2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. -- the TACL Editors-in-Chief (below is an incomplete draft)

Personnel updates

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann, Diana McCarthy, Daichi Mochihashi, Patrick Pantel (one year), Sebastian Riedel, Stefan Riezler, Brian Roark, Noah Smith, Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

Some statistics

First-decision statistics

Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision excluding desk rejects (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

  5% (a) = accepted as is
 12% (b) = conditional accept:  acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
 50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
 33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

 26% (a)
 42% (b)
  5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
 26% (d)

Publishing statistics

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.