2016Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

(We are very grateful to have received an extension on filing our report until July 22 from ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao. --the TACL editors in chief)

Personnel updates

The ACL Exec and Lillian Lee have jointly agreed to give her an extra half-term lasting up to but not including September 2018, when she goes on sabbatical. Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson does not currently plan on staying on part that time.

We have reached the Grand Term Expiration Date of July 2016, where out of our 34 action editors, the terms of 16 have ended. We thank our departing AEs Regina Barzilay, Chris Callison-Burch, and Joakim Nivre for all their help over these pivotal years for TACL, and thank our renewing AEs David Chiang, Alexander Clark, Hal Daume III, Katrin Erk, Philipp Koehn, Hwee You Ng, Patrick Pantel, and Chris Potts for being willing and able to stay on board. (Other AEs with expiring terms are still pondering the question.)

218 of our elite reviewing team also had expiring terms. Renewal invitations have been issued: of these, there have been 10 declines, 19 requests pending, and --- a fact we are deepy, truly grateful for --- the rest have agreed to rejoin.

Some statistics

number of submissions and timing of first decision

Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision, and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month).

The drop in the last two months is due at least in part to 13 papers submitted in that period that have not yet received a decision. Also, not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL), papers, and the 106 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem. The decision time for papers submitted late in a month is counted as starting from the first of the next month.

Observations:

While we don't count technical/format problems, we "do" count papers that receive an editorial decision of rejection without going out for full review. One way we EiCs trying to keep reviewing loads down and keep submissions interesting for our reviewers is sometimes doing a preliminary consultation with an action editor or highly relevant reviewer for submissions that seem highly unlikely to be accepted. Such consultations and subsequent discussion can take two weeks or so, since we strive to be cautious about making such decisions, but also want to factor in the value of conserving reviewer effort.

Waves in the number of submissions seem correlated with upcoming conference deadlines.

Average decision times per month appear to correspond well with an ideal but attainable schedule of

• ideally 7 days to make a load-balanced assignment of submission to action editors (AEs)
• ideally 7 days for AEs to get three reviewers confirmed to review
• ideally 21 days for reviewers to review
• ideally 10 days for AE to coordinate discussion among reviewers and come to a decision

which would yield an ideal target of 45 days turnaround.

Decision statistics

First decision breakdown for our 589 submissions.

  9% (a) = accepted as is
 22% (b) = conditional accept:  acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
 31% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance 
 38% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.  
         =  32% rejected based on full review, 6% rejected without full review (but received editorial consideration)

72 (=12%) some of these papers are revised versions of (c) papers: TACL treats these as new submissions. Of these 72 papers, the first-decision breakdown is:

 44% (a)
 11% (b)
 14% (c)
 30% (d)