2015Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

Personnel

• The ACL has approved a motion for TACL to have three editors-in-chief for a period of five years, to handle the workload needed to bring TACL out of "startup" mode. We are now thus in a process to find two successors for Michael Collins.
• We had some action editors who graciously agreed to extend their term by one year to this July. Of them, many sincere thanks to Sharon Goldwater, Rada Mihalcea, Ryan McDonald, and Kristina Toutanova, who are retiring, for all the work they've done for TACL; and sincere gratitude to Alexander Clark, Hal Daume, and Patrick Pantel, who were willing and able to extend their terms for one more year. Our four retiring action editors are in a strong sense irreplaceable, but we will be working on finding new action editors.

Policy updates

• We have switched to using Creative Commons copyright license CC-BY 4.0 for TACL papers. Many thanks to Stuart Shieber for consultation and advice.

Biggest pending issues

• Conference interface.

The fact that TACL papers aren't in the START system is inconvenient for conference PC chairs. We anticipate that this is easily fixable.

With respect to poster/oral allocation: All conferences so far have agreed that TACL papers should be distributed to talk or poster slots at approximately the same ratio as papers submitted directly to the conference, with recommendations by the TACL co-EiCs, and the ultimate decision up to the conference program chairs.

For NAACL 2015 and ACL 2015, the TACL co-EiCs and conference PC chairs have honored requests by authors preferring poster format, and done the rest of the allocation randomly. The overall guiding principle for this experiment, given qualitative differences between *ACL and TACL, has been that all published TACL papers be treated equally (i.e., with no quality distinction among TACL papers being indicated by the poster vs. talk allocation).

However, a full position statement and subsequent discussion is being initiated, including with previous conference program chairs to get their perspective and experience.

• Corrections/updates to published papers: a few cases of differing natures have come up; consultation with COPE (Committee On Publishing Ethics) guidelines has begun. We should consult with the policies of Computational Linguistics as well.

• DOI's for TACL papers: this will require (extensive?) changes to the existing referencing pipeline. We are being advised by Min-Yen Kan, who notes: "referenced papers that have an existing DOI should be hyperlinked by their DOI"

• Indexing by DBLP needs to be fixed, and indexing by major indexing organizations needs to be undertaken

Selected minor procedure/system updates:

• filling in reviewer profiles regard(still some holdouts)
• Reminder to the world: we have an RSS feed.
• ACL anthology (manually) immediately notified of new publication

Some statistics

Number of papers published to date: 107
Number published in 2014: 44 ( including 1 erratum for 2014)
Number published in 2015, as of June 30: 27 (including 1 erratum for 2014)

Of the 76 non-errata papers submitted under new numbers (i.e., completely new submission, or a resubmission of a paper that had been rejected with encouragement to resubmit) between the Jan 2015 and June 2015 rounds, inclusive, 
    
    8 =10% have been published (5 were resubmissions)
    6 = 8% have been accepted as is but not yet published (camera-ready not yet received or is being processed) (1 a resubmission)
    5 = 7% have been accepted conditional to specific revisions (2 were resubmissions)
   25 =33% were rejected with encouragement to resubmit  (1 a resubmission)  
   22 =29% were sent to action editors and were rejected with a 1-year moratorium on resubmission (1 a resubmission)
    3 = 4% were desk-rejected
    6 = 8% have not yet received a decision 
    

Number presented at EMNLP 2014: 9 (5 as talks, 4 as posters)
Number presented at NAACL 2015: 19 of 30 eligible 
     (9 as talks, 10 as posters (1 requested poster))
Number to be presented at ACL 2015: 12 out of 23 eligible (after one withdrew due to visa issues) 
     (8 as talks, 4 as posters (3 of whom requested poster))
Number to be presented at EMNLP 2015: 18 of 25 eligible, 5 declinations never want conference presentation