2009Q1 Reports: CL Journal

Computational Linguistics Journal Report for Calendar Year 2008 Robert Dale, Editor

1 Summary

From CL's point of view this is considered an interim report, since many submissions to the journal in 2008 are still being processed.

As of the beginning of this year, we have gone Open Access and the journal's content is now freely available via the ACL website, where anyone can download the content and, I believe, set up email alerts for new issues as they appear. The first issue of 2009, being Volume 35 Issue 1, will appear in the next few weeks; Volume 35 Issue 2 is a special issue on prepositions, which will appear by mid year. Thereafter it is possible we will switch to an article-by-article publication stream, with quarterly retrospective 'batch-ups' into issues.

This year, in an attempt to kick-start a new short papers track in the journal, the authors of all seven best paper candidates for ACL 2008 were invited to submit extended versions of their conference papers (which would then be subjected to further review). Five have indicated an intention to submit, and two declined; none of the extended papers have yet been received, although most authors indicated an intention to provide their articles during the early part of 2009.

Work on the CL online review management system, which uses the Open Journal Management System software, has been delayed, but should be completed by the middle of the year.

At the mid-year Exec Meeting, we will need to review where things stand financially and with regard to the future funding model for the journal.

As ever, Mary Gardiner has provided magnificent support as editorial assistant for CL.

2 Early Access

Articles are published 'Early Access' -- after the copyeditor has worked over the article, but prior to final proofreading and correction -- before the final versions appear; at the time of writing, eight articles are now available Early Access, although there apppears to be a bug on the MIT Press website that prevents getting to the appropriate page; this has been reported. Once the special issue has been published, I would expect we will publish a bumper issue for 35:3 to clear the Early Access queue. There are still some unresolved issues regarding citation of Early Access articles; it may be that it is more sensible to drop this delivery category once we are in a position to publish article by article.

3 Statistics

Here are the usual statistics relating to the journal.

In 2008 we had 55 new submissions, 15 resubs from a previous year and 1 resub of a 2008 paper.

Disposition for first submissions is:

- 0 accepts
- 0 accept with minor
- 8 revise and resub
- 5 reject
- 11 reject without review
- 29 decisions pending

Disposition for all submissions is:

- 7 accepts
- 2 accept with minor
- 12 revise and resub
- 6 reject
- 11 reject without review
- 31 decisions pending

Not counting reject without review, we are averaging 70 days to decision and 79 for first submissions. These numbers are skewed downwards due to the remaining non-decisions (most papers in 2008 were submitted late in the year). Final numbers are likely to resemble 2007: 86 days to decision.