Authorship Changes Policy for ACL Conference Papers

The author list for a submission should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the presented work. Any changes to the author list must follow the guidelines outlined below.

Role of authors and contributors

Referring to the ICMJE's criteria for authorship (https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html), ACL adopts the following criteria:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
• Drafting the work, providing and processing training and testing data and reviewing it critically for important intellectual content;
• Final approval of the version to be published;
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Responsibilities and obligations of corresponding authors

The corresponding authors are primarily responsible for communicating with the conference when there are multiple authors involved in a paper. Each submission must clearly designate the corresponding authors (mandatory for conference submissions through the submission system). A submission usually has one corresponding author, with a maximum of two. For papers not submitted through the submission system, such as a workshop in very exceptional circumstances, the first author will be assumed as the corresponding author.

The corresponding author has the following responsibilities and obligations:

1. Reaching a consensus among all co-authors regarding their name placement before submitting the paper.
2. Ensuring that each co-author updates their personal information and publication data on the designated platform or system of the conference as required. This ensures fair anonymous reviews by the Program Committee without any COI issues. Failure to do so may affect the fairness of the committee's selection of papers, resulting in desk rejection upon discovery of inaccurate authorship information.
3. Maintaining well consistent communication with the conference organizers throughout the manuscript submission, review, and publication stages, while adhering to all conference administrative requirements. The conference organizers include but not limited to Program Committee Chairs, (Senior) Area Chairs, Publication Chairs and other conference organizers related to paper review, rebuttal, publication and other processes.
4. Seeking opinions from all co-authors before submitting the camera-ready paper to ensure there are no objections.
5. Responding to post-publication inquiries about the work. In case of allegations of plagiarism, the corresponding author and co-authors must cooperate with the ACL Executive Board or committee related to suspected plagiarism investigation.

Categories of Authorship Alterations:

1. Switching the corresponding author.
2. Incorporating new authors.
3. Removing existing authors.
4. Re-arranging the current author sequence.
5. Updating existing author information. Hereafter, 'author information' refers to all other information related to the paper, except for the author's name, including the author's affiliation, postal or email addresses etc.
6. Rectifying errors in author names and their information, including spelling errors caused by code corruption.
7. Changing author name.

Protocols for Authorship Alterations:

1. All alterations from Section 3 above are permissible before the deadline of camera-ready paper submission. When an existing corresponding author needs to be replaced, or it may be necessary to add a new corresponding author, an existing corresponding author must apply to the Program Committee Chairs for assistance and provide the agreement of all co-authors. There should be no more than two corresponding authors.
2. After the camera-ready paper deadline, the alterations except 3(f) and 3(g) are typically declined.
3. The ACL Name Change Policy should be referred to when an author needs to change their name (alteration 3(g)) after the camera-ready paper deadline.

The authority to interpret this policy belongs to the ACL Executive Board. In case of any disputes, please file an appeal with the ACL Executive Board.