ACL Policy on Publication Ethics

ACL Policy on Publication Ethics

It is important for members of the ACL community, especially authors and reviewers, to understand ACL’s position on publication ethics, which is described in this document.

ACL is a scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language. Since the ACL deals with reviewing and publishing research, it is important to be clear about what publication practices are considered ethical.

This policy draws upon multiple authoritative sources, including IEEE Policy, ACM Policy, ACL 2023 Policy, COLM 2024 Policy, the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE), USENIX, and others. References are given below.

The goal of this policy is to provide a fair publication process and to prevent harm, as defined by ACM/COPE. Subsections below provide definitions, outline the scope, define the policies, and provide references for other issues.

Aoife Cahill

Leon Derczynski

Kokil Jaidka

– Publication Ethics Committee co-chairs, June 2024

(Authors listed in order of surname, alphabetical)

Definitions

Reviewer

Reviewer refers to people writing peer reviews of manuscripts submitted for consideration to ACL venues.

Editor

Editor refers to people involved in making a decision about a submitted manuscript’s rejection, acceptance, scheduling, or format, but not writing direct (i.e. non-meta) reviews. Editors include action editors, area chairs, senior area chairs, programme chairs, and similar roles.

Convener

A person who arranges meetings of groups or committees, for example conferences or workshops.

Author

Any person named in the “Authors” field of a submission.

Works

Author-created material submitted for review or created for presentation. This includes manuscripts as well as appendices, presentations, code, datasets, videos, images, etc.

Conflict of interest

The ACL definitions of a conflict of interest are detailed at the ACL Conference Conflict-of-interest policy page.

ACL Venues

ACL main conference; ACL Regional body main conferences; ACL SIG conferences; workshops at these conferences; TACL; CL.

Generative tools

Here we include text and image generation tools, commonly referred to as generative AI tools, trained on massive datasets to generate multimedia outputs. These can be privacy-preserving or non-privacy preserving. An example of a non-privacy preserving tool is a text or image generation tool, that stores input data for a commercial purpose, and is typically hosted on remote servers managed by third-party companies. An example of a privacy-preserving tool is a text and image generation tool that doesn’t store input data.

Scope

This policy applies to works submitted to, reviewed by, published at, and presented at ACL venues.

Policies

Conflicts of Interest

Authors, reviewers, and editors must confidentially disclose all relevant affiliations and relationships that may constitute conflicts of interest at the time of submission. Review and publication must follow the ACL Conference Conflict-of-interest policy.