2019Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

Request for approval and launch of professional submission-system support

The proposal from the TACL editors-in-chief for professional paid support of the submission system is now under consideration by the ACL executive committee. Getting this approved is an urgent priority, so that we can port our system during the summer, thus leaving sufficient time for Lillian Lee's help with the transition before her term ends in December. In addition to on-going professional system support, the vendor will also upgrade us to the most current version of OJS 2 (2.4.8) and patch in existing customizations.

Personnel updates

As noted in our previous report (2019Q1, link below), an ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) was organized to search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. We are pleased to announce that the search committee has selected Ani Nenkova as a new TACL co-EiC, and she has accepted the position. Her term will run until June 2022. We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

We have continued to expand our action editor and standing reviewer teams, which now stand at 62 and 256 individuals, respectively.

Indexing update

We are pleased to report that we have completed all of the requirements to submit an application for inclusion in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, and these applications have been submitted by MIT Press. Our application (via MIT Press) for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) should be submitted around the end of the month.

One main reason TACL was created was to be indexed: Many institutions, especially in Asia and Europe, only “count” WoS/Scopus-indexed journals for promotion and/or tenure. Indexing bodies are estimated to take 9-12 months to make a decision on an application. The process and approval criteria are opaque, but we believe they involve sustained historical evidence of very high quality. MIT Press indexing applications have historically had a 90-100% success rate.

Publication ethics statement and COPE procedural flowcharts

As part of the indexing application process, TACL put together a Publication Ethics statement. This document references procedural flowcharts regarding potential author, reviewer, or editor misconduct put together by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Example:

Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript.  Version 2, November 2018.  https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.1, flowchart https://publicationethics.org/files/plagiarism%20A.pdf

We think that other ACL conferences and journals and organizations might want to take a look at the COPE guidelines.

Statistics

Since our last report (2019Q1) was published within the last two months, the statistics have not substantially changed, so we refer readers to that report for these numbers. We will provide updated statistics in our next report.

The 2019Q1 Report can be found here.