chose to present at EMNLP 2014. 17 papers' authors have chosen to present at NAACL 2015;