2017Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

Summary

Overall, TACL is a resounding success. The number of submissions and the number of publications has never been higher. We have excellent relationships with the *ACL and EMNLP conferences, where the majority of TACL papers have been presented. We believe that TACL is now viewed by the ACL membership as an important and integral part of the ACL environment. However, we foresee challenges ahead, largely due to our rapid growth. We need professional support to allow us to provide the services that ACL members expect from TACL. The rest of this report focuses on these issues.

Challenges facing TACL

Policing duplicate submission policy

There are a significant number of duplicate submissions or submissions with largely overlapping content to TACL and to ACL conferences, or submissions that otherwise don't meet our submission rules (e.g., we don't allow resubmissions of papers recently rejected at a *ACL conference). This entails a lot of work for the TACL Editors in Chief (EiCs). The program chairs at the *ACL conference have been very helpful with this, and help us to find a sizable number of submissions that don't meet the TACL rules.

Copy-editing

In general, considerable copy-editing is required to bring many of our accepted submissions up to a suitable standard for publication. We already have complaints from some reviewers and action editors about the TACL workload, so we think we can't ask them to do this as well. The TACL EiCs have been doing copy-editing, but this takes a lot of time (many hours and sometimes many emails for each publication). This is not sustainable, especially if the number of submissions grows.

Journal indexing

One of TACL's goals was to become indexed by the major journal indexing services. ACL members have consistently said that this is a high priority for them. However, we believe that high quality copy editing will be required for this. We also expect that the number of submissions will jump as soon as TACL is indexed, so processes to handle increased submission volume should be in place before TACL is indexed.

System support

Lillian Lee is most proficient with the open-source OJS system, and can make it perform magic. Even so, the increased volume of submissions means that we need proper systems support. It is probably wise not to use technology that only one person understands well, as they become a critical single point of failure. We believe it is time to move to a professionally supported system, along the same way that our conferences are supported by SoftCon. An advantage of professional support is that the technical expertise to run the system resides with the company maintaining it, so it remains constant even though the volunteers who run the journal change (just as for our conferences).

Recommendations

• TACL should have professional support, perhaps from an academic press such as MIT Press and/or an organisation such as SoftCon, for:
  • copy editing
  • database, web site and system support
  • applying for journal indexation.
• The ACL consider implementing procedures for systematically searching for duplicate or largely overlapping submissions across all our conferences. Perhaps SoftCon could provide support for this?