2013Q3 Reports: Publications Chairs

Summary

The whole process of proceedings production went reasonably smoothly.

Thanks to new softconf system improvements, the ACLPUB online system was able to satisfy almost all the workshop organizers needs. Some improvements can be still done.

Details

• Rare accented characters (eg from Latvian names) are not accepted by the system.
• The Sponsor pictures and Cover design can't be fully edited online, because the user can't upload single files to the online package.
• PDFs generated from Microsoft Word often cause the copyright stamp process to fail. Fixing these problems required a great deal of time for coordinating with authors. It would be much better if the final submission process *required* authors to check and fix their submissions.
• almost all the fields of the final submission form should be mandatory (so the publication chairs should only check their correctness). Many authors don’t understand the importance of:
  • List of authors: order, completeness, capitalization, middle names and special characters. In particular many authors don’t understand where to specify the middle names in the submission form.
  • Copyright transfer form: many people miss to fill the form (completely or partially), someone write “NA” (when is not applicable) but is not caring about sending their license for publishing. This process could be automatized by sending a license-to-publish request email.
  • Page count field: this field is often empty. Again, this could be automatized.
  • Very few people use the test button.
• Many authors asked us how they could check the margin not only on the first two pages. We suggest to extend the number of pages in the draft produced by the “test button” from 2 to the total number of pages.
• A source of problems is due to the paper ordering in the proceedings depending on the conference program. The publication chairs’ work is therefore affected by any change to the program, which might be due to several reasons. As also suggested by the GC, the conference program could be removed from the proceedings and produced separately.
• While writing this document the proceedings publication process is still under development, so we can’t report about the USB image and Web finalization of the proceedings.

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Roberto Navigli and Jing-Shin Chang