2016Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

Personnel

• Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova have joined Lillian Lee as co-editors-in-chief!
• Sincere gratitude to our retiring action editor Janyce Wiebe. We are very glad to have the new action editors Phil Blunsom (University of Oxford and Google DeepMind), Chris Quirk (Microsoft Research), Hinrich Schütze (University of Munich), Holger Schwenk (Facebook AI Research), Scott Wen-tau Yih (Microsoft Research), and Luke Zettlemoyer (University of Washington) join, and to have Bo Pang (Google Research) come back as a TACL action editor after a pause.
• We have expanded the roster of reviewers thanks mainly to Cindy's great efforts.

Policy updates

• We have a precedent for consequences in case of multiple submission to a conference and TACL, but have not formulated a general policy.
• Mark Johnson is developing a publication ethics statement. This is an important step in the process of getting the journal indexed by several major bodies.

Biggest pending issues

• System Hosting.

We are considering move to a different machine hosted somewhere else to improve the reliability of the system.

Professional short-term help by a developer would be very useful if available.

• Conference interface.

To integrate the handling of TACL papers into the START-based workflow of the conferences, EMNLP 2015 and NAACL 2016 did or will create a special track in START. TACL provides the conference with author contact info, and the authors upload their papers and metadata into the START track. We understand from EMNLP 2015 that this worked well.

Checking for double submissions to TACL and conferences or undeclared re-submission of conference rejected papers: The TACL co-editors and conference PC chairs exchange information on submissions to be able to do this check. We have caught multiple cases of violations of the multiple submission policy.

Selected minor procedure/system updates:

• We have updated the style files for submissions and now require the use of these files.
• We have updated the reviewer information in the system to improve search for suitable reviewers (thanks to Cindy).

Some statistics

• Coming very soon!