2010Q3 Reports: Journal Editor

Computational Linguistics Journal Report for 2009–2010

Robert Dale, Editor

1 Summary

In 2009, we published 18 articles, one LTA talk, one squib, 3 Last Words pieces, 3 book reviews, one letter to the editor and, sadly, three obituaries. One of our four issues was a special issue on Prepositions, guest-edited by Tim Baldwin, Valia Kordona and Aline Villavicencio.

We received 69 submissions in 2009, so our submission numbers are reasonably stable, although we have dropped from the highs of some earlier years in which we had issued special issue calls. At 148 days, our mean time to first decision appears to have suffered this year, but this is due a small number of outliers that took in excess of 250 days.

The major administrative activity this year was our shift to the Open Journal Management System, ably executed by Mary Gardiner. All reviews are now handled via this system, which provides both a database for storing and accessing all relevant information, and a workflow environment within which papers are submitted and reviewed. We simultaneously moved the journal's online editorial presence to www.cljournal.org, and subsequently moved our email hosting to Gmail because of changes to Macquarie University's email system.

As always, the journal could not function without the outstanding assistance provided by Suzy Howlett and Mary Gardiner, the CL editorial assistants, and our editorial board.

2 Upcoming Changes

During 2010H1, we designed a new review form on the basis of feedback and suggestions from the editorial board, and this will be rolled out in 2010H2.

Significant changes to our processes are likely if the proposal to route all conference submissions through the journal goes ahead, and there will be a need for further expenditure to implement the required changes to the online system.

More generally, there are a number of aspects of the standard processing provided by OJMS which are suboptimal given the particular workflow we use or CL. Once things are clearer in regard to the conference publishing proposal mentioned above, the Editorial Office will submit a proposal to the Executive to cover a number of upgrades to the system.

3 Summary Statistics

Detailed statistics regarding number of papers submitted, accepted, given revise and resubmit decisions, and so on are provided in Media:ComputationalLinguisticsJournalReport2010.pdf. Here are some higher level stats that may be more interesting.

First, number of submissions per year:

Year 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Submissions 47 64 57 65 65 72 88 99 80 71 69

And the all important mean time to first decision:

Year 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Decision Time 110 127 129 131 146 125 100 97 148

Comparisons across years should be treated with some caution, because the methodology for deriving the statistics has changed over time; for example, a key question is how one treats resubmissions, especially if they are resubmissions in a later year than the original submission. Our move to the OJMS has also involved a new numbering and tracking system which should regularise things from here on.