2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

(Thanks to ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on filing this report!)

TACL EiC search

The TACL Steering Committee (chaired by Ido Dagan) organised a search for a new EiC to replace Kristina Toutanova, who will be retiring in July 2018. That search concluded, with Brian Roark as the preferred candidate. The committee has contacted Brian, and he has accepted, so Brian Roark will join Lillian Lee and Mark Johnson as the Editors in Chief for TACL, once Kristina retires.

We thank Kristina for her exemplary service to TACL, above and beyond the call of duty.

Other personnel updates

Joining us as Action Editors are Marco Baroni, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Xavier Carreras, Asli Celikyilmaz, Stephen Clark, Trevor Cohn, Mona Diab, Chris Dyer, James Henderson, and Alessandro Moschitti.

Transition to MIT Press as TACL publisher

The negotiations with MIT Press to publish TACL concluded at the end of 2017. MIT Press will handle TACL in the same way that it handles CL. This primarily affects the post-acceptance handling of papers (e.g., copy-editing, publication, etc.); the pre-acceptance reviewing process will continue to be handled by TACL EiCs using our modified OJS software. MIT Press is currently learning about the current TACL publication process, with the goal of MIT Press taking over within the next month or so. Once this has happened, MIT Press will start arranging for the indexing companies to index TACL, including our earlier publications if possible.

It's likely that the rate of submissions to TACL will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed. We hope that MIT Press' publication of TACL will ease our post-acceptance process, but we need to improve our pre-acceptance processes as well. We think that the submission rate will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed, so we think reducing the current pain points (e.g., off-loading maintenance of the OJS server, dealing with the relentlessly growing number of submissions, etc.) is a priority.

TACL issues that are really community-wide

TACL has disallowed conference resubmission within a 9-month window

To reduce community reviewing load and to halt the need to make decisions on whether revisions of conference submissions were extensive enough to allow for TACL consideration, conference resubmissions are no longer eligible for TACL consideration within the 9-month window starting at the conference's submission deadline. For more on the rationales leading to this decision, see the announcement of this change on the TACL website.

TACL currently does not consider ACL workshop papers as archival

This differs from the policy that most *ACL conferences have adopted. The issue is, anecdotally, the subject of some disagreement among TACL action editors and EiCs, and needs discussion.

Checking for dual submissions

Softconf has nearly completed a feature for automatically checking submissions of TACL against conference submissions from the prior nine months. We expect to be able to detect overlaps faster and with higher accuracy.

Some statistics

Time to first decision

Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision, excluding desk rejects, 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. No February-submitted valid submissions have received decisions yet, and there are some papers still undecided from January and two lingering from February, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 253 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

Here is the time until first decision per paper, grouped by decision round, to give an idea of the variance of this statistic. 45 days (3rd line from the bottom) would be perfection.

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time has crept up just a little from 23 days as of our last report to 24.6 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the Mar 2017 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 13 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 140)

 2% (a) = accepted as is
15% (b) = conditional accept:  acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
56% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Publishing statistics

10 papers have been published so far in 2018. 17 are in some stage of the publication queue.