2012Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor
Michael Collins and Dekang Lin Editors in chief
Monday July 2nd, 2012
[1] Summary
TACL was launched this year, the first submission deadline being May 1st 2012. The website for TACL can be found at www.transacl.org. The website has full details of policies for the journal, editorial board, and so on.
[2] Editorial board and Reviewers
35 action editors were recruited for TACL: for the full list see
http://www.transacl.org/editorial-board/
In addition, a standing committee of close to 200 reviewers has been recruited.
The work-flow for papers is then as follows:
1) Submissions come in to TACL on the 1st of each month.
2) Each submission is assigned to an action editor.
3) The action editor assigns 3 reviewers to the paper. Reviews are due 3 weeks after the assignment date.
4) After reviews are in, the action editor makes a final decision on the paper (for decision categories, see http://www.transacl.org/faq/)
[3] Submission status
As of July 2nd, we have now had three rounds of submissions: May 1st, June 1st, July 1st.
At this point, we have had 15 submissions total (excluding papers rejected for formatting violations etc.): 6 on May 1st, 6 on June 1st, and 3 on July 1st.
Our expectation is that submission numbers will increase over the next few months. May/June/July is a somewhat odd time for submissions, given the proximity to previous conference deadlines.
The 6 papers submitted on May 1st have all been through the entire review and decision phase. 17 of the 18 reviews were completed by the end of May, with the final review coming in a few days later. All decisions on papers were made by June 18th, with several being made earlier. Five of the six papers were rejected outright. The sixth received a recommendation of "Rejection with encouragement to revise and resubmit within 3-6 months."
In summary, we are pleased to see that fast turnaround of reviews and decisions seems very possible for TACL. We would like to see more submissions to TACL but are not overly worried: we expect things to ramp up rapidly in the fall.
[4] Interaction with ACL 2013
Michael Collins and Dekang Lin had a conference call with the ACL 2013 PC chairs, Pascale Fung and Massimo Poesio, in early May 2012, to discuss the interaction between TACL and ACL 2013. (Recall that all papers accepted for publication at TACL are eligible for presentation at ACL -- this introduces various logistic issues.) The group reached agreement on a broad set of issues, and the interaction between TACL and ACL 2013 should go smoothly.