2021Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

Journal indexing

As we reported last year, TACL was accepted for inclusion in Scopus in May of 2020, but has yet to be incorporated fully into that index, presumably due to administrative delays resulting from the pandemic. Similarly, our application for inclusion in Web of Science (WoS) is still ongoing. We were contacted by WoS earlier this year, after a lengthy period with no updates about our progress. MIT Press continues to assist us in this application process, which we hope will move forward soon. Earlier in 2020, we were approved and are now present in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Personnel updates

Editors-in-chief

Brian Roark's term was extended by the ACL executive committee to the end of 2022. Ani Nenkova's first term ends in the summer of 2022. We expect to recruit a new co-Editor-in-chief sometime in 2022.

Reviewing process

Increased submission volumes

As detailed in the 2021Q1 report, the number of submissions to TACL was substantially higher than in any previous year. There were 60% more papers submitted to the journal in 2020 than in the previous peak year. To date, 2021 has met or somewhat exceeded the volume of 2020, so this volume of submissions appears to be the new normal for the journal.

Recruitment of action editors and reviewers

To keep our reviewing workloads consistent given this increased volume of submissions, we have been steadily recruiting new reviewers over the past couple of years, and also asking experienced reviewers with sufficient seniority to become action editors. Including a recently concluded reviewer recruitment effort, we have added over 175 new reviewers to our standing reviewer team in the past 2 years, and shifted over 35 veteran reviewers to action editor roles. As detailed in last year's Q3 report, our process for identifying and recruiting candidates for these roles requires a sustained effort, in order to ensure that everyone we invite meets the prerequisites for their prospective role. We expect reviewers to be several years beyond PhD with a record of sustained publication in the field, and action editors must be at the associate professor (or equivalent) level of seniority in order to issue signed decisions on behalf of the journal. We have continued to follow our established procedures for identifying candidates for these roles in a way that yields strong diversity (geographic, demographic, and topical) across the editorial team. Once again, in 2021, we had a very high positive response rate from those we invited to these roles. Additionally, we have had fairly low attrition of existing reviewers and action editors, so that our roster has grown sufficiently to match the needs of the increased volume of submissions. We extend a big welcome to our newest members of the editorial team (a list of which can be found on the TACL website) and a big thanks to all of those who have contributed to reviewing at TACL over the past year.

Quick turnaround of reviewing

Another 2020 statistic that we can highlight from those published in the 2021Q1 report is the mean days to decision of our papers, which was the lowest on record at 45.2 days. This is right in line with our targeted turnaround of 6 weeks. We note that we achieved this in 2020 despite pandemic-related disruptions, and we are confident that we have the procedures and personnel in place to maintain this in 2021. Thanks again to the action editors and reviewers who make this possible, as well as to our Editorial Assistant extraordinaire Cindy Robinson who keeps us all on track in such a friendly way.