2012Q1 Reports: TACL Journal
The TACL editors (Michael Collins and Dekang Lin) began a series of phone meetings in September 2011, the aim being to flesh out a proposal for TACL. The resulting proposal covered several issues, the main ones being the following: reviewing structure for TACL (action editors and reviewers); the review process (revise and resubmit policies, target review schedule, and so on); page lengths; interaction with ACL-sponsored conferences; policy on dual submissions and resubmission; anonymity policies; interaction with other journals; launch date for the journal; and budget.
The proposal was sent to the TACL steering committee in late September 2011 for feedback. In response to this feedback, a revised version of the proposal was submitted to the TACL steering committee on November 1st. After approval it was then sent on to the ACL exec. In response to feedback from the ACL exec, a second round of revisions was carried out; in early December 2011 the proposal was approved by the ACL exec.
The TACL editors are now working to set up the new journal. The next steps are as follows (in no particular order):
1) Recruitment of action editors. Over the next couple of weeks, we will recruit 25 action editors for the journal. (Target date for completion: Feb 15th.)
2) Creation of a START-based paper-handling system. We have started negotiations with Rich Gerber on how best to implement a system for TACL. (Target date for completion: Feb 28th.)
3) Creation of a website for the journal. We will create a website listing policies for the journal, the editorial board, etc. etc. (for examples, see http://www.jair.org/, http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/, or http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/). In addition, the website will be set up to host papers accepted by the journal. (Target date for completion: Feb 28th.) The urls tacl.org and tacl.com are not available: instead we plan to use transacl.org.
The main remaining step will be to recruit reviewers for the journal (this step will be carried out after action editors are recruited). At that point, we will be ready to launch TACL.