2013Q3 Reports: Information Officer
The Information Officer (IO) portfolio includes integration of the different ACL-wide activities that are related to information dissemination; including the Anthology, website, wiki, portal and archive. Plans include short-term goals to update our software installations (DONE); provide integration of logins (through OpenID and OAuth; IN PROGRESS); update our information services to be responsive (i.e., accessible on mobile devices; IN PROGRESS) and professionally-designed (PLANNED). Long-term goals for the costs of the information services to be sponsored, accessibility and long-term maintenance of the aclweb.org and other sites, and absorbed by corporate interests.
Budget. A key part of the work done in the IO is to oversee part-time manpower allocated to help improve our association's websites, which includes maintenance, upgrading, migrating and backup. These are not small jobs and require budget. We proposed to the ACL Exec a budget 10,000 USD that was approved to hire a professional webmaster who could do part of the regular work with help from the IO and Secretary positions in ACL.
DOIs/CrossRef. Another urgent matter is that the ACL has started publishing the Transactions of the ACL. This new journal is wholly owned by ACL and needs to have Digital Object Identifiers assigned to each article; as this is the standard practice for scholarly works. However, doing so requires ACL to register as an organization that can issue and grant DOIs -- of which CrossRef is the standard service for scholarly papers. The ACL Exec passed a motion to allow the IO to pursue this agenda on the behalf of the ACL. This is currently in progress. Once settled, we will work with the TACL to provide DOIs for TACL articles.
Previously DOIs were assigned by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for all ACL materials. We are in the midst of transitioning away from this model, so that DOIs for future ACL materials will be properly reflected to the ACL Anthology site. This will involve all ACL materials in the future, but for the current work, we are most interested in having assignments done to TACL first.
Plans. The hired part-time help for the webmaster position is now working on consolidating the ACL Website and the ACL Portal, and then working on the first major milestone of establishing a central login for ACL services (something akin to a "ACL Account" a la Google or Facebook). We are planning to use OpenID and OAuth, which would allow members to link their ACL account with other (i.e., Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Microsoft/Hotmail) services; such that one could use login credentials from those services for ACL use.
Other plans include:
- Adding a vetting service for bibliographies, so that any ACL paper referencing an ACL publication would have a proper identifier to the work. This is likely to take the industry standard form of the DOI.
- Investigating the citation indexing of our materials -- it appears that ACL materials are somewhat haphazardly indexed by Elsevier and SCI. We need to address this because many of our membership depend on the availability of indexing in determining whether to publish in our venues or not.
- Adding a citable identifier for language resources (in collaboration with ELRA) so that corpora, tools and other contributions that are not formal publications can be appropriately assessed and rewarded.
As the IO office subsumes a number of IO services, you may be interested in the following subreports: