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2019Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2019-07-24T15:45:06Z

LillianLee: /* Indexing update */ Scopus application is in, some more explanation of process and chances of success

== Request for approval and launch of professional submission-system support ==

The proposal from the TACL editors-in-chief for professional paid support of the submission system is now under consideration by the ACL executive committee. Getting this approved is an urgent priority, so that we can port our system during the summer, thus leaving sufficient time for Lillian Lee's help with the transition before her term ends in December. In addition to on-going professional system support, the vendor will also upgrade us to the most current version of OJS 2 (2.4.8) and patch in existing customizations.

== Personnel updates ==

As noted in our previous report (2019Q1, link below), an ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) was organized to search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. We are pleased to announce that the search committee has selected Ani Nenkova as a new TACL co-EiC, and she has accepted the position. Her term will run until June 2022. We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

We have continued to expand our action editor and standing reviewer teams, which now stand at 62 and 256 individuals, respectively.

== Indexing update ==

We are pleased to report that we have completed all of the requirements to submit an application for inclusion in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, and these applications have been submitted by MIT Press. Our application (via MIT Press) for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) should be submitted around the end of the month.

'''One main reason TACL was created was to be indexed:''' Many institutions, especially in Asia and Europe, only “count” WoS/Scopus-indexed journals for promotion and/or tenure. Indexing bodies are estimated to take 9-12 months to make a decision on an application. The process and approval criteria are opaque, but we believe they involve sustained historical evidence of very high quality. MIT Press indexing applications have historically had a 90-100% success rate.

== Publication ethics statement and COPE procedural flowcharts==

As part of the indexing application process, TACL put together a [http://https://www.transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialPolicies#custom-0 Publication Ethics statement]. This document references procedural flowcharts regarding potential author, reviewer, or editor misconduct put together by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Example:

Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript. Version 2, November 2018. https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.1, flowchart https://publicationethics.org/files/plagiarism%20A.pdf

We think that other ACL conferences and journals and organizations might want to take a look at the COPE guidelines.

== Statistics ==

Since our last report (2019Q1) was published within the last two months, the statistics have not substantially changed, so we refer readers to that report for these numbers. We will provide updated statistics in our next report.

The 2019Q1 Report can be found [[2019Q1_Reports:_TACL_Journal|here]].

2019Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2019-07-23T15:38:58Z

LillianLee: /* Indexing update */ - add new (related) section on Publication ethics and COPE guidelines

== Request for approval and launch of professional submission-system support ==

The proposal from the TACL editors-in-chief for professional paid support of the submission system is now under consideration by the ACL executive committee. Getting this approved is an urgent priority, so that we can port our system during the summer, thus leaving sufficient time for Lillian Lee's help with the transition before her term ends in December. In addition to on-going professional system support, the vendor will also upgrade us to the most current version of OJS 2 (2.4.8) and patch in existing customizations.

== Personnel updates ==

As noted in our previous report (2019Q1, link below), an ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) was organized to search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. We are pleased to announce that the search committee has selected Ani Nenkova as a new TACL co-EiC, and she has accepted the position. Her term will run until June 2022. We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

We have continued to expand our action editor and standing reviewer teams, which now stand at 62 and 256 individuals, respectively.

== Indexing update ==

We are pleased to report that we have completed all of the requirements to submit an application for inclusion in the Web of Science (WoS), and that application has been submitted by MIT Press. An application to Scopus is also now complete and will be submitted shortly. These applications are estimated to take 9-12 months for the indexing body to make a decision on. We have also applied for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

== Publication ethics statement and COPE procedural flowcharts==

As part of the indexing application process, TACL put together a [http://https://www.transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialPolicies#custom-0 Publication Ethics statement]. This document references procedural flowcharts regarding potential author, reviewer, or editor misconduct put together by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Example:

Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript. Version 2, November 2018. https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.1, flowchart https://publicationethics.org/files/plagiarism%20A.pdf

We think that other ACL conferences and journals and organizations might want to take a look at the COPE guidelines.

== Statistics ==

Since our last report (2019Q1) was published within the last two months, the statistics have not substantially changed, so we refer readers to that report for these numbers. We will provide updated statistics in our next report.

The 2019Q1 Report can be found [[2019Q1_Reports:_TACL_Journal|here]].

2019Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2019-07-22T23:00:31Z

LillianLee: clarify that we request, rather than already have, ACL approval for professional support

2019Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2019-07-18T22:26:17Z

LillianLee: /* Indexing update */ - add time info for indexing completion

== Approval and launch of professional submission-system support ==

The proposal from the TACL editors-in-chief for professional paid support of the submission system is now under consideration by the ACL executive committee. Getting this approved is an urgent priority, so that we can port our system during the summer, thus leaving sufficient time for Lillian Lee's help with the transition before her term ends in December. In addition to on-going professional system support, the vendor will also upgrade us to the most current version of OJS 2 (2.4.8) and patch in existing customizations.

== Personnel updates ==

As noted in our previous report (2019Q1, link below), an ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) was organized to search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. We are pleased to announce that the search committee has selected Ani Nenkova as a new TACL co-EiC, and she has accepted the position. Her term will run until June 2022. We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

We have continued to expand our action editor and standing reviewer teams, which now stand at 62 and 256 individuals, respectively.

== Indexing update ==

We are pleased to report that we have completed all of the requirements to submit an application for inclusion in the Web of Science (WoS), and that application has been submitted by MIT Press. An application to Scopus is also now complete and will be submitted shortly. These applications are estimated to take 9-12 months for the indexing body to make a decision on. We have also applied for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

== Statistics ==

Since our last report (2019Q1) was published within the last two months, the statistics have not substantially changed, so we refer readers to that report for these numbers. We will provide updated statistics in our next report.

The 2019Q1 Report can be found [[2019Q1_Reports:_TACL_Journal|here]].

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-12T22:03:15Z

LillianLee: /* Number of submissions and days to first decision */ typoe

== MIT Press transition ==

We are pleased to report that all TACL papers, past and present, are now available at the MIT Press website, with the first batch of MIT-Press-managed papers having been released in December 2018. This was a few months later than we had all planned, but here in May 2019, we have, we believe, smoothed out many of the wrinkles in the process of coordinating between two complex entities and in reworking our "legal" apparati (forms and policies regarding copyright, preprint posting, releases, etc.). We would like to especially thank Levi Rubeck of MIT Press for being so helpful and thoughtful throughout; his patience in working out the details with TACL are greatly appreciated. We also thank Matt Post and Arya McCarthy of the ACL Anthology for help in working out issues in transferring data from MIT Press to the Anthology.

Unfortunately, the planned integration with Overleaf on the MIT Press side did not happen.

MIT Press will also be handling the application of TACL to be indexed by the major services. During the period covered by this report, we have prepared most of the documentation required for this application. We are in the midst of completing the final piece, a publication ethics statement, which should certainly be done in the next two months, as a very generous upper bound.

== Finding professional submission-system support ==

TACL is in the midst of discussions with various vendors regarding professional paid support of the submission system, currently a 2.x version of OJS with in-house modifications. (The publication system, handled by MIT Press, is disjoint.)

An issue is that the latest version of OJS 3.x is a poor fit with some of TACL’s workflow, but 2.x is deprecated. TACL will probably transition to professional paid support of a version of the current system upgraded to 2.4.8 during this calendar year. Upgrading to 3.x remains an option for future years.

== Personnel updates ==

An ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) has organised a search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. A call for nominations has been issued, deadline May 27, 2019:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-summer-2019-summer-2022

We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

TACL currently has roughly 50 Action Editors (AEs) and roughly 230 members of the elite standing reviewing pool, while maintaining minimum eligibility requirements of the equivalent of tenured experience in the field (AEs) or several years post-PhD in the field (standing reviewers). The AEs and standing reviewers have done a terrific job upholding TACL standards, although even with the increased size of these two groups, it is sometimes a challenge to balance reviewing assignments and our “one person, one paper” workload objective in the face of increased submissions and re-submissions. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Number of submissions and days to first decision ===

Here is the number of first submissions per monthly submission round (=nearest first-of-the-month), including desk rejects (see caveats at the end of this paragraph). ''More details'': this plot excludes first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, papers handled using START (the early days of TACL), and re-submissions.

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.number_of_submissions.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The trendline (omitted) is very slightly upwards, which should perhaps be interpreted as stable. We expect the number of submissions to increase dramatically once TACL is indexed by the major services.
* The number of submissions tends to peak around early winter, perhaps as authors strive to submit in time for their papers to be accepted at ACL.
* The number of submissions tends to drop in early summer.

Now, here is the history, depicted in terms of quartiles, of the average time to first decision, excluding desk rejects, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). A blue line shows the average time for each submission month, and the red horizontal line shows our “goal” time of 45 days. Yellow shading indicates alternate calendar years.
''More details'': The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. Most May-2019 papers, and about 11 March-2019 papers, have not yet been decided, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.)

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The average time to first decision continues to bounce between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (a detailed breakdown of this ideal can be found at the "Reviewing Procedure" section of [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess]. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally like to be.
** It's worth pointing out that, for reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average review-completion time is 24.4 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!
* Time to first decision seems to spike in early spring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conferences (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.

=== Distribution of decisions ===

We had 135 papers submitted from the May 2018 round through the present, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision. Of these, 18 (13%) were desk-rejected. Of the 117 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
23% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
58% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
27% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 28 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, and recalling that TACL policy is not to give two (c)s in a row, the breakdown was:
11% (a)
43% (b)
39% (d)

There was one special case that had to be handled differently.

=== Number of TACL papers presented at conferences ===

These counts are not broken down by talk vs. poster, but rather, group these categories together.

ACL 2019: 22 (3 conditional on AE technical approval of final version, to be submitted).
NAACL 2019: 8
EMNLP 2018: 10
ACL 2018: 20
NAACL 2018: 16

It should be noted that some TACL authors do request poster presentation rather than a talk.

=== Publishing statistics ===

Volume 6 (2018) had 48 non-erratum papers and 0 errata. So far, volume 7 (2019) has 14 non-erratum papers and 0 errata, with 11 papers in the publication queue and 7 awaiting submission of the final version by the authors.

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-11T22:08:45Z

LillianLee: /* Distribution of decisions */ - fix spacing

== MIT Press transition ==

We are pleased to report that all TACL papers, past and present, are now available at the MIT Press website, with the first batch of MIT-Press-managed papers having been released in December 2018. This was a few months later than we had all planned, but here in May 2019, we have, we believe, smoothed out many of the wrinkles in the process of coordinating between two complex entities and in reworking our "legal" apparati (forms and policies regarding copyright, preprint posting, releases, etc.). We would like to especially thank Levi Rubeck of MIT Press for being so helpful and thoughtful throughout; his patience in working out the details with TACL are greatly appreciated. We also thank Matt Post and Arya McCarthy of the ACL Anthology for help in working out issues in transferring data from MIT Press to the Anthology.

Unfortunately, the planned integration with Overleaf on the MIT Press side did not happen.

MIT Press will also be handling the application of TACL to be indexed by the major services. During the period covered by this report, we have prepared most of the documentation required for this application. We are in the midst of completing the final piece, a publication ethics statement, which should certainly be done in the next two months, as a very generous upper bound.

== Finding professional submission-system support ==

TACL is in the midst of discussions with various vendors regarding professional paid support of the submission system, currently a 2.x version of OJS with in-house modifications. (The publication system, handled by MIT Press, is disjoint.)

An issue is that the latest version of OJS 3.x is a poor fit with some of TACL’s workflow, but 2.x is deprecated. TACL will probably transition to professional paid support of a version of the current system upgraded to 2.4.8 during this calendar year. Upgrading to 3.x remains an option for future years.

== Personnel updates ==

An ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) has organised a search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. A call for nominations has been issued, deadline May 27, 2019:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-summer-2019-summer-2022

We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

TACL currently has roughly 50 Action Editors (AEs) and roughly 230 members of the elite standing reviewing pool, while maintaining minimum eligibility requirements of the equivalent of tenured experience in the field (AEs) or several years post-PhD in the field (standing reviewers). The AEs and standing reviewers have done a terrific job upholding TACL standards, although even with the increased size of these two groups, it is sometimes a challenge to balance reviewing assignments and our “one person, one paper” workload objective in the face of increased submissions and re-submissions. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Number of submissions and days to first decision ===

Here is the number of first submissions per monthly submission round (=nearest first-of-the-month), including desk rejects (see caveats at the end of this paragraph). ''More details'': this plot excludes first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, papers handled using START (the early days of TACL), and re-submissions.

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.number_of_submissions.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The trendline (omitted) is very slightly upwards, which should perhaps be interpreted as stable. We expect the number of submissions to increase dramatically once TACL is indexed by the major services.
* The number of submissions tends to peak around early winter, perhaps as authors strive to submit in time for their papers to be accepted at ACL.
* The number of submissions tends to drop in early summer.

Now, here is the history, depicted in terms of quartiles, of the average time to first decision, excluding desk rejects, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). A blue line showsWhen the average time for each submission month, and the red horizontal line shows our “goal” time of 45 days. Yellow shading indicates alternate calendar years.
''More details'': The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. Most May-2019 papers, and about 11 March-2019 papers, have not yet been decided, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.)

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The average time to first decision continues to bounce between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (a detailed breakdown of this ideal can be found at the "Reviewing Procedure" section of [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess]. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally like to be.
** It's worth pointing out that, for reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average review-completion time is 24.4 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!
* Time to first decision seems to spike in early spring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conferences (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.

=== Distribution of decisions ===

We had 135 papers submitted from the May 2018 round through the present, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision. Of these, 18 (13%) were desk-rejected. Of the 117 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
23% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
58% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
27% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 28 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, and recalling that TACL policy is not to give two (c)s in a row, the breakdown was:
11% (a)
43% (b)
39% (d)

There was one special case that had to be handled differently.

=== Number of TACL papers presented at conferences ===

These counts are not broken down by talk vs. poster, but rather, group these categories together.

ACL 2019: 22 (3 conditional on AE technical approval of final version, to be submitted).
NAACL 2019: 8
EMNLP 2018: 10
ACL 2018: 20
NAACL 2018: 16

It should be noted that some TACL authors do request poster presentation rather than a talk.

=== Publishing statistics ===

Volume 6 (2018) had 48 non-erratum papers and 0 errata. So far, volume 7 (2019) has 14 non-erratum papers and 0 errata, with 11 papers in the publication queue and 7 awaiting submission of the final version by the authors.

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-11T22:07:55Z

LillianLee: typos, added more detailed distribution for (c) resubmits.

== MIT Press transition ==

We are pleased to report that all TACL papers, past and present, are now available at the MIT Press website, with the first batch of MIT-Press-managed papers having been released in December 2018. This was a few months later than we had all planned, but here in May 2019, we have, we believe, smoothed out many of the wrinkles in the process of coordinating between two complex entities and in reworking our "legal" apparati (forms and policies regarding copyright, preprint posting, releases, etc.). We would like to especially thank Levi Rubeck of MIT Press for being so helpful and thoughtful throughout; his patience in working out the details with TACL are greatly appreciated. We also thank Matt Post and Arya McCarthy of the ACL Anthology for help in working out issues in transferring data from MIT Press to the Anthology.

Unfortunately, the planned integration with Overleaf on the MIT Press side did not happen.

MIT Press will also be handling the application of TACL to be indexed by the major services. During the period covered by this report, we have prepared most of the documentation required for this application. We are in the midst of completing the final piece, a publication ethics statement, which should certainly be done in the next two months, as a very generous upper bound.

== Finding professional submission-system support ==

TACL is in the midst of discussions with various vendors regarding professional paid support of the submission system, currently a 2.x version of OJS with in-house modifications. (The publication system, handled by MIT Press, is disjoint.)

An issue is that the latest version of OJS 3.x is a poor fit with some of TACL’s workflow, but 2.x is deprecated. TACL will probably transition to professional paid support of a version of the current system upgraded to 2.4.8 during this calendar year. Upgrading to 3.x remains an option for future years.

== Personnel updates ==

An ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) has organised a search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. A call for nominations has been issued, deadline May 27, 2019:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-summer-2019-summer-2022

We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

TACL currently has roughly 50 Action Editors (AEs) and roughly 230 members of the elite standing reviewing pool, while maintaining minimum eligibility requirements of the equivalent of tenured experience in the field (AEs) or several years post-PhD in the field (standing reviewers). The AEs and standing reviewers have done a terrific job upholding TACL standards, although even with the increased size of these two groups, it is sometimes a challenge to balance reviewing assignments and our “one person, one paper” workload objective in the face of increased submissions and re-submissions. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Number of submissions and days to first decision ===

Here is the number of first submissions per monthly submission round (=nearest first-of-the-month), including desk rejects (see caveats at the end of this paragraph). ''More details'': this plot excludes first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, papers handled using START (the early days of TACL), and re-submissions.

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.number_of_submissions.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The trendline (omitted) is very slightly upwards, which should perhaps be interpreted as stable. We expect the number of submissions to increase dramatically once TACL is indexed by the major services.
* The number of submissions tends to peak around early winter, perhaps as authors strive to submit in time for their papers to be accepted at ACL.
* The number of submissions tends to drop in early summer.

Now, here is the history, depicted in terms of quartiles, of the average time to first decision, excluding desk rejects, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). A blue line showsWhen the average time for each submission month, and the red horizontal line shows our “goal” time of 45 days. Yellow shading indicates alternate calendar years.
''More details'': The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. Most May-2019 papers, and about 11 March-2019 papers, have not yet been decided, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.)

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The average time to first decision continues to bounce between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (a detailed breakdown of this ideal can be found at the "Reviewing Procedure" section of [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess]. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally like to be.
** It's worth pointing out that, for reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average review-completion time is 24.4 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!
* Time to first decision seems to spike in early spring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conferences (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.

=== Distribution of decisions ===

We had 135 papers submitted from the May 2018 round through the present, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision. Of these, 18 (13%) were desk-rejected. Of the 117 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
23% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
58% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
27% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 28 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, and recalling that TACL policy is not to give two (c)s in a row, the breakdown was:
11% (a)
43% (b)
39% (d)

There was one special case that had to be handled differently.

=== Number of TACL papers presented at conferences ===

These counts are not broken down by talk vs. poster, but rather, group these categories together.

ACL 2019: 22 (3 conditional on AE technical approval of final version, to be submitted).
NAACL 2019: 8
EMNLP 2018: 10
ACL 2018: 20
NAACL 2018: 16

It should be noted that some TACL authors do request poster presentation rather than a talk.

=== Publishing statistics ===

Volume 6 (2018) had 48 non-erratum papers and 0 errata. So far, volume 7 (2019) has 14 non-erratum papers and 0 errata, with 11 papers in the publication queue and 7 awaiting submission of the final version by the authors.

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-11T04:54:17Z

LillianLee: added reviewer time

== MIT Press transition ==

We are pleased to report that all TACL papers, past and present, are now available at the MIT Press website, with the first batch of MIT-Press-managed papers having been released in December 2018. This was a few months later than we had all planned, but here in May 2019, we have, we believe, smoothed out many of the wrinkles in the process of coordinating between two complex entities and in reworking our "legal" apparati (forms and policies regarding copyright, preprint posting, releases, etc.). We would like to especially thank Levi Rubeck of MIT Press for being so helpful and thoughtful throughout; his patience in working out the details with TACL are greatly appreciated. We also thank Matt Post and Arya McCarthy of the ACL Anthology for help in working out issues in transferring data from MIT Press to the Anthology.

Unfortunately, the planned integration with Overleaf on the MIT Press side did not happen.

MIT Press will also be handling the application of TACL to be indexed by the major services. During the period covered by this report, we have prepared most of the documentation required for this application. We are in the midst of completing the final piece, a publication ethics statement, which should certainly be done in the next two months, as a very generous upper bound.

== Finding professional submission support ==

TACL is in the midst of discussions with various vendors regarding professional paid support of the submission system, currently a 2.x version of OJS with in-house modifications. (The publication system, handled by MIT Press, is disjoint.)

An issue is that the latest version of OJS 3.x is a poor fit with some of TACL’s workflow, but 2.x is deprecated. TACL will probably transition to professional paid support of a version of the current system upgraded to 2.4.8 during this calendar year. Upgrading to 3.x remains an option for future years.
z
== Personnel updates ==

An ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) has organised a search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. A call for nominations has been issued, deadline May 27, 2019:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-summer-2019-summer-2022

We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

TACL currently has roughly 50 Action Editors (AEs) and roughly 230 members of the elite standing reviewing pool, while maintaining minimum eligibility requirements of the equivalent of tenured experience in the field (AEs) or several years post-PhD in the field (standing reviewers). The AEs and standing reviewers have done a terrific job upholding TACL standards, although even with the increased size of these two groups, it is sometimes a challenge to balance reviewing assignments and our “one person, one paper” workload objective in the face of increased submissions and re-submissions. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Number of submissions and days to first decision ===

Here is the number of submissions per monthly submission round (=nearest first-of-the-month), including desk rejects (see caveats at the end of this paragraph). ''More details'': this plot excludes first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL).

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.number_of_submissions.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The trendline (omitted) is very slightly upwards, which should perhaps be interpreted as stable. We expect the number of submissions to increase dramatically once TACL is indexed by the major services.
* The number of submissions tends to peak around early winter, perhaps as authors strive to submit in time for their papers to be accepted at ACL.
* The number of submissions tends to drop in early summer.

Now, here is the history, depicted in terms of quartiles, of the average time to first decision, excluding desk rejects, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). A blue line shows connects the average time for each submission month, and the red horizontal line shows our “goal” time of 45 days. Yellow shading indicates alternate calendar years.
''More details'': The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. Most May-2019 papers, and about 11 March-2019 papers, have not yet been decided, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.)

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The average time to first decision continues to bounce between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (a detailed breakdown of this ideal can be found at the "Reviewing Procedure" section of So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
** It's worth pointing out that, for reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average review-completion time is 24.4 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!
* Time to first decision seems to spike in early spring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conferences (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 135 papers submitted from the May 2018 round through the present, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision. Of these, 18 (13%) were desk-rejected. Of the 117 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
23% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
58% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
27% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 28 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 54% received a conditional accept or an accept. 39% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining paper was a special case that had to be handled differently.

=== Number of TACL papers presented at conferences ===

These counts are not broken down by talk vs. poster, but rather, group these categories together.

ACL 2019: 22 (3 conditional on AE technical approval of final version, to be submitted).
NAACL 2019: 8
EMNLP 2018: 10
ACL 2018: 20
NAACL 2018: 16

It should be noted that some TACL authors do request poster presentation rather than a talk.

=== Publishing statistics ===

Volume 6 (2018) had 48 non-erratum papers and 0 errata. So far, volume 7 (2019) has 14 non-erratum papers and 0 errata, with 11 papers in the publication queue and 7 awaiting submission of the final version by the authors.

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-11T04:43:06Z

LillianLee: shrink size of /* Number of submissions and days to first decision */

== MIT Press transition ==

We are pleased to report that all TACL papers, past and present, are now available at the MIT Press website, with the first batch of MIT-Press-managed papers having been released in December 2018. This was a few months later than we had all planned, but here in May 2019, we have, we believe, smoothed out many of the wrinkles in the process of coordinating between two complex entities and in reworking our "legal" apparati (forms and policies regarding copyright, preprint posting, releases, etc.). We would like to especially thank Levi Rubeck of MIT Press for being so helpful and thoughtful throughout; his patience in working out the details with TACL are greatly appreciated. We also thank Matt Post and Arya McCarthy of the ACL Anthology for help in working out issues in transferring data from MIT Press to the Anthology.

Unfortunately, the planned integration with Overleaf on the MIT Press side did not happen.

MIT Press will also be handling the application of TACL to be indexed by the major services. During the period covered by this report, we have prepared most of the documentation required for this application. We are in the midst of completing the final piece, a publication ethics statement, which should certainly be done in the next two months, as a very generous upper bound.

== Finding professional submission support ==

TACL is in the midst of discussions with various vendors regarding professional paid support of the submission system, currently a 2.x version of OJS with in-house modifications. (The publication system, handled by MIT Press, is disjoint.)

An issue is that the latest version of OJS 3.x is a poor fit with some of TACL’s workflow, but 2.x is deprecated. TACL will probably transition to professional paid support of a version of the current system upgraded to 2.4.8 during this calendar year. Upgrading to 3.x remains an option for future years.

== Personnel updates ==

An ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) has organised a search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. A call for nominations has been issued, deadline May 27, 2019:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-summer-2019-summer-2022

We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

TACL currently has roughly 50 Action Editors (AEs) and roughly 230 members of the elite standing reviewing pool, while maintaining minimum eligibility requirements of the equivalent of tenured experience in the field (AEs) or several years post-PhD in the field (standing reviewers). The AEs and standing reviewers have done a terrific job upholding TACL standards, although even with the increased size of these two groups, it is sometimes a challenge to balance reviewing assignments and our “one person, one paper” workload objective in the face of increased submissions and re-submissions. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Number of submissions and days to first decision ===

Here is the number of submissions per monthly submission round (=nearest first-of-the-month), including desk rejects (see caveats at the end of this paragraph). ''More details'': this plot excludes first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL).

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.number_of_submissions.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The trendline (omitted) is very slightly upwards, which should perhaps be interpreted as stable. We expect the number of submissions to increase dramatically once TACL is indexed by the major services.
* The number of submissions tends to peak around early winter, perhaps as authors
strive to submit in time for their papers to be accepted at ACL.
* The number of submissions tends to drop in early summer.

Now, here is the history, depicted in terms of quartiles, of the average time to first decision, excluding desk rejects, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). A blue line shows connects the average time for each submission month, and the red horizontal line shows our “goal” time of 45 days. Yellow shading indicates alternate calendar years.
''More details'': The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. Most May-2019 papers, and about 11 March-2019 papers, have not yet been decided, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.)

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The average time to first decision continues to bounce between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (a detailed breakdown of this ideal can be found at the "Reviewing Procedure" section of So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike in early spring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conferences (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 135 papers submitted from the May 2018 round through the present, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision. Of these, 18 (13%) were desk-rejected. Of the 117 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
23% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
58% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
27% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 28 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 54% received a conditional accept or an accept. 39% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining paper was a special case that had to be handled differently.

=== Number of TACL papers presented at conferences ===

These counts are not broken down by talk vs. poster, but rather, group these categories together.

ACL 2019: 22 (3 conditional on AE technical approval of final version, to be submitted).
NAACL 2019: 8
EMNLP 2018: 10
ACL 2018: 20
NAACL 2018: 16

It should be noted that some TACL authors do request poster presentation rather than a talk.

=== Publishing statistics ===

Volume 6 (2018) had 48 non-erratum papers and 0 errata. So far, volume 7 (2019) has 14 non-erratum papers and 0 errata, with 11 papers in the publication queue and 7 awaiting submission of the final version by the authors.

File:2019Q1 TACL.number of submissions.png

2019-05-11T04:41:46Z

LillianLee: LillianLee uploaded a new version of File:2019Q1 TACL.number of submissions.png

File:2019Q1 TACL.number of submissions.png

2019-05-11T04:40:54Z

LillianLee:

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-11T04:39:59Z

LillianLee: minor fixes and correction of file name

== MIT Press transition ==

We are pleased to report that all TACL papers, past and present, are now available at the MIT Press website, with the first batch of MIT-Press-managed papers having been released in December 2018. This was a few months later than we had all planned, but here in May 2019, we have, we believe, smoothed out many of the wrinkles in the process of coordinating between two complex entities and in reworking our "legal" apparati (forms and policies regarding copyright, preprint posting, releases, etc.). We would like to especially thank Levi Rubeck of MIT Press for being so helpful and thoughtful throughout; his patience in working out the details with TACL are greatly appreciated. We also thank Matt Post and Arya McCarthy of the ACL Anthology for help in working out issues in transferring data from MIT Press to the Anthology.

Unfortunately, the planned integration with Overleaf on the MIT Press side did not happen.

MIT Press will also be handling the application of TACL to be indexed by the major services. During the period covered by this report, we have prepared most of the documentation required for this application. We are in the midst of completing the final piece, a publication ethics statement, which should certainly be done in the next two months, as a very generous upper bound.

== Finding professional submission support ==

TACL is in the midst of discussions with various vendors regarding professional paid support of the submission system, currently a 2.x version of OJS with in-house modifications. (The publication system, handled by MIT Press, is disjoint.)

An issue is that the latest version of OJS 3.x is a poor fit with some of TACL’s workflow, but 2.x is deprecated. TACL will probably transition to professional paid support of a version of the current system upgraded to 2.4.8 during this calendar year. Upgrading to 3.x remains an option for future years.

== Personnel updates ==

An ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) has organised a search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. A call for nominations has been issued, deadline May 27, 2019:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-summer-2019-summer-2022

We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

TACL currently has roughly 50 Action Editors (AEs) and roughly 230 members of the elite standing reviewing pool, while maintaining minimum eligibility requirements of the equivalent of tenured experience in the field (AEs) or several years post-PhD in the field (standing reviewers). The AEs and standing reviewers have done a terrific job upholding TACL standards, although even with the increased size of these two groups, it is sometimes a challenge to balance reviewing assignments and our “one person, one paper” workload objective in the face of increased submissions and re-submissions. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Number of submissions and days to first decision ===

Here is the number of submissions per monthly submission round (=nearest first-of-the-month), including desk rejects (see caveats at the end of this paragraph). ''More details'': this plot excludes first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL).

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.number_of_submissions.png]]

''Observations'':

* The trendline (omitted) is very slightly upwards, which should perhaps be interpreted as stable. We expect the number of submissions to increase dramatically once TACL is indexed by the major services.
* The number of submissions tends to peak around early winter, perhaps as authors
strive to submit in time for their papers to be accepted at ACL.
* The number of submissions tends to drop in early summer.

Now, here is the history, depicted in terms of quartiles, of the average time to first decision, excluding desk rejects, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). A blue line shows connects the average time for each submission month, and the red horizontal line shows our “goal” time of 45 days. Yellow shading indicates alternate calendar years.
''More details'': The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. Most May-2019 papers, and about 11 March-2019 papers, have not yet been decided, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.)

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The average time to first decision continues to bounce between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (a detailed breakdown of this ideal can be found at the "Reviewing Procedure" section of So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike in early spring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conferences (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 135 papers submitted from the May 2018 round through the present, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision. Of these, 18 (13%) were desk-rejected. Of the 117 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
23% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
58% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
27% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 28 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 54% received a conditional accept or an accept. 39% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining paper was a special case that had to be handled differently.

=== Number of TACL papers presented at conferences ===

These counts are not broken down by talk vs. poster, but rather, group these categories together.

ACL 2019: 22 (3 conditional on AE technical approval of final version, to be submitted).
NAACL 2019: 8
EMNLP 2018: 10
ACL 2018: 20
NAACL 2018: 16

It should be noted that some TACL authors do request poster presentation rather than a talk.

=== Publishing statistics ===

Volume 6 (2018) had 48 non-erratum papers and 0 errata. So far, volume 7 (2019) has 14 non-erratum papers and 0 errata, with 11 papers in the publication queue and 7 awaiting submission of the final version by the authors.

File:2019Q1 TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png

2019-05-11T04:39:09Z

LillianLee:

File:2019Q1 TACL.days to decision.png

2019-05-11T04:37:56Z

LillianLee:

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-11T04:36:54Z

LillianLee: Report except for plots

== MIT Press transition ==

We are pleased to report that all TACL papers, past and present, are now available at the MIT Press website, with the first batch of MIT-Press-managed papers having been released in December 2018. This was a few months later than we had all planned, but here in May 2019, we have, we believe, smoothed out many of the wrinkles in the process of coordinating between two complex entities and in reworking our "legal" apparati (forms and policies regarding copyright, preprint posting, releases, etc.). We would like to especially thank Levi Rubeck of MIT Press for being so helpful and thoughtful throughout; his patience in working out the details with TACL are greatly appreciated. We also thank Matt Post and Arya McCarthy of the ACL Anthology for help in working out issues in transferring data from MIT Press to the Anthology.

Unfortunately, the planned integration with Overleaf on the MIT Press side did not happen.

MIT Press will also be handling the application of TACL to be indexed by the major services. During the period covered by this report, we have prepared most of the documentation required for this application. We are in the midst of completing the final piece, a publication ethics statement, which should certainly be done in the next two months, as a very generous upper bound.

== Finding professional submission support ==

TACL is in the midst of discussions with various vendors regarding professional paid support of the submission system, currently a 2.x version of OJS with in-house modifications. (The publication system, handled by MIT Press, is disjoint.)

An issue is that the latest version of OJS 3.x is a poor fit with some of TACL’s workflow, but 2.x is deprecated. TACL will probably transition to professional paid support of a version of the current system upgraded to 2.4.8 during this calendar year. Upgrading to 3.x remains an option for future years.

== Personnel updates ==

An ad hoc search committee (chaired by Jan Hajic) has organised a search for a new co-Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to replace Lillian Lee, who will be retiring from TACL in December 2019. A call for nominations has been issued, deadline May 27, 2019:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-tacl-co-editor-chief-summer-2019-summer-2022

We note that Mark Johnson’s co-EiC term ends in June 2020, at which point TACL will revert to having two co-EiCs. Brian Roark’s term ends June 2021.

TACL currently has roughly 50 Action Editors (AEs) and roughly 230 members of the elite standing reviewing pool, while maintaining minimum eligibility requirements of the equivalent of tenured experience in the field (AEs) or several years post-PhD in the field (standing reviewers). The AEs and standing reviewers have done a terrific job upholding TACL standards, although even with the increased size of these two groups, it is sometimes a challenge to balance reviewing assignments and our “one person, one paper” workload objective in the face of increased submissions and re-submissions. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Number of submissions and days to first decision ===

Here is the number of submissions per monthly submission round (=nearest first-of-the-month), including desk rejects (see caveats at the end of this paragraph). ''More details'': this plot excludes first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL).

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.days_to_decision.png]]

''Observations'':

* The trendline (omitted) is very slightly upwards, which should perhaps be interpreted as stable. We expect the number of submissions to increase dramatically once TACL is indexed by the major services.
* The number of submissions tends to peak around early winter, perhaps as authors
strive to submit in time for their papers to be accepted at ACL.
* The number of submissions tends to drop in early summer.

Now, here is the history, depicted in terms of quartiles, of the average time to first decision, excluding desk rejects, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). A blue line shows connects the average time for each submission month, and the red horizontal line shows our “goal” time of 45 days. Yellow shading indicates alternate calendar years.
''More details'': The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. Most May-2019 papers, and about 11 March-2019 papers, have not yet been decided, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.)

[[File:2019Q1_TACL.per-paper-days-to-decision.png|800px]]

''Observations'':

* The average time to first decision continues to bounce between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (a detailed breakdown of this ideal can be found at the "Reviewing Procedure" section of So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike in early spring. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conferences (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 135 papers submitted from the May 2018 round through the present, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision. Of these, 18 (13%) were desk-rejected. Of the 117 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
23% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
58% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
27% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 28 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 54% received a conditional accept or an accept. 39% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining paper was a special case that had to be handled differently.

=== Number of TACL papers presented at conferences ===

These counts are not broken down by talk vs. poster, but rather, group these categories together.

ACL 2019: 22 (3 conditional on AE technical approval of final version, to be submitted).
NAACL 2019: 8
EMNLP 2018: 10
ACL 2018: 20
NAACL 2018: 16

It should be noted that some TACL authors do request poster presentation rather than a talk.

=== Publishing statistics ===

Volume 6 (2018) had 48 non-erratum papers and 0 errata. So far, volume 7 (2019) has 14 non-erratum papers and 0 errata, with 11 papers in the publication queue and 7 awaiting submission of the final version by the authors.

2019Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2019-05-01T12:49:24Z

LillianLee: give timeline for report and description of what to expect.

''We thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for arranging a due date of May 10th for this report. We will be describing progress on searching for professional support for the submission system, the transition to MIT Press, and statistics on submissions and outcomes. --- the TACL co-EICs''

2018Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2018-07-08T03:43:55Z

LillianLee: add numbers of AEs and standing reviewers

== Transition to MIT Press ==

We have been working to transition the publication process to MIT Press, and we have
a target goal that MIT Press will start publishing TACL papers in July 2018 and
back-publish all TACL 2018 papers by the end of July and all TACL papers by September.

This is Big News for TACL! Here are some implications:
# The cost of TACL to the ACL has risen a lot. The TACL EiCs believe the cost is worth it.
# Indexing: it is recognized that the application/approval process for Scopus and Web of Science can take several years. But MIT Press will, simultaneously, send metadata to the following "discovery services": ACM, CNKI, cnpLINKer, EBSCO EDS, Ex Libris, IBZ, IET, Informatics, Meta, Modern Library Association of America, Naver, OCLC Discovery, Summon, TDNET, Yewno.
# Processing of papers:
## MIT Press would like the processing of camera-readies to work through Overleaf, which would mean authors would need to submit LaTeX source. We have been discussing whether Word documents can also be handled by MIT Press. (In the past, TACL simply worked with pdfs supplied by the authors)
## The copy-editing that MIT Press would engage in would begin after the TACL Action Editor signs off on the author camera-ready to make sure nothing too dramatic happened between acceptance and final version. We imagine this will change the TACL workflow so that authors submit camera-ready source to Overleaf and AEs do a final review there.
# The prospect of working with Overleaf offers us the opportunity (or forces us to into the process of) revamping the TACL style files, including deciding on whether to switch to A4 and other such multifarious details.

== Editor-in-Chief transition and other personnel information==

Co-editor-in-chief Kristina Toutanova's term ended June 30, 2018, and Brian Roark's
term as co-editor-in-chief officially begins July 1, 2018. All hail Kristina
for her incredible service!

Looking ahead:
* The ACL resolved in 2015 that TACL will have three co-editors-in-chief until 2020 to complete the work needed to bring TACL out of "start-up mode".
* Co-editor-in-chief Lillian Lee's second term ends December 31, 2019. She does not currently anticipate putting her name in the hat for a third term. (The ACL allows TACL co-EiCs three 3-year terms).
* Co-editor-in-chief Mark Johnson's second term ends June 30, 2020.

TACL has about 50 Action Editors and a bit over 200 people in the standing elite reviewer pool. Our AEs and standing reviewers are listed at: https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/editorialTeam .

== Statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===

First, we show, '''in blue, the number of submissions that received their first decision''' (see caveats at the end of this paragraph), and, '''in yellow, the average time in days to first decision'''; both of these types of data are grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. ''Caveats'': this plot excludes desk rejects, first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL). Also, papers submitted in June have not yet received decisions.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.days_to_decision.png]]

''Observations'':
* The average time to decision has, with exceptions, been bouncing between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (1 week for EiC to assign an AE; 1 week for AEs to assign reviewers; 3 weeks for reviewers to review; 7-10 days for AEs to organize discussion and decide. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike around February or March. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conference (or burnout from said commitments), and another is a number of people changing professional positions. Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.
* Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of submissions appears to drop during conference-submission seasons.
* On the positive side, ACL-wide automatic checking for duplicate submissions should help reduce the amount of time EiCs spend pre-processing submissions before assignment to AEs, which should help speed up the AE-assignment part of the pipeline.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that for the past 12 months, the average time that our reviewers took to complete a review (if they completed it) was 24.4 days, which is gratifyingly close to the requested timeframe of 21 days.

Next, we show, '''in light blue, the variance (via box-and-whisker plots) in the number of days to first decision''', grouped by submission round. '''The red line shows the median.'''
The higlighted blue and magenta bars mark January and July submission rounds, with the intent
of highlighting any seasonal trends.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png|800px]]

'''Observations''':
* The median is, of course, less spiky than the mean shown in the first plot.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 167 paper submitted from June 2017 through June 2018, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision . Of those, 12 were desk-rejected. Of the 155 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
17% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
55% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 35 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 48% received a conditional accept or an accept. 45% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining two were special cases that had to be handled differently.

=== Publishing statistics ===

The 2018 volume has had 28 papers published so far, with 8 camera-readies in hand to be processed, and 5 papers that have received (a) but where camera-readies have not yet been submitted.

2018Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2018-07-02T20:18:34Z

LillianLee: forgot to include the reviewer speeds

== Transition to MIT Press ==

We have been working to transition the publication process to MIT Press, and we have
a target goal that MIT Press will start publishing TACL papers in July 2018 and
back-publish all TACL 2018 papers by the end of July and all TACL papers by September.

This is Big News for TACL! Here are some implications:
# The cost of TACL to the ACL has risen a lot. The TACL EiCs believe the cost is worth it.
# Indexing: it is recognized that the application/approval process for Scopus and Web of Science can take several years. But MIT Press will, simultaneously, send metadata to the following "discovery services": ACM, CNKI, cnpLINKer, EBSCO EDS, Ex Libris, IBZ, IET, Informatics, Meta, Modern Library Association of America, Naver, OCLC Discovery, Summon, TDNET, Yewno.
# Processing of papers:
## MIT Press would like the processing of camera-readies to work through Overleaf, which would mean authors would need to submit LaTeX source. We have been discussing whether Word documents can also be handled by MIT Press. (In the past, TACL simply worked with pdfs supplied by the authors)
## The copy-editing that MIT Press would engage in would begin after the TACL Action Editor signs off on the author camera-ready to make sure nothing too dramatic happened between acceptance and final version. We imagine this will change the TACL workflow so that authors submit camera-ready source to Overleaf and AEs do a final review there.
# The prospect of working with Overleaf offers us the opportunity (or forces us to into the process of) revamping the TACL style files, including deciding on whether to switch to A4 and other such multifarious details.

== Editor-in-Chief transition ==

Co-editor-in-chief Kristina Toutanova's term ended June 30, 2018, and Brian Roark's
term as co-editor-in-chief officially begins July 1, 2018. All hail Kristina
for her incredible service!

Looking ahead:
* The ACL resolved in 2015 that TACL will have three co-editors-in-chief until 2020 to complete the work needed to bring TACL out of "start-up mode".
* Co-editor-in-chief Lillian Lee's second term ends December 31, 2019. She does not currently anticipate putting her name in the hat for a third term. (The ACL allows TACL co-EiCs three 3-year terms).
* Co-editor-in-chief Mark Johnson's second term ends June 30, 2020.

== Statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===

First, we show, '''in blue, the number of submissions that received their first decision''' (see caveats at the end of this paragraph), and, '''in yellow, the average time in days to first decision'''; both of these types of data are grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. ''Caveats'': this plot excludes desk rejects, first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL). Also, papers submitted in June have not yet received decisions.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.days_to_decision.png]]

''Observations'':
* The average time to decision has, with exceptions, been bouncing between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (1 week for EiC to assign an AE; 1 week for AEs to assign reviewers; 3 weeks for reviewers to review; 7-10 days for AEs to organize discussion and decide. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike around February or March. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conference (or burnout from said commitments), and another is a number of people changing professional positions. Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.
* Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of submissions appears to drop during conference-submission seasons.
* On the positive side, ACL-wide automatic checking for duplicate submissions should help reduce the amount of time EiCs spend pre-processing submissions before assignment to AEs, which should help speed up the AE-assignment part of the pipeline.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that for the past 12 months, the average time that our reviewers took to complete a review (if they completed it) was 24.4 days, which is gratifyingly close to the requested timeframe of 21 days.

Next, we show, '''in light blue, the variance (via box-and-whisker plots) in the number of days to first decision''', grouped by submission round. '''The red line shows the median.'''
The higlighted blue and magenta bars mark January and July submission rounds, with the intent
of highlighting any seasonal trends.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png|800px]]

'''Observations''':
* The median is, of course, less spiky than the mean shown in the first plot.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 167 paper submitted from June 2017 through June 2018, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision . Of those, 12 were desk-rejected. Of the 155 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
17% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
55% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 35 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 48% received a conditional accept or an accept. 45% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining two were special cases that had to be handled differently.

=== Publishing statistics ===

The 2018 volume has had 28 papers published so far, with 8 camera-readies in hand to be processed, and 5 papers that have received (a) but where camera-readies have not yet been submitted.

2018Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2018-07-02T19:53:33Z

LillianLee: stray text deleted

== Transition to MIT Press ==

We have been working to transition the publication process to MIT Press, and we have
a target goal that MIT Press will start publishing TACL papers in July 2018 and
back-publish all TACL 2018 papers by the end of July and all TACL papers by September.

This is Big News for TACL! Here are some implications:
# The cost of TACL to the ACL has risen a lot. The TACL EiCs believe the cost is worth it.
# Indexing: it is recognized that the application/approval process for Scopus and Web of Science can take several years. But MIT Press will, simultaneously, send metadata to the following "discovery services": ACM, CNKI, cnpLINKer, EBSCO EDS, Ex Libris, IBZ, IET, Informatics, Meta, Modern Library Association of America, Naver, OCLC Discovery, Summon, TDNET, Yewno.
# Processing of papers:
## MIT Press would like the processing of camera-readies to work through Overleaf, which would mean authors would need to submit LaTeX source. We have been discussing whether Word documents can also be handled by MIT Press. (In the past, TACL simply worked with pdfs supplied by the authors)
## The copy-editing that MIT Press would engage in would begin after the TACL Action Editor signs off on the author camera-ready to make sure nothing too dramatic happened between acceptance and final version. We imagine this will change the TACL workflow so that authors submit camera-ready source to Overleaf and AEs do a final review there.
# The prospect of working with Overleaf offers us the opportunity (or forces us to into the process of) revamping the TACL style files, including deciding on whether to switch to A4 and other such multifarious details.

== Editor-in-Chief transition ==

Co-editor-in-chief Kristina Toutanova's term ended June 30, 2018, and Brian Roark's
term as co-editor-in-chief officially begins July 1, 2018. All hail Kristina
for her incredible service!

Looking ahead:
* The ACL resolved in 2015 that TACL will have three co-editors-in-chief until 2020 to complete the work needed to bring TACL out of "start-up mode".
* Co-editor-in-chief Lillian Lee's second term ends December 31, 2019. She does not currently anticipate putting her name in the hat for a third term. (The ACL allows TACL co-EiCs three 3-year terms).
* Co-editor-in-chief Mark Johnson's second term ends June 30, 2020.

== Statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===

First, we show, '''in blue, the number of submissions that received their first decision''' (see caveats at the end of this paragraph), and, '''in yellow, the average time in days to first decision'''; both of these types of data are grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. ''Caveats'': this plot excludes desk rejects, first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL). Also, papers submitted in June have not yet received decisions.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.days_to_decision.png]]

''Observations'':
* The average time to decision has, with exceptions, been bouncing between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (1 week for EiC to assign an AE; 1 week for AEs to assign reviewers; 3 weeks for reviewers to review; 7-10 days for AEs to organize discussion and decide. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike around February or March. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conference (or burnout from said commitments), and another is a number of people changing professional positions. Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.
* Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of submissions appears to drop during conference-submission seasons.
* On the positive side, ACL-wide automatic checking for duplicate submissions should help reduce the amount of time EiCs spend pre-processing submissions before assignment to AEs, which should help speed up the AE-assignment part of the pipeline.

Next, we show, '''in light blue, the variance (via box-and-whisker plots) in the number of days to first decision''', grouped by submission round. '''The red line shows the median.'''
The higlighted blue and magenta bars mark January and July submission rounds, with the intent
of highlighting any seasonal trends.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png|800px]]

'''Observations''':
* The median is, of course, less spiky than the mean shown in the first plot.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 167 paper submitted from June 2017 through June 2018, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision . Of those, 12 were desk-rejected. Of the 155 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
17% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
55% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 35 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 48% received a conditional accept or an accept. 45% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining two were special cases that had to be handled differently.

=== Publishing statistics ===

The 2018 volume has had 28 papers published so far, with 8 camera-readies in hand to be processed, and 5 papers that have received (a) but where camera-readies have not yet been submitted.

2018Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2018-07-01T22:25:58Z

LillianLee:

== Transition to MIT Press ==

We have been working to transition the publication process to MIT Press, and we have
a target goal that MIT Press will start publishing TACL papers in July 2018 and
back-publish all TACL 2018 papers by the end of July and all TACL papers by September.

This is Big News for TACL! Here are some implications:
# The cost of TACL to the ACL has risen a lot. The TACL EiCs believe the cost is worth it.
# Indexing: it is recognized that the application/approval process for Scopus and Web of Science can take several years. But MIT Press will, simultaneously, send metadata to the following "discovery services": ACM, CNKI, cnpLINKer, EBSCO EDS, Ex Libris, IBZ, IET, Informatics, Meta, Modern Library Association of America, Naver, OCLC Discovery, Summon, TDNET, Yewno.
# Processing of papers:
## MIT Press would like the processing of camera-readies to work through Overleaf, which would mean authors would need to submit LaTeX source. We have been discussing whether Word documents can also be handled by MIT Press. (In the past, TACL simply worked with pdfs supplied by the authors)
## The copy-editing that MIT Press would engage in would begin after the TACL Action Editor signs off on the author camera-ready to make sure nothing too dramatic happened between acceptance and final version. We imagine this will change the TACL workflow so that authors submit camera-ready source to Overleaf and AEs do a final review there.
# The prospect of working with Overleaf offers us the opportunity (or forces us to into the process of) revamping the TACL style files, including deciding on whether to switch to A4 and other such multifarious details.

== Editor-in-Chief transition ==

Co-editor-in-chief Kristina Toutanova's term ended June 30, 2018, and Brian Roark's
term as co-editor-in-chief officially begins July 1, 2018. All hail Kristina
for her incredible service!

Looking ahead:
* The ACL resolved in 2015 that TACL will have three co-editors-in-chief until 2020 to complete the work needed to bring TACL out of "start-up mode".
* Co-editor-in-chief Lillian Lee's second term ends December 31, 2019. She does not currently anticipate putting her name in the hat for a third term. (The ACL allows TACL co-EiCs three 3-year terms).
* Co-editor-in-chief Mark Johnson's second term ends June 30, 2020.

== Statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===

First, we show, '''in blue, the number of submissions that received their first decision''' (see caveats at the end of this paragraph), and, '''in yellow, the average time in days to first decision'''; both of these types of data are grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. ''Caveats'': this plot excludes desk rejects, first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL). Also, papers submitted in June have not yet received decisions.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.days_to_decision.png]]

''Observations'':
* The average time to decision has, with exceptions, been bouncing between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (1 week for EiC to assign an AE; 1 week for AEs to assign reviewers; 3 weeks for reviewers to review; 7-10 days for AEs to organize discussion and decide. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike around February or March. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conference (or burnout from said commitments), and another is a number of people changing professional positions. Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.
* Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of submissions appears to drop during conference-submission seasons.
* On the positive side, ACL-wide automatic checking for duplicate submissions should help reduce the amount of time EiCs spend pre-processing submissions before assignment to AEs, which should help speed up the AE-assignment part of the pipeline.

Next, we show, '''in light blue, the variance (via box-and-whisker plots) in the number of days to first decision''', grouped by submission round. '''The red line shows the median.'''
The higlighted blue and magenta bars mark January and July submission rounds, with the intent
of highlighting any seasonal trends.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png|800px]]

'''Observations''':
* The median is, of course, less spiky than the mean shown in the first plot.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 167 paper submitted from June 2017 through June 2018, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision . Of those, 12 were desk-rejected. Of the 155 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
17% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
55% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 35 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 48% received a conditional accept or an accept. 45% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining two were special cases that had to be handled differently.

=== Publishing statistics ===

The 2018 volume has had 28 papers published so far, with 8 camera-readies in hand to be processed, and 5 papers that have received (a) but where camera-readies have not yet been submitted.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

2018Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2018-07-01T21:16:56Z

LillianLee: posting the TACL quarterly report

== Transition to MIT Press ==

We have been working to transition the publication process to MIT Press, and we have
a target goal that MIT Press will start publishing TACL papers in July 2018 and
back-publish all TACL 2018 papers by the end of July and all TACL papers by September.

This is Big News for TACL! Here are some implications:
# The cost of TACL to the ACL has risen a lot. The TACL EiCs believe the cost is worth it.
# Indexing: it is recognized that the application/approval process for Scopus and Web of Science can take several years. But MIT Press will, simultaneously, send metadata to the following "discovery services": ACM, CNKI, cnpLINKer, EBSCO EDS, Ex Libris, IBZ, IET, Informatics, Meta, Modern Library Association of America, Naver, OCLC Discovery, Summon, TDNET, Yewno.
# Processing of papers:
## MIT Press would like the processing of camera-readies to work through Overleaf, which would mean authors would need to submit LaTeX source. We have been discussing whether Word documents can also be handled by MIT Press. (In the past, TACL simply worked with pdfs supplied by the authors)
## The copy-editing that MIT Press would engage in would begin after the TACL Action Editor signs off on the author camera-ready to make sure nothing too dramatic happened between acceptance and final version. We imagine this will change the TACL workflow so that authors submit camera-ready source to Overleaf and AEs do a final review there.
# The prospect of working with Overleaf offers us the opportunity (or forces us to into the process of) revamping the TACL style files, including deciding on whether to switch to A4 and other such multifarious details.

== Editor-in-Chief transition ==

Co-editor-in-chief Kristina Toutanova's term ended June 30, 2018, and Brian Roark's
term as co-editor-in-chief officially begins July 1, 2018. All hail Kristina
for her incredible service!

Looking ahead:
* The ACL resolved in 2015 that TACL will have three co-editors-in-chief until 2020 to complete the work needed to bring TACL out of "start-up mode".
* Co-editor-in-chief Lillian Lee's second term ends December 31, 2019. She does not currently anticipate putting her name in the hat for a third term. (The ACL allows TACL co-EiCs three 3-year terms).
* Co-editor-in-chief Mark Johnson's second term ends June 30, 2020.

== Statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===

First, we show, '''in blue, the number of submissions that received their first decision''' (see caveats at the end of this paragraph), and, '''in yellow, the average time in days to first decision'''; both of these types of data are grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month is counted as starting from the first of that month. ''Caveats'': this plot excludes desk rejects, first versions of papers that were not considered due to minor technical formatting problems, and papers handled using START (the early days of TACL). Also, papers submitted in June have not yet received decisions.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.days_to_decision.png]]

''Observations'':
* The average time to decision has, with exceptions, been bouncing between 50-60 days. The ideal timeline would be 45 days (1 week for EiC to assign an AE; 1 week for AEs to assign reviewers; 3 weeks for reviewers to review; 7-10 days for AEs to organize discussion and decide. So we are running about a week or week and a half, on average, later than we would ideally be.
* Time to first decision seems to spike around February or March. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one cause is Action Editor and reviewer commitments to conference (or burnout from said commitments). Admittedly, another contributing factor could be that the spring semesters constitute very heavy teaching loads for one of the co-EiCs.
* Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of submissions appears to drop during conference-submission seasons.
* On the positive side, ACL-wide automatic checking for duplicate submissions should help reduce the amount of time EiCs spend pre-processing submissions before assignment to AEs, which should help speed up the AE-assignment part of the pipeline.

Next, we show, '''in light blue, the variance (via box-and-whisker plots) in the number of days to first decision''', grouped by submission round. '''The red line shows the median.'''
The higlighted blue and magenta bars mark January and July submission rounds, with the intent
of highlighting any seasonal trends.

[[File:2018Q3_TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png|800px]]

'''Observations''':
* The median is, of course, less spiky than the mean shown in the first plot.

=== Distribution of first decisions ===

We had 167 paper submitted from June 2017 through June 2018, inclusive, that received a ''first'' decision . Of those, 12 were desk-rejected. Of the 155 left, the decision breakdown was:

2% (a) = accepted as is
17% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
55% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 35 resubmissions of (c)s that were submitted during the same period and received a decision, 48% received a conditional accept or an accept. 45% received a (d), as TACL policy is to not give two (c)s in a row. The remaining two were special cases that had to be handled differently.

=== Publishing statistics ===

The 2018 volume has had 28 papers published so far, with 8 camera-readies in hand to be processed, and 5 papers that have received (a) but where camera-readies have not yet been submitted.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

File:2018Q3 TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png

2018-07-01T20:37:30Z

LillianLee:

Median and quartiles of days taken til first decision for each TACL submission, desk rejects excluded, by submission month, Nov 2012-Jun 2018

File:2018Q3 TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png

2018-07-01T19:51:54Z

LillianLee:

Median and quartiles of days taken by reviewers for each TACL submission, desk rejects excluded, by submission month, Nov 2012-Jun 2018

File:2018Q3 TACL.days to decision.png

2018-07-01T19:50:08Z

LillianLee: Number of TACL submissions and average number of days to first decision, by monthly submission round, Nov 2012-June 2018.

Number of TACL submissions and average number of days to first decision, by monthly submission round, Nov 2012-June 2018.

File:2018Q3 TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png

2018-07-01T19:47:13Z

LillianLee: LillianLee uploaded a new version of File:2018Q3 TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png

Median and quartiles of days to first decision for each TACL submission, desk rejects excluded, by submission month, Nov 2012-Jun 2018

File:2018Q3 TACL.Per-paper-days-to-decision.annotated.png

2018-07-01T19:46:54Z

LillianLee: Median and quartiles of days to first decision for each TACL submission, desk rejects excluded, by submission month, Nov 2012-Jun 2018

Median and quartiles of days to first decision for each TACL submission, desk rejects excluded, by submission month, Nov 2012-Jun 2018

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-12T03:01:55Z

LillianLee: added that Julia Hockenmaier-> ACL Exec = retires from TACL

''(Thanks to ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on filing this report!)''

==TACL EiC search==

The TACL Steering Committee (chaired by Ido Dagan) organised a search for a new EiC to replace Kristina Toutanova, who will be retiring in July 2018. That search concluded, with Brian Roark as the preferred candidate. The committee has contacted Brian, and he has accepted, so Brian Roark will join Lillian Lee and Mark Johnson as the Editors in Chief for TACL, once Kristina retires.

We thank Kristina for her exemplary service to TACL, above and beyond the call of duty.

== Other personnel updates==

Joining us as Action Editors are Marco Baroni, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Xavier Carreras, Asli Celikyilmaz, Stephen Clark, Trevor Cohn, Mona Diab, Chris Dyer, James Henderson, and Alessandro Moschitti. Julia Hockenmaier was elected to chair NAACL, and, by thus joining the ACL Exec, retires from TACL. Thanks very much Julia for what you do for the community!

==Transition to MIT Press as TACL publisher==

The negotiations with MIT Press to publish TACL concluded at the end of 2017. MIT Press will handle TACL in the same way that it handles CL. This primarily affects the post-acceptance handling of papers (e.g., copy-editing, publication, etc.); the pre-acceptance reviewing process will continue to be handled by TACL EiCs using our modified OJS software. MIT Press is currently learning about the current TACL publication process, with the goal of MIT Press taking over within the next month or so. Once this has happened, MIT Press will start arranging for the indexing companies to index TACL, including our earlier publications if possible.

It's likely that the rate of submissions to TACL will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed. We hope that MIT Press' publication of TACL will ease our post-acceptance process, but we need to improve our pre-acceptance processes as well. We think that the submission rate will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed, so we think reducing the current pain points (e.g., off-loading maintenance of the OJS server, dealing with the relentlessly growing number of submissions, etc.) is a priority.

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== TACL has disallowed conference resubmission within a 9-month window ===

To reduce community reviewing load and to halt the need to make decisions on whether revisions of conference submissions were extensive enough to allow for TACL consideration, conference resubmissions are no longer eligible for TACL consideration within the 9-month window starting at the conference's submission deadline. For more on the rationales leading to this decision, see [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/announcement/view/32 the announcement of this change on the TACL website].

=== TACL currently does not consider ACL workshop papers as archival ===

This differs from the policy that most *ACL conferences have adopted. The issue is, anecdotally, the subject of some disagreement among TACL action editors and EiCs, and needs discussion.

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

Softconf has nearly completed a feature for automatically checking submissions of TACL against conference submissions from the prior nine months. We expect to be able to detect overlaps faster and with higher accuracy.

== Some statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision, excluding desk rejects, and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month. No February-submitted valid submissions have received decisions yet, and there are some papers still undecided from January and two lingering from February, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 253 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

[[File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.png|800px]]

Here is the time until first decision per paper, grouped by decision round, to give an idea of the variance of this statistic. 45 days (3rd line from the bottom) would be perfection. Papers that are still in the reviewing/decision queue will raise the number of ``late'' dots after this report is filed.

[[File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.per paper.png|700px]]

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time has crept up just a little from 23 days as of our last report to 24.6 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the Mar 2017 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 13 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 140)

2% (a) = accepted as is
15% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
56% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

=== Publishing statistics ===

10 papers have been published so far in 2018. 17 are in some stage of the publication queue.

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-06T10:01:44Z

LillianLee:

''(Thanks to ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on filing this report!)''

==TACL EiC search==

The TACL Steering Committee (chaired by Ido Dagan) organised a search for a new EiC to replace Kristina Toutanova, who will be retiring in July 2018. That search concluded, with Brian Roark as the preferred candidate. The committee has contacted Brian, and he has accepted, so Brian Roark will join Lillian Lee and Mark Johnson as the Editors in Chief for TACL, once Kristina retires.

We thank Kristina for her exemplary service to TACL, above and beyond the call of duty.

== Other personnel updates==

Joining us as Action Editors are Marco Baroni, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Xavier Carreras, Asli Celikyilmaz, Stephen Clark, Trevor Cohn, Mona Diab, Chris Dyer, James Henderson, and Alessandro Moschitti.

==Transition to MIT Press as TACL publisher==

The negotiations with MIT Press to publish TACL concluded at the end of 2017. MIT Press will handle TACL in the same way that it handles CL. This primarily affects the post-acceptance handling of papers (e.g., copy-editing, publication, etc.); the pre-acceptance reviewing process will continue to be handled by TACL EiCs using our modified OJS software. MIT Press is currently learning about the current TACL publication process, with the goal of MIT Press taking over within the next month or so. Once this has happened, MIT Press will start arranging for the indexing companies to index TACL, including our earlier publications if possible.

It's likely that the rate of submissions to TACL will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed. We hope that MIT Press' publication of TACL will ease our post-acceptance process, but we need to improve our pre-acceptance processes as well. We think that the submission rate will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed, so we think reducing the current pain points (e.g., off-loading maintenance of the OJS server, dealing with the relentlessly growing number of submissions, etc.) is a priority.

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== TACL has disallowed conference resubmission within a 9-month window ===

To reduce community reviewing load and to halt the need to make decisions on whether revisions of conference submissions were extensive enough to allow for TACL consideration, conference resubmissions are no longer eligible for TACL consideration within the 9-month window starting at the conference's submission deadline. For more on the rationales leading to this decision, see [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/announcement/view/32 the announcement of this change on the TACL website].

=== TACL currently does not consider ACL workshop papers as archival ===

This differs from the policy that most *ACL conferences have adopted. The issue is, anecdotally, the subject of some disagreement among TACL action editors and EiCs, and needs discussion.

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

Softconf has nearly completed a feature for automatically checking submissions of TACL against conference submissions from the prior nine months. We expect to be able to detect overlaps faster and with higher accuracy.

== Some statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision, excluding desk rejects, and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month. No February-submitted valid submissions have received decisions yet, and there are some papers still undecided from January and two lingering from February, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 253 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

[[File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.png|800px]]

Here is the time until first decision per paper, grouped by decision round, to give an idea of the variance of this statistic. 45 days (3rd line from the bottom) would be perfection. Papers that are still in the reviewing/decision queue will raise the number of ``late'' dots after this report is filed.

[[File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.per paper.png|700px]]

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time has crept up just a little from 23 days as of our last report to 24.6 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the Mar 2017 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 13 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 140)

2% (a) = accepted as is
15% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
56% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

=== Publishing statistics ===

10 papers have been published so far in 2018. 17 are in some stage of the publication queue.

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-06T10:00:13Z

LillianLee: finishing up

''(Thanks to ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on filing this report!)''

==TACL EiC search==

The TACL Steering Committee (chaired by Ido Dagan) organised a search for a new EiC to replace Kristina Toutanova, who will be retiring in July 2018. That search concluded, with Brian Roark as the preferred candidate. The committee has contacted Brian, and he has accepted, so Brian Roark will join Lillian Lee and Mark Johnson as the Editors in Chief for TACL, once Kristina retires.

We thank Kristina for her exemplary service to TACL, above and beyond the call of duty.

== Other personnel updates==

Joining us as Action Editors are Marco Baroni, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Xavier Carreras, Asli Celikyilmaz, Stephen Clark, Trevor Cohn, Mona Diab, Chris Dyer, James Henderson, and Alessandro Moschitti.

==Transition to MIT Press as TACL publisher==

The negotiations with MIT Press to publish TACL concluded at the end of 2017. MIT Press will handle TACL in the same way that it handles CL. This primarily affects the post-acceptance handling of papers (e.g., copy-editing, publication, etc.); the pre-acceptance reviewing process will continue to be handled by TACL EiCs using our modified OJS software. MIT Press is currently learning about the current TACL publication process, with the goal of MIT Press taking over within the next month or so. Once this has happened, MIT Press will start arranging for the indexing companies to index TACL, including our earlier publications if possible.

It's likely that the rate of submissions to TACL will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed. We hope that MIT Press' publication of TACL will ease our post-acceptance process, but we need to improve our pre-acceptance processes as well. We think that the submission rate will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed, so we think reducing the current pain points (e.g., off-loading maintenance of the OJS server, dealing with the relentlessly growing number of submissions, etc.) is a priority.

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== TACL has disallowed conference resubmission within a 9-month window ===

To reduce community reviewing load and to halt the need to make decisions on whether revisions of conference submissions were extensive enough to allow for TACL consideration, conference resubmissions are no longer eligible for TACL consideration within the 9-month window starting at the conference's submission deadline. For more on the rationales leading to this decision, see [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/announcement/view/32 the announcement of this change on the TACL website].

=== TACL currently does not consider ACL workshop papers as archival ===

This differs from the policy that most *ACL conferences have adopted. The issue is, anecdotally, the subject of some disagreement among TACL action editors and EiCs, and needs discussion.

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

Softconf has nearly completed a feature for automatically checking submissions of TACL against conference submissions from the prior nine months. We expect to be able to detect overlaps faster and with higher accuracy.

== Some statistics ==

=== Time to first decision ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision, excluding desk rejects, and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month. No February-submitted valid submissions have received decisions yet, and there are some papers still undecided from January and two lingering from February, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 253 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

[[File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.png|800px]]

Here is the time until first decision per paper, grouped by decision round, to give an idea of the variance of this statistic. 45 days (3rd line from the bottom) would be perfection.

[[File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.per paper.png|800px]]

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time has crept up just a little from 23 days as of our last report to 24.6 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the Mar 2017 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 13 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 140)

2% (a) = accepted as is
15% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
56% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

=== Publishing statistics ===

10 papers have been published so far in 2018. 17 are in some stage of the publication queue.

File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.per paper.png

2018-03-06T09:57:07Z

LillianLee:

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-06T09:38:44Z

LillianLee: incremental additions

''(Thanks to ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on filing this report!)''

==TACL EiC search==

The TACL Steering Committee (chaired by Ido Dagan) organised a search for a new EiC to replace Kristina Toutanova, who will be retiring in July 2018. That search concluded, with Brian Roark as the preferred candidate. The committee has contacted Brian, and he has accepted, so Brian Roark will join Lillian Lee and Mark Johnson as the Editors in Chief for TACL, once Kristina retires.

We thank Kristina for her exemplary service to TACL, above and beyond the call of duty.

== Other personnel updates==

Joining us as Action Editors are Marco Baroni, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Xavier Carreras, Asli Celikyilmaz, Stephen Clark, Trevor Cohn, Mona Diab, Chris Dyer, James Henderson, and Alessandro Moschitti.

==Transition to MIT Press as TACL publisher==

The negotiations with MIT Press to publish TACL concluded at the end of 2017. MIT Press will handle TACL in the same way that it handles CL. This primarily affects the post-acceptance handling of papers (e.g., copy-editing, publication, etc.); the pre-acceptance reviewing process will continue to be handled by TACL EiCs using our modified OJS software. MIT Press is currently learning about the current TACL publication process, with the goal of MIT Press taking over within the next month or so. Once this has happened, MIT Press will start arranging for the indexing companies to index TACL, including our earlier publications if possible.

It's likely that the rate of submissions to TACL will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed. We hope that MIT Press' publication of TACL will ease our post-acceptance process, but we need to improve our pre-acceptance processes as well. We think that the submission rate will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed, so we think reducing the current pain points (e.g., off-loading maintenance of the OJS server, dealing with the relentlessly growing number of submissions, etc.) is a priority.

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== TACL has disallowed conference resubmission within a 9-month window ===

To reduce community reviewing load and to halt the need to make decisions on whether revisions of conference submissions were extensive enough to allow for TACL consideration, conference resubmissions are no longer eligible for TACL consideration within the 9-month window starting at the conference's submission deadline. For more on the rationales leading to this decision, see [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/announcement/view/32 the announcement of this change on the TACL website].

=== TACL currently does not consider ACL workshop papers as archival ===

This differs from the policy that most *ACL conferences have adopted. The issue is, anecdotally, the subject of some disagreement among TACL action editors and EiCs, and needs discussion.

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

Softconf has nearly completed a feature for automatically checking submissions of TACL against conference submissions from the prior nine months. We expect to be able to detect overlaps faster and with higher accuracy.

== Some statistics ==

Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision, excluding desk rejects, and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month. No February-submitted valid submissions have received decisions yet, and there are some papers still undecided from January and two lingering from February, so the shape of the right-hand side of the graph will change. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 253 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

[[File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.png]]

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time has crept up just a little from 23 days as of our last report to 24.6 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the Mar 2017 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 13 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 140)

2% (a) = accepted as is
15% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
56% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

=== Publishing statistics ===

10 papers have been published so far in 2018. 17 are in some stage of the publication queue.

File:2018Q1-TACL-Time to first decision no desk rejects.png

2018-03-06T09:30:17Z

LillianLee:

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-06T09:28:28Z

LillianLee: incremental updating

''(Thanks to ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on filing this report!)''

==TACL EiC search==

The TACL Steering Committee (chaired by Ido Dagan) organised a search for a new EiC to replace Kristina Toutanova, who will be retiring in July 2018. That search concluded, with Brian Roark as the preferred candidate. The committee has contacted Brian, and he has accepted, so Brian Roark will join Lillian Lee and Mark Johnson as the Editors in Chief for TACL, once Kristina retires.

We thank Kristina for her exemplary service to TACL, above and beyond the call of duty.

== Other personnel updates==

Joining us as Action Editors are Marco Baroni, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Xavier Carreras, Asli Celikyilmaz, Stephen Clark, Trevor Cohn, Mona Diab, Chris Dyer, James Henderson, and Alessandro Moschitti.

==Transition to MIT Press as TACL publisher==

The negotiations with MIT Press to publish TACL concluded at the end of 2017. MIT Press will handle TACL in the same way that it handles CL. This primarily affects the post-acceptance handling of papers (e.g., copy-editing, publication, etc.); the pre-acceptance reviewing process will continue to be handled by TACL EiCs using our modified OJS software. MIT Press is currently learning about the current TACL publication process, with the goal of MIT Press taking over within the next month or so. Once this has happened, MIT Press will start arranging for the indexing companies to index TACL, including our earlier publications if possible.

It's likely that the rate of submissions to TACL will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed. We hope that MIT Press' publication of TACL will ease our post-acceptance process, but we need to improve our pre-acceptance processes as well. We think that the submission rate will dramatically increase once TACL is indexed, so we think reducing the current pain points (e.g., off-loading maintenance of the OJS server, dealing with the relentlessly growing number of submissions, etc.) is a priority.

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== TACL has disallowed conference resubmission within a 9-month window ===

To reduce community reviewing load and to halt the need to make decisions on whether revisions of conference submissions were extensive enough to allow for TACL consideration, conference resubmissions are no longer eligible for TACL consideration within the 9-month window starting at the conference's submission deadline. For more on the rationales leading to this decision, see [https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/announcement/view/32 the announcement of this change on the TACL website].

=== TACL currently does not consider ACL workshop papers as archival ===

This differs from the policy that most *ACL conferences have adopted. The issue is, anecdotally, the subject of some disagreement among TACL action editors and EiCs, and needs discussion.

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

Softconf has nearly completed a feature for automatically checking submissions of TACL against conference submissions from the prior nine months. We expect to be able to detect overlaps faster and with higher accuracy.

== Some statistics ==

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time has crept up just a little from 23 days as of our last report to 24.6 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the Mar 2017 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 13 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 140)

2% (a) = accepted as is
15% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
56% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
26% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

=== Publishing statistics ===

10 papers have been published so far in 2018. 17 are in some stage of the publication queue.

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-06T09:09:13Z

LillianLee: /* Some statistics */

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-06T09:04:58Z

LillianLee:

2018Q1 Reports

2018-03-06T08:36:08Z

LillianLee: alphabetized TACL EiCs (the report is a joint effort, all authors contributed equally, as they say)

* [[2018Q1 Agenda]] - Agenda for the winter teleconference

* [[2018Q1 Reports: EACL]] - Walter Daelemans
* [[2018Q1 Reports: NAACL]] - Julia Hockenmaier, Emily Bender (past chair)
* [[2018Q1 Reports: AFNLP]] - Kam-Fai Wong
* [[2018Q1 Reports: Office]] - Priscilla Rasmussen
* [[2018Q1 Reports: Secretary]] - Shiqi Zhao
* [[2018Q1 Reports: Treasurer]] - David Yarowsky, Graeme Hirst (past treasurer)
* [[2018Q1 Reports: Info_Officer]] - Jing-Shin Chang
* [[2018Q1 Reports: SIG Compliance]] - Jennifer Foster
* [[2018Q1 Reports: Conference_Officer]] - Barbara Di Eugenio, Yejin Choi (past conference officer)
* [[2018Q1 Reports: ACL 2018]] - Joakim Nivre (Coordinating Committee Chair, includes updates from the local chairs, general chairs, and program chairs)
* [[2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal]] - Mark Johnson, Lillian Lee, and Kristina Toutanova
* [[2018Q1 Reports: ACL 2019]] - Marti Hearst
* [[2018Q1 Reports: ACL 2020]] - Ming Zhou
* [[2018Q1 Reports: ACL 2021]] - Hinrich Schütze
* [[2018Q1 Reports: CL Journal]] - Paola Merlo

*[[2018Q1 Minutes (public version)]]

2018Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

2018-03-06T08:28:38Z

LillianLee: portions of the report that don't involve submission statistics

2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2017-08-01T11:47:40Z

LillianLee: /* Checking for dual submissions */ credit ICML

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. ''-- the TACL Editors-in-Chief''

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== Pre-print servers and double-blind review ===

The issues are complicated, and it is too early for TACL to take a definitive stance.

Nonetheless, we have made some inquiries to our arxiv connections (it is conveniently hosted at the same institution as one of the EiCs) about the possibility of it implementing anonymous submissions. Details are not currently in a publicly shareable state, though, and the arxiv is, although by far the most popular, not the only preprint distribution mechanism, so we defer public discussion of that option.

Given this, options the TACL EiCs have been talking about among ourselves and are just about to gather TACL AE thoughts on are as follows. The first suggestion is new, but the options below are not ordered.

# Allow preprints during review, but make the author choice to do or not do so salient, by requiring a suffix to submission and camera-ready paper titles (or to the abstract, or as keywords), say, “PADR” or “noPADR”. indicating whether a preprint was available during review. In this way, future readers or citers of the paper would be able to see whether it was accepted as "truly" double-blind or perhaps potentially effectively single-blind. This mechanism may provide some potential alternate advantage (?) or recognition to authors choosing not to make preprints available during review.
# Ban the posting of preprints during review
# The status quo

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

"Illegal" dual submissions occur, and the (significant) overhead for checking for them each month falls not just on TACL, but also on the program chairs for ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and so on for nine months after the conference receives its submissions. It would be excellent if near-duplicate checking could be centralized and automated, perhaps by integrating the ICML duplicate-detection software that Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan employed for ACL 2017, into SoftConf? (Informal conversation with the arxiv also suggest that we be granted access to their near-duplicate-detection API.)

=== Is TACL (not) a conference? ===

Should TACL be more part of the conference eco-system or more distinct from it? One issue that throws this question into sharp relief is the following. TACL currently allows submission of (revised) conference rejections if the revised version is significantly different from the rejected version. However, judging "significantly difficult" is proving significantly difficult for the EiCs to determine, who collectively spend 2-3 days in making each such judgment.

If TACL should be an distinct channel, where people chose to either go "the conference route" or "the journal route", then TACL should move towards not allowing any conference-rejection resubmissions. On the other hand, if TACL should be more or less be considered another conference, then it should be more relaxed about accepting revised rejections for review.

=== TACL workload is part of the community's workload ===

Even though the TACL arrangement is meant to keep each TACL member occupied with at most one paper at a time, ''reviewing/service burnout from other conferences and meetings'', not to speak of those conferences' submission deadlines, is, anecdotally, significantly affecting TACL, such that we are now experience a significant number of reviewers declining TACL reviewing assignments. TACL reviewers and action editors (AEs) are *ACL reviewers, program committee members, and authors, as well.

In other words, TACL may be trying to keep reviewing loads down internally, but reviewing burnout is a community-wide issue.

== Some statistics ==

=== First-decision statistics ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision ''excluding desk rejects'' (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time is 23 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

[[File:Time to first decision.no desk rejects.png]]

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

[[File:2017Q3_TACL.Time_to_first_decision.each_paper.by_sub_round.png|800px]]

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

5% (a) = accepted as is
12% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

26% (a)
42% (b)
5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
26% (d)

=== Publishing statistics ===

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.

== Personnel updates ==

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Eric Fosler-Lussier (until EOY 2017) for now Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann,
Diana McCarthy,
Daichi Mochihashi,
Patrick Pantel (one year),
Sebastian Riedel,
Stefan Riezler,
Brian Roark,
Noah Smith,
Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

We also need and plan to increase the standing reviewer pool.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

Here are some major bottlenecks beyond just the usual people missing their deadlines.
# Pre-review police work: checking for dual submissions, format violations, and so on. We typically have multiple cases each round.
# Pre-review load- and expertise-balancing of papers to action editors
# Post-acceptance copy-editing. Until 2017, TACL HQ (the EiCs and Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson) had been doing all the copy-editing work. This started to introduce very significant delays (months! alas) in publication time.

TACL co-EiC Mark Johnson has summarized the situation and the possible solutions as follows.

Even though TACL has 3 Editors in Chief, the workload is enormous because of the sheer volume of submissions. Everyone is stretched thin, and the extended absence of one of Editors in Chief causes us to fall significantly behind.

Because of this, we decided to investigate whether having a professional academic publisher publish TACL would reduce the workload on the Editors in Chief and Action Editors, and improve service for the TACL community.

I contacted 3 publishers over the past few months; MIT Press, Springer and Microtome Press (run by Stuart Shieber, a Harvard professor who is an expert in open access publishing). I had extended email conversations and Skype conversations with MIT Press, Springer and Stuart Shieber (Microtome). This message is a summary of those conversations.

There are four different stages of work involved in producing TACL:
# Submission/review workflow management (handling paper submissions, routing them to reviewers, etc.)
# Editorial review (handling accept/revise/rejection decisions, etc.)
# Production (copy-editing, formatting camera-ready copy)
# Distribution (ACL anthology, a publisher might also sell TACL to libraries).
Academic publishers are primarily set up to handle distribution, but they can also handle some parts of production, largely by outsourcing copy-editing to freelancers. (There's a quote from MIT Press for this).

The actual editorial review needs to be handled by experts who know the area, so there is not much a 3rd party company can do to help us here. Stu Shieber's suggestion is to build a hierarchy (specifically, to add an additional level of Area Editors, corresponding to Area Chairs in a conference) and push as much work as possible down to lower levels in the hierarchy.
There are several commercial firms that handle the submission workflow. Stu Shieber mentioned the following:
Open Journal Systems (we currently use OJS; Stu points out PKP (at Simon Fraser U.) offers hosting of OJS <https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting>);
Editorial Manager (this is also what MIT Press and Springer suggested);
ScholasticaHQ;
ScienceAI;
Ubiquity Press
Editorial Manager, ScholasticaHQ and ScienceAI are all hosted services (as is OJS hosted by PKP), while Ubiquity Press offers more service (for a price). They should all be easier to use and more robust than our current setup (which is still running on a Columbia site). An issue is that Lillian has highly customised the OJS software for TACL; I suspect this won't be sustainable over the longer term.

All the publishers I spoke to (and Stu Shieber agrees) that there should be no problem getting TACL indexed by the Science Citation Index (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier). Our agreement with the *ACL conferences of offering a conference presentation to authors of accepted papers does not seem to be a problem.

Here are my suggestions (largely drawn from suggestions from the TACL EiCs, Stu Shieber, etc.):

# We should evaluate the various hosted services for handling the submission workflow, with the goal of having someone else run the TACL submission web site. This evaluation is likely to involve a substantial amount of work, as it needs to evaluate working versions of these systems, to see how well they can support Lillian’s highly customised TACL work flow. Perhaps the ACL can find and pay an energetic CLer to try to implement the TACL work flow in each of these systems (or at least find out how hard it would be to do)?
# We add an additional level to hierarchy of Area Editors. The web submission software should be customised so authors nominate the area for their paper, and it is automatically routed to the appropriate Area Editor, who handles it in the same way that the EiCs currently do.
## The area editors perform aggressive triage of submissions. We add two new review category for papers that we decline to review, e.g., "desk reject without prejudice" for papers that violate our formatting requirements, and "inappropriate submission desk reject" for papers that we think are unlikely to be accepted.
## We dramatically increase the number of reviewers and action editors.
## Action editors are responsible for checking that the submission is acceptable, e.g., checking that all required changes have been made, that the English is acceptable, etc. They can require that a paper be revised to improve English. TACL should find one or more free-lance copy-editors that authors can use if they can't correct the English themselves (the author pays, of course).
# We should ask Paola Merlo (the CL editor) to describe the services that MIT Press provides for the publication of CL.
# We should delay getting TACL indexed until we have solutions to our submission workflow management and editorial review problems. Once TACL is indexed we can expect our submissions to jump sharply.

2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2017-08-01T09:39:07Z

LillianLee: /* Personnel updates */ fixed missing paren

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. ''-- the TACL Editors-in-Chief''

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== Pre-print servers and double-blind review ===

The issues are complicated, and it is too early for TACL to take a definitive stance.

Nonetheless, we have made some inquiries to our arxiv connections (it is conveniently hosted at the same institution as one of the EiCs) about the possibility of it implementing anonymous submissions. Details are not currently in a publicly shareable state, though, and the arxiv is, although by far the most popular, not the only preprint distribution mechanism, so we defer public discussion of that option.

Given this, options the TACL EiCs have been talking about among ourselves and are just about to gather TACL AE thoughts on are as follows. The first suggestion is new, but the options below are not ordered.

# Allow preprints during review, but make the author choice to do or not do so salient, by requiring a suffix to submission and camera-ready paper titles (or to the abstract, or as keywords), say, “PADR” or “noPADR”. indicating whether a preprint was available during review. In this way, future readers or citers of the paper would be able to see whether it was accepted as "truly" double-blind or perhaps potentially effectively single-blind. This mechanism may provide some potential alternate advantage (?) or recognition to authors choosing not to make preprints available during review.
# Ban the posting of preprints during review
# The status quo

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

"Illegal" dual submissions occur, and the (significant) overhead for checking for them each month falls not just on TACL, but also on the program chairs for ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and so on for nine months after the conference receives its submissions. It would be excellent if near-duplicate checking could be centralized and automated, perhaps by integrating Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan's ACL 2017 duplicate-detection software into SoftConf? (Informal conversation with the arxiv also suggest that we be granted access to their near-duplicate-detection API.)

=== Is TACL (not) a conference? ===

Should TACL be more part of the conference eco-system or more distinct from it? One issue that throws this question into sharp relief is the following. TACL currently allows submission of (revised) conference rejections if the revised version is significantly different from the rejected version. However, judging "significantly difficult" is proving significantly difficult for the EiCs to determine, who collectively spend 2-3 days in making each such judgment.

If TACL should be an distinct channel, where people chose to either go "the conference route" or "the journal route", then TACL should move towards not allowing any conference-rejection resubmissions. On the other hand, if TACL should be more or less be considered another conference, then it should be more relaxed about accepting revised rejections for review.

=== TACL workload is part of the community's workload ===

Even though the TACL arrangement is meant to keep each TACL member occupied with at most one paper at a time, ''reviewing/service burnout from other conferences and meetings'', not to speak of those conferences' submission deadlines, is, anecdotally, significantly affecting TACL, such that we are now experience a significant number of reviewers declining TACL reviewing assignments. TACL reviewers and action editors (AEs) are *ACL reviewers, program committee members, and authors, as well.

In other words, TACL may be trying to keep reviewing loads down internally, but reviewing burnout is a community-wide issue.

== Some statistics ==

=== First-decision statistics ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision ''excluding desk rejects'' (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time is 23 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

[[File:Time to first decision.no desk rejects.png]]

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

[[File:2017Q3_TACL.Time_to_first_decision.each_paper.by_sub_round.png|800px]]

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

5% (a) = accepted as is
12% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

26% (a)
42% (b)
5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
26% (d)

=== Publishing statistics ===

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.

== Personnel updates ==

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Eric Fosler-Lussier (until EOY 2017) for now Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann,
Diana McCarthy,
Daichi Mochihashi,
Patrick Pantel (one year),
Sebastian Riedel,
Stefan Riezler,
Brian Roark,
Noah Smith,
Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

We also need and plan to increase the standing reviewer pool.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

Here are some major bottlenecks beyond just the usual people missing their deadlines.
# Pre-review police work: checking for dual submissions, format violations, and so on. We typically have multiple cases each round.
# Pre-review load- and expertise-balancing of papers to action editors
# Post-acceptance copy-editing. Until 2017, TACL HQ (the EiCs and Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson) had been doing all the copy-editing work. This started to introduce very significant delays (months! alas) in publication time.

TACL co-EiC Mark Johnson has summarized the situation and the possible solutions as follows.

Even though TACL has 3 Editors in Chief, the workload is enormous because of the sheer volume of submissions. Everyone is stretched thin, and the extended absence of one of Editors in Chief causes us to fall significantly behind.

Because of this, we decided to investigate whether having a professional academic publisher publish TACL would reduce the workload on the Editors in Chief and Action Editors, and improve service for the TACL community.

I contacted 3 publishers over the past few months; MIT Press, Springer and Microtome Press (run by Stuart Shieber, a Harvard professor who is an expert in open access publishing). I had extended email conversations and Skype conversations with MIT Press, Springer and Stuart Shieber (Microtome). This message is a summary of those conversations.

There are four different stages of work involved in producing TACL:
# Submission/review workflow management (handling paper submissions, routing them to reviewers, etc.)
# Editorial review (handling accept/revise/rejection decisions, etc.)
# Production (copy-editing, formatting camera-ready copy)
# Distribution (ACL anthology, a publisher might also sell TACL to libraries).
Academic publishers are primarily set up to handle distribution, but they can also handle some parts of production, largely by outsourcing copy-editing to freelancers. (There's a quote from MIT Press for this).

The actual editorial review needs to be handled by experts who know the area, so there is not much a 3rd party company can do to help us here. Stu Shieber's suggestion is to build a hierarchy (specifically, to add an additional level of Area Editors, corresponding to Area Chairs in a conference) and push as much work as possible down to lower levels in the hierarchy.
There are several commercial firms that handle the submission workflow. Stu Shieber mentioned the following:
Open Journal Systems (we currently use OJS; Stu points out PKP (at Simon Fraser U.) offers hosting of OJS <https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting>);
Editorial Manager (this is also what MIT Press and Springer suggested);
ScholasticaHQ;
ScienceAI;
Ubiquity Press
Editorial Manager, ScholasticaHQ and ScienceAI are all hosted services (as is OJS hosted by PKP), while Ubiquity Press offers more service (for a price). They should all be easier to use and more robust than our current setup (which is still running on a Columbia site). An issue is that Lillian has highly customised the OJS software for TACL; I suspect this won't be sustainable over the longer term.

All the publishers I spoke to (and Stu Shieber agrees) that there should be no problem getting TACL indexed by the Science Citation Index (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier). Our agreement with the *ACL conferences of offering a conference presentation to authors of accepted papers does not seem to be a problem.

Here are my suggestions (largely drawn from suggestions from the TACL EiCs, Stu Shieber, etc.):

# We should evaluate the various hosted services for handling the submission workflow, with the goal of having someone else run the TACL submission web site. This evaluation is likely to involve a substantial amount of work, as it needs to evaluate working versions of these systems, to see how well they can support Lillian’s highly customised TACL work flow. Perhaps the ACL can find and pay an energetic CLer to try to implement the TACL work flow in each of these systems (or at least find out how hard it would be to do)?
# We add an additional level to hierarchy of Area Editors. The web submission software should be customised so authors nominate the area for their paper, and it is automatically routed to the appropriate Area Editor, who handles it in the same way that the EiCs currently do.
## The area editors perform aggressive triage of submissions. We add two new review category for papers that we decline to review, e.g., "desk reject without prejudice" for papers that violate our formatting requirements, and "inappropriate submission desk reject" for papers that we think are unlikely to be accepted.
## We dramatically increase the number of reviewers and action editors.
## Action editors are responsible for checking that the submission is acceptable, e.g., checking that all required changes have been made, that the English is acceptable, etc. They can require that a paper be revised to improve English. TACL should find one or more free-lance copy-editors that authors can use if they can't correct the English themselves (the author pays, of course).
# We should ask Paola Merlo (the CL editor) to describe the services that MIT Press provides for the publication of CL.
# We should delay getting TACL indexed until we have solutions to our submission workflow management and editorial review problems. Once TACL is indexed we can expect our submissions to jump sharply.

2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2017-07-26T16:55:32Z

LillianLee: /* Personnel updates */ - Eric Fossler-Lussier's acceptance of additional term just came in

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. ''-- the TACL Editors-in-Chief''

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== Pre-print servers and double-blind review ===

The issues are complicated, and it is too early for TACL to take a definitive stance.

Nonetheless, we have made some inquiries to our arxiv connections (it is conveniently hosted at the same institution as one of the EiCs) about the possibility of it implementing anonymous submissions. Details are not currently in a publicly shareable state, though, and the arxiv is, although by far the most popular, not the only preprint distribution mechanism, so we defer public discussion of that option.

Given this, options the TACL EiCs have been talking about among ourselves and are just about to gather TACL AE thoughts on are as follows. The first suggestion is new, but the options below are not ordered.

# Allow preprints during review, but make the author choice to do or not do so salient, by requiring a suffix to submission and camera-ready paper titles (or to the abstract, or as keywords), say, “PADR” or “noPADR”. indicating whether a preprint was available during review. In this way, future readers or citers of the paper would be able to see whether it was accepted as "truly" double-blind or perhaps potentially effectively single-blind. This mechanism may provide some potential alternate advantage (?) or recognition to authors choosing not to make preprints available during review.
# Ban the posting of preprints during review
# The status quo

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

"Illegal" dual submissions occur, and the (significant) overhead for checking for them each month falls not just on TACL, but also on the program chairs for ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and so on for nine months after the conference receives its submissions. It would be excellent if near-duplicate checking could be centralized and automated, perhaps by integrating Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan's ACL 2017 duplicate-detection software into SoftConf? (Informal conversation with the arxiv also suggest that we be granted access to their near-duplicate-detection API.)

=== Is TACL (not) a conference? ===

Should TACL be more part of the conference eco-system or more distinct from it? One issue that throws this question into sharp relief is the following. TACL currently allows submission of (revised) conference rejections if the revised version is significantly different from the rejected version. However, judging "significantly difficult" is proving significantly difficult for the EiCs to determine, who collectively spend 2-3 days in making each such judgment.

If TACL should be an distinct channel, where people chose to either go "the conference route" or "the journal route", then TACL should move towards not allowing any conference-rejection resubmissions. On the other hand, if TACL should be more or less be considered another conference, then it should be more relaxed about accepting revised rejections for review.

=== TACL workload is part of the community's workload ===

Even though the TACL arrangement is meant to keep each TACL member occupied with at most one paper at a time, ''reviewing/service burnout from other conferences and meetings'', not to speak of those conferences' submission deadlines, is, anecdotally, significantly affecting TACL, such that we are now experience a significant number of reviewers declining TACL reviewing assignments. TACL reviewers and action editors (AEs) are *ACL reviewers, program committee members, and authors, as well.

In other words, TACL may be trying to keep reviewing loads down internally, but reviewing burnout is a community-wide issue.

== Some statistics ==

=== First-decision statistics ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision ''excluding desk rejects'' (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time is 23 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

[[File:Time to first decision.no desk rejects.png]]

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

[[File:2017Q3_TACL.Time_to_first_decision.each_paper.by_sub_round.png|800px]]

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

5% (a) = accepted as is
12% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

26% (a)
42% (b)
5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
26% (d)

=== Publishing statistics ===

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.

== Personnel updates ==

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Eric Fosler-Lussier (until EOY 2017 for now Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann,
Diana McCarthy,
Daichi Mochihashi,
Patrick Pantel (one year),
Sebastian Riedel,
Stefan Riezler,
Brian Roark,
Noah Smith,
Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

We also need and plan to increase the standing reviewer pool.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

Here are some major bottlenecks beyond just the usual people missing their deadlines.
# Pre-review police work: checking for dual submissions, format violations, and so on. We typically have multiple cases each round.
# Pre-review load- and expertise-balancing of papers to action editors
# Post-acceptance copy-editing. Until 2017, TACL HQ (the EiCs and Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson) had been doing all the copy-editing work. This started to introduce very significant delays (months! alas) in publication time.

TACL co-EiC Mark Johnson has summarized the situation and the possible solutions as follows.

Even though TACL has 3 Editors in Chief, the workload is enormous because of the sheer volume of submissions. Everyone is stretched thin, and the extended absence of one of Editors in Chief causes us to fall significantly behind.

Because of this, we decided to investigate whether having a professional academic publisher publish TACL would reduce the workload on the Editors in Chief and Action Editors, and improve service for the TACL community.

I contacted 3 publishers over the past few months; MIT Press, Springer and Microtome Press (run by Stuart Shieber, a Harvard professor who is an expert in open access publishing). I had extended email conversations and Skype conversations with MIT Press, Springer and Stuart Shieber (Microtome). This message is a summary of those conversations.

There are four different stages of work involved in producing TACL:
# Submission/review workflow management (handling paper submissions, routing them to reviewers, etc.)
# Editorial review (handling accept/revise/rejection decisions, etc.)
# Production (copy-editing, formatting camera-ready copy)
# Distribution (ACL anthology, a publisher might also sell TACL to libraries).
Academic publishers are primarily set up to handle distribution, but they can also handle some parts of production, largely by outsourcing copy-editing to freelancers. (There's a quote from MIT Press for this).

The actual editorial review needs to be handled by experts who know the area, so there is not much a 3rd party company can do to help us here. Stu Shieber's suggestion is to build a hierarchy (specifically, to add an additional level of Area Editors, corresponding to Area Chairs in a conference) and push as much work as possible down to lower levels in the hierarchy.
There are several commercial firms that handle the submission workflow. Stu Shieber mentioned the following:
Open Journal Systems (we currently use OJS; Stu points out PKP (at Simon Fraser U.) offers hosting of OJS <https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting>);
Editorial Manager (this is also what MIT Press and Springer suggested);
ScholasticaHQ;
ScienceAI;
Ubiquity Press
Editorial Manager, ScholasticaHQ and ScienceAI are all hosted services (as is OJS hosted by PKP), while Ubiquity Press offers more service (for a price). They should all be easier to use and more robust than our current setup (which is still running on a Columbia site). An issue is that Lillian has highly customised the OJS software for TACL; I suspect this won't be sustainable over the longer term.

All the publishers I spoke to (and Stu Shieber agrees) that there should be no problem getting TACL indexed by the Science Citation Index (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier). Our agreement with the *ACL conferences of offering a conference presentation to authors of accepted papers does not seem to be a problem.

Here are my suggestions (largely drawn from suggestions from the TACL EiCs, Stu Shieber, etc.):

# We should evaluate the various hosted services for handling the submission workflow, with the goal of having someone else run the TACL submission web site. This evaluation is likely to involve a substantial amount of work, as it needs to evaluate working versions of these systems, to see how well they can support Lillian’s highly customised TACL work flow. Perhaps the ACL can find and pay an energetic CLer to try to implement the TACL work flow in each of these systems (or at least find out how hard it would be to do)?
# We add an additional level to hierarchy of Area Editors. The web submission software should be customised so authors nominate the area for their paper, and it is automatically routed to the appropriate Area Editor, who handles it in the same way that the EiCs currently do.
## The area editors perform aggressive triage of submissions. We add two new review category for papers that we decline to review, e.g., "desk reject without prejudice" for papers that violate our formatting requirements, and "inappropriate submission desk reject" for papers that we think are unlikely to be accepted.
## We dramatically increase the number of reviewers and action editors.
## Action editors are responsible for checking that the submission is acceptable, e.g., checking that all required changes have been made, that the English is acceptable, etc. They can require that a paper be revised to improve English. TACL should find one or more free-lance copy-editors that authors can use if they can't correct the English themselves (the author pays, of course).
# We should ask Paola Merlo (the CL editor) to describe the services that MIT Press provides for the publication of CL.
# We should delay getting TACL indexed until we have solutions to our submission workflow management and editorial review problems. Once TACL is indexed we can expect our submissions to jump sharply.

2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2017-07-26T16:42:32Z

LillianLee: modify "(no)preprint during review" idea

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. ''-- the TACL Editors-in-Chief''

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== Pre-print servers and double-blind review ===

The issues are complicated, and it is too early for TACL to take a definitive stance.

Nonetheless, we have made some inquiries to our arxiv connections (it is conveniently hosted at the same institution as one of the EiCs) about the possibility of it implementing anonymous submissions. Details are not currently in a publicly shareable state, though, and the arxiv is, although by far the most popular, not the only preprint distribution mechanism, so we defer public discussion of that option.

Given this, options the TACL EiCs have been talking about among ourselves and are just about to gather TACL AE thoughts on are as follows. The first suggestion is new, but the options below are not ordered.

# Allow preprints during review, but make the author choice to do or not do so salient, by requiring a suffix to submission and camera-ready paper titles (or to the abstract, or as keywords), say, “PADR” or “noPADR”. indicating whether a preprint was available during review. In this way, future readers or citers of the paper would be able to see whether it was accepted as "truly" double-blind or perhaps potentially effectively single-blind. This mechanism may provide some potential alternate advantage (?) or recognition to authors choosing not to make preprints available during review.
# Ban the posting of preprints during review
# The status quo

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

"Illegal" dual submissions occur, and the (significant) overhead for checking for them each month falls not just on TACL, but also on the program chairs for ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and so on for nine months after the conference receives its submissions. It would be excellent if near-duplicate checking could be centralized and automated, perhaps by integrating Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan's ACL 2017 duplicate-detection software into SoftConf? (Informal conversation with the arxiv also suggest that we be granted access to their near-duplicate-detection API.)

=== Is TACL (not) a conference? ===

Should TACL be more part of the conference eco-system or more distinct from it? One issue that throws this question into sharp relief is the following. TACL currently allows submission of (revised) conference rejections if the revised version is significantly different from the rejected version. However, judging "significantly difficult" is proving significantly difficult for the EiCs to determine, who collectively spend 2-3 days in making each such judgment.

If TACL should be an distinct channel, where people chose to either go "the conference route" or "the journal route", then TACL should move towards not allowing any conference-rejection resubmissions. On the other hand, if TACL should be more or less be considered another conference, then it should be more relaxed about accepting revised rejections for review.

=== TACL workload is part of the community's workload ===

Even though the TACL arrangement is meant to keep each TACL member occupied with at most one paper at a time, ''reviewing/service burnout from other conferences and meetings'', not to speak of those conferences' submission deadlines, is, anecdotally, significantly affecting TACL, such that we are now experience a significant number of reviewers declining TACL reviewing assignments. TACL reviewers and action editors (AEs) are *ACL reviewers, program committee members, and authors, as well.

In other words, TACL may be trying to keep reviewing loads down internally, but reviewing burnout is a community-wide issue.

== Some statistics ==

=== First-decision statistics ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision ''excluding desk rejects'' (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time is 23 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

[[File:Time to first decision.no desk rejects.png]]

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

[[File:2017Q3_TACL.Time_to_first_decision.each_paper.by_sub_round.png|800px]]

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

5% (a) = accepted as is
12% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

26% (a)
42% (b)
5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
26% (d)

=== Publishing statistics ===

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.

== Personnel updates ==

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann,
Diana McCarthy,
Daichi Mochihashi,
Patrick Pantel (one year),
Sebastian Riedel,
Stefan Riezler,
Brian Roark,
Noah Smith,
Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

We also need and plan to increase the standing reviewer pool.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

Here are some major bottlenecks beyond just the usual people missing their deadlines.
# Pre-review police work: checking for dual submissions, format violations, and so on. We typically have multiple cases each round.
# Pre-review load- and expertise-balancing of papers to action editors
# Post-acceptance copy-editing. Until 2017, TACL HQ (the EiCs and Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson) had been doing all the copy-editing work. This started to introduce very significant delays (months! alas) in publication time.

TACL co-EiC Mark Johnson has summarized the situation and the possible solutions as follows.

Even though TACL has 3 Editors in Chief, the workload is enormous because of the sheer volume of submissions. Everyone is stretched thin, and the extended absence of one of Editors in Chief causes us to fall significantly behind.

Because of this, we decided to investigate whether having a professional academic publisher publish TACL would reduce the workload on the Editors in Chief and Action Editors, and improve service for the TACL community.

I contacted 3 publishers over the past few months; MIT Press, Springer and Microtome Press (run by Stuart Shieber, a Harvard professor who is an expert in open access publishing). I had extended email conversations and Skype conversations with MIT Press, Springer and Stuart Shieber (Microtome). This message is a summary of those conversations.

There are four different stages of work involved in producing TACL:
# Submission/review workflow management (handling paper submissions, routing them to reviewers, etc.)
# Editorial review (handling accept/revise/rejection decisions, etc.)
# Production (copy-editing, formatting camera-ready copy)
# Distribution (ACL anthology, a publisher might also sell TACL to libraries).
Academic publishers are primarily set up to handle distribution, but they can also handle some parts of production, largely by outsourcing copy-editing to freelancers. (There's a quote from MIT Press for this).

The actual editorial review needs to be handled by experts who know the area, so there is not much a 3rd party company can do to help us here. Stu Shieber's suggestion is to build a hierarchy (specifically, to add an additional level of Area Editors, corresponding to Area Chairs in a conference) and push as much work as possible down to lower levels in the hierarchy.
There are several commercial firms that handle the submission workflow. Stu Shieber mentioned the following:
Open Journal Systems (we currently use OJS; Stu points out PKP (at Simon Fraser U.) offers hosting of OJS <https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting>);
Editorial Manager (this is also what MIT Press and Springer suggested);
ScholasticaHQ;
ScienceAI;
Ubiquity Press
Editorial Manager, ScholasticaHQ and ScienceAI are all hosted services (as is OJS hosted by PKP), while Ubiquity Press offers more service (for a price). They should all be easier to use and more robust than our current setup (which is still running on a Columbia site). An issue is that Lillian has highly customised the OJS software for TACL; I suspect this won't be sustainable over the longer term.

All the publishers I spoke to (and Stu Shieber agrees) that there should be no problem getting TACL indexed by the Science Citation Index (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier). Our agreement with the *ACL conferences of offering a conference presentation to authors of accepted papers does not seem to be a problem.

Here are my suggestions (largely drawn from suggestions from the TACL EiCs, Stu Shieber, etc.):

# We should evaluate the various hosted services for handling the submission workflow, with the goal of having someone else run the TACL submission web site. This evaluation is likely to involve a substantial amount of work, as it needs to evaluate working versions of these systems, to see how well they can support Lillian’s highly customised TACL work flow. Perhaps the ACL can find and pay an energetic CLer to try to implement the TACL work flow in each of these systems (or at least find out how hard it would be to do)?
# We add an additional level to hierarchy of Area Editors. The web submission software should be customised so authors nominate the area for their paper, and it is automatically routed to the appropriate Area Editor, who handles it in the same way that the EiCs currently do.
## The area editors perform aggressive triage of submissions. We add two new review category for papers that we decline to review, e.g., "desk reject without prejudice" for papers that violate our formatting requirements, and "inappropriate submission desk reject" for papers that we think are unlikely to be accepted.
## We dramatically increase the number of reviewers and action editors.
## Action editors are responsible for checking that the submission is acceptable, e.g., checking that all required changes have been made, that the English is acceptable, etc. They can require that a paper be revised to improve English. TACL should find one or more free-lance copy-editors that authors can use if they can't correct the English themselves (the author pays, of course).
# We should ask Paola Merlo (the CL editor) to describe the services that MIT Press provides for the publication of CL.
# We should delay getting TACL indexed until we have solutions to our submission workflow management and editorial review problems. Once TACL is indexed we can expect our submissions to jump sharply.

2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2017-07-26T05:35:55Z

LillianLee: added reviewer completion average for reviewers that complete their reviews

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. ''-- the TACL Editors-in-Chief''

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== Pre-print servers and double-blind review ===

The issues are complicated, and it is too early for TACL to take a definitive stance.

Nonetheless, we have made some inquiries to our arxiv connections (it is conveniently hosted at the same institution as one of the EiCs) about the possibility of it implementing anonymous submissions. Details are not currently in a publicly shareable state, though, and the arxiv is, although by far the most popular, not the only preprint distribution mechanism, so we defer public discussion of that option.

Given this, options the TACL EiCs have been talking about among ourselves and are just about to gather TACL AE thoughts on are as follows. The first suggestion is new, but the options below are not ordered.

# Allow preprints during review, but make the author choice to do or not do so salient, by requiring a suffix to submission and camera-ready paper titles, say, “PADR” or “noPADR”. indicating whether a preprint was available during review. In this way, future readers or citers of the paper would be able to see whether it was accepted as "truly" double-blind or perhaps potentially effectively single-blind. This mechanism may provide some potential alternate advantage (?) or recognition to authors choosing not to make preprints available during review.
# Ban the posting of preprints during review
# The status quo

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

"Illegal" dual submissions occur, and the (significant) overhead for checking for them each month falls not just on TACL, but also on the program chairs for ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and so on for nine months after the conference receives its submissions. It would be excellent if near-duplicate checking could be centralized and automated, perhaps by integrating Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan's ACL 2017 duplicate-detection software into SoftConf? (Informal conversation with the arxiv also suggest that we be granted access to their near-duplicate-detection API.)

=== Is TACL (not) a conference? ===

Should TACL be more part of the conference eco-system or more distinct from it? One issue that throws this question into sharp relief is the following. TACL currently allows submission of (revised) conference rejections if the revised version is significantly different from the rejected version. However, judging "significantly difficult" is proving significantly difficult for the EiCs to determine, who collectively spend 2-3 days in making each such judgment.

If TACL should be an distinct channel, where people chose to either go "the conference route" or "the journal route", then TACL should move towards not allowing any conference-rejection resubmissions. On the other hand, if TACL should be more or less be considered another conference, then it should be more relaxed about accepting revised rejections for review.

=== TACL workload is part of the community's workload ===

Even though the TACL arrangement is meant to keep each TACL member occupied with at most one paper at a time, ''reviewing/service burnout from other conferences and meetings'', not to speak of those conferences' submission deadlines, is, anecdotally, significantly affecting TACL, such that we are now experience a significant number of reviewers declining TACL reviewing assignments. TACL reviewers and action editors (AEs) are *ACL reviewers, program committee members, and authors, as well.

In other words, TACL may be trying to keep reviewing loads down internally, but reviewing burnout is a community-wide issue.

== Some statistics ==

=== First-decision statistics ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision ''excluding desk rejects'' (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

For reviewers that complete their reviews, over the past 12 months, the average completion time is 23 days, where the TACL "contract" is 21 days. Many, many thanks to these wonderful reviewers!

[[File:Time to first decision.no desk rejects.png]]

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

[[File:2017Q3_TACL.Time_to_first_decision.each_paper.by_sub_round.png|800px]]

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

5% (a) = accepted as is
12% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

26% (a)
42% (b)
5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
26% (d)

=== Publishing statistics ===

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.

== Personnel updates ==

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann,
Diana McCarthy,
Daichi Mochihashi,
Patrick Pantel (one year),
Sebastian Riedel,
Stefan Riezler,
Brian Roark,
Noah Smith,
Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

We also need and plan to increase the standing reviewer pool.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

Here are some major bottlenecks beyond just the usual people missing their deadlines.
# Pre-review police work: checking for dual submissions, format violations, and so on. We typically have multiple cases each round.
# Pre-review load- and expertise-balancing of papers to action editors
# Post-acceptance copy-editing. Until 2017, TACL HQ (the EiCs and Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson) had been doing all the copy-editing work. This started to introduce very significant delays (months! alas) in publication time.

TACL co-EiC Mark Johnson has summarized the situation and the possible solutions as follows.

Even though TACL has 3 Editors in Chief, the workload is enormous because of the sheer volume of submissions. Everyone is stretched thin, and the extended absence of one of Editors in Chief causes us to fall significantly behind.

Because of this, we decided to investigate whether having a professional academic publisher publish TACL would reduce the workload on the Editors in Chief and Action Editors, and improve service for the TACL community.

I contacted 3 publishers over the past few months; MIT Press, Springer and Microtome Press (run by Stuart Shieber, a Harvard professor who is an expert in open access publishing). I had extended email conversations and Skype conversations with MIT Press, Springer and Stuart Shieber (Microtome). This message is a summary of those conversations.

There are four different stages of work involved in producing TACL:
# Submission/review workflow management (handling paper submissions, routing them to reviewers, etc.)
# Editorial review (handling accept/revise/rejection decisions, etc.)
# Production (copy-editing, formatting camera-ready copy)
# Distribution (ACL anthology, a publisher might also sell TACL to libraries).
Academic publishers are primarily set up to handle distribution, but they can also handle some parts of production, largely by outsourcing copy-editing to freelancers. (There's a quote from MIT Press for this).

The actual editorial review needs to be handled by experts who know the area, so there is not much a 3rd party company can do to help us here. Stu Shieber's suggestion is to build a hierarchy (specifically, to add an additional level of Area Editors, corresponding to Area Chairs in a conference) and push as much work as possible down to lower levels in the hierarchy.
There are several commercial firms that handle the submission workflow. Stu Shieber mentioned the following:
Open Journal Systems (we currently use OJS; Stu points out PKP (at Simon Fraser U.) offers hosting of OJS <https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting>);
Editorial Manager (this is also what MIT Press and Springer suggested);
ScholasticaHQ;
ScienceAI;
Ubiquity Press
Editorial Manager, ScholasticaHQ and ScienceAI are all hosted services (as is OJS hosted by PKP), while Ubiquity Press offers more service (for a price). They should all be easier to use and more robust than our current setup (which is still running on a Columbia site). An issue is that Lillian has highly customised the OJS software for TACL; I suspect this won't be sustainable over the longer term.

All the publishers I spoke to (and Stu Shieber agrees) that there should be no problem getting TACL indexed by the Science Citation Index (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier). Our agreement with the *ACL conferences of offering a conference presentation to authors of accepted papers does not seem to be a problem.

Here are my suggestions (largely drawn from suggestions from the TACL EiCs, Stu Shieber, etc.):

# We should evaluate the various hosted services for handling the submission workflow, with the goal of having someone else run the TACL submission web site. This evaluation is likely to involve a substantial amount of work, as it needs to evaluate working versions of these systems, to see how well they can support Lillian’s highly customised TACL work flow. Perhaps the ACL can find and pay an energetic CLer to try to implement the TACL work flow in each of these systems (or at least find out how hard it would be to do)?
# We add an additional level to hierarchy of Area Editors. The web submission software should be customised so authors nominate the area for their paper, and it is automatically routed to the appropriate Area Editor, who handles it in the same way that the EiCs currently do.
## The area editors perform aggressive triage of submissions. We add two new review category for papers that we decline to review, e.g., "desk reject without prejudice" for papers that violate our formatting requirements, and "inappropriate submission desk reject" for papers that we think are unlikely to be accepted.
## We dramatically increase the number of reviewers and action editors.
## Action editors are responsible for checking that the submission is acceptable, e.g., checking that all required changes have been made, that the English is acceptable, etc. They can require that a paper be revised to improve English. TACL should find one or more free-lance copy-editors that authors can use if they can't correct the English themselves (the author pays, of course).
# We should ask Paola Merlo (the CL editor) to describe the services that MIT Press provides for the publication of CL.
# We should delay getting TACL indexed until we have solutions to our submission workflow management and editorial review problems. Once TACL is indexed we can expect our submissions to jump sharply.

2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2017-07-26T04:38:19Z

LillianLee: finished a pass

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. ''-- the TACL Editors-in-Chief''

== TACL issues that are really community-wide ==

=== Pre-print servers and double-blind review ===

The issues are complicated, and it is too early for TACL to take a definitive stance.

Nonetheless, we have made some inquiries to our arxiv connections (it is conveniently hosted at the same institution as one of the EiCs) about the possibility of it implementing anonymous submissions. Details are not currently in a publicly shareable state, though, and the arxiv is, although by far the most popular, not the only preprint distribution mechanism, so we defer public discussion of that option.

Given this, options the TACL EiCs have been talking about among ourselves and are just about to gather TACL AE thoughts on are as follows. The first suggestion is new, but the options below are not ordered.

# Allow preprints during review, but make the author choice to do or not do so salient, by requiring a suffix to submission and camera-ready paper titles, say, “PADR” or “noPADR”. indicating whether a preprint was available during review. In this way, future readers or citers of the paper would be able to see whether it was accepted as "truly" double-blind or perhaps potentially effectively single-blind. This mechanism may provide some potential alternate advantage (?) or recognition to authors choosing not to make preprints available during review.
# Ban the posting of preprints during review
# The status quo

=== Checking for dual submissions ===

"Illegal" dual submissions occur, and the (significant) overhead for checking for them each month falls not just on TACL, but also on the program chairs for ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and so on for nine months after the conference receives its submissions. It would be excellent if near-duplicate checking could be centralized and automated, perhaps by integrating Regina Barzilay and Min-Yen Kan's ACL 2017 duplicate-detection software into SoftConf? (Informal conversation with the arxiv also suggest that we be granted access to their near-duplicate-detection API.)

=== Is TACL (not) a conference? ===

Should TACL be more part of the conference eco-system or more distinct from it? One issue that throws this question into sharp relief is the following. TACL currently allows submission of (revised) conference rejections if the revised version is significantly different from the rejected version. However, judging "significantly difficult" is proving significantly difficult for the EiCs to determine, who collectively spend 2-3 days in making each such judgment.

If TACL should be an distinct channel, where people chose to either go "the conference route" or "the journal route", then TACL should move towards not allowing any conference-rejection resubmissions. On the other hand, if TACL should be more or less be considered another conference, then it should be more relaxed about accepting revised rejections for review.

=== TACL workload is part of the community's workload ===

Even though the TACL arrangement is meant to keep each TACL member occupied with at most one paper at a time, ''reviewing/service burnout from other conferences and meetings'', not to speak of those conferences' submission deadlines, is, anecdotally, significantly affecting TACL, such that we are now experience a significant number of reviewers declining TACL reviewing assignments. TACL reviewers and action editors (AEs) are *ACL reviewers, program committee members, and authors, as well.

In other words, TACL may be trying to keep reviewing loads down internally, but reviewing burnout is a community-wide issue.

== Some statistics ==

=== First-decision statistics ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision ''excluding desk rejects'' (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

[[File:Time to first decision.no desk rejects.png]]

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

[[File:2017Q3_TACL.Time_to_first_decision.each_paper.by_sub_round.png|800px]]

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

5% (a) = accepted as is
12% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

26% (a)
42% (b)
5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
26% (d)

=== Publishing statistics ===

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.

== Personnel updates ==

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann,
Diana McCarthy,
Daichi Mochihashi,
Patrick Pantel (one year),
Sebastian Riedel,
Stefan Riezler,
Brian Roark,
Noah Smith,
Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

We also need and plan to increase the standing reviewer pool.

== Major bottlenecks, and major proposed changes as solutions ==

Here are some major bottlenecks beyond just the usual people missing their deadlines.
# Pre-review police work: checking for dual submissions, format violations, and so on. We typically have multiple cases each round.
# Pre-review load- and expertise-balancing of papers to action editors
# Post-acceptance copy-editing. Until 2017, TACL HQ (the EiCs and Editorial Assistant Cindy Robinson) had been doing all the copy-editing work. This started to introduce very significant delays (months! alas) in publication time.

TACL co-EiC Mark Johnson has summarized the situation and the possible solutions as follows.

Even though TACL has 3 Editors in Chief, the workload is enormous because of the sheer volume of submissions. Everyone is stretched thin, and the extended absence of one of Editors in Chief causes us to fall significantly behind.

Because of this, we decided to investigate whether having a professional academic publisher publish TACL would reduce the workload on the Editors in Chief and Action Editors, and improve service for the TACL community.

I contacted 3 publishers over the past few months; MIT Press, Springer and Microtome Press (run by Stuart Shieber, a Harvard professor who is an expert in open access publishing). I had extended email conversations and Skype conversations with MIT Press, Springer and Stuart Shieber (Microtome). This message is a summary of those conversations.

There are four different stages of work involved in producing TACL:
# Submission/review workflow management (handling paper submissions, routing them to reviewers, etc.)
# Editorial review (handling accept/revise/rejection decisions, etc.)
# Production (copy-editing, formatting camera-ready copy)
# Distribution (ACL anthology, a publisher might also sell TACL to libraries).
Academic publishers are primarily set up to handle distribution, but they can also handle some parts of production, largely by outsourcing copy-editing to freelancers. (There's a quote from MIT Press for this).

The actual editorial review needs to be handled by experts who know the area, so there is not much a 3rd party company can do to help us here. Stu Shieber's suggestion is to build a hierarchy (specifically, to add an additional level of Area Editors, corresponding to Area Chairs in a conference) and push as much work as possible down to lower levels in the hierarchy.
There are several commercial firms that handle the submission workflow. Stu Shieber mentioned the following:
Open Journal Systems (we currently use OJS; Stu points out PKP (at Simon Fraser U.) offers hosting of OJS <https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting>);
Editorial Manager (this is also what MIT Press and Springer suggested);
ScholasticaHQ;
ScienceAI;
Ubiquity Press
Editorial Manager, ScholasticaHQ and ScienceAI are all hosted services (as is OJS hosted by PKP), while Ubiquity Press offers more service (for a price). They should all be easier to use and more robust than our current setup (which is still running on a Columbia site). An issue is that Lillian has highly customised the OJS software for TACL; I suspect this won't be sustainable over the longer term.

All the publishers I spoke to (and Stu Shieber agrees) that there should be no problem getting TACL indexed by the Science Citation Index (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier). Our agreement with the *ACL conferences of offering a conference presentation to authors of accepted papers does not seem to be a problem.

Here are my suggestions (largely drawn from suggestions from the TACL EiCs, Stu Shieber, etc.):

# We should evaluate the various hosted services for handling the submission workflow, with the goal of having someone else run the TACL submission web site. This evaluation is likely to involve a substantial amount of work, as it needs to evaluate working versions of these systems, to see how well they can support Lillian’s highly customised TACL work flow. Perhaps the ACL can find and pay an energetic CLer to try to implement the TACL work flow in each of these systems (or at least find out how hard it would be to do)?
# We add an additional level to hierarchy of Area Editors. The web submission software should be customised so authors nominate the area for their paper, and it is automatically routed to the appropriate Area Editor, who handles it in the same way that the EiCs currently do.
## The area editors perform aggressive triage of submissions. We add two new review category for papers that we decline to review, e.g., "desk reject without prejudice" for papers that violate our formatting requirements, and "inappropriate submission desk reject" for papers that we think are unlikely to be accepted.
## We dramatically increase the number of reviewers and action editors.
## Action editors are responsible for checking that the submission is acceptable, e.g., checking that all required changes have been made, that the English is acceptable, etc. They can require that a paper be revised to improve English. TACL should find one or more free-lance copy-editors that authors can use if they can't correct the English themselves (the author pays, of course).
# We should ask Paola Merlo (the CL editor) to describe the services that MIT Press provides for the publication of CL.
# We should delay getting TACL indexed until we have solutions to our submission workflow management and editorial review problems. Once TACL is indexed we can expect our submissions to jump sharply.

2017Q3 Reports: TACL Journal Editor

2017-07-26T03:28:18Z

LillianLee: checkpoint: more stats entered

We sincerely thank ACL Secretary Shiqi Zhao for granting us an extension on July 2nd for a new reporting deadline of Tuesday July 25th due to circumstances beyond our control. -- the TACL Editors-in-Chief
(below is an incomplete draft)

== Personnel updates ==

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lillian Lee will be rescinding her request to serve only a half-term, asking the ACL for her second term to instead extend for the full length, until the end of 2019. (Mark Johnson and Kristina Toutanova's terms end July 2018.)

The following became Action Editors in January 2017: Colin Cherry, Jiangfeng Gao, Julia Hockenmaier, Adam Lopez, Ani Nenkova, Sebastian Pado, and Ivan Titov. Welcome aboard!

The following Action Editors have graciously agreed to stay on for an additional term starting July 2017: Hal Daume III, Alexander Koller, Anna Korhonen, Marco Kuhlmann,
Diana McCarthy,
Daichi Mochihashi,
Patrick Pantel (one year),
Sebastian Riedel,
Stefan Riezler,
Brian Roark,
Noah Smith,
Mark Steedman. We are very grateful to have these experienced Action Editors back on board to help us through the upcoming challenges!

We are planning invites to new Action Editors in the near term.

== Some statistics ==

=== First-decision statistics ===
Depicted below is the history of the number of distinct submission IDs that have received a decision ''excluding desk rejects'' (in contrast to plots from prior reports) in and the average time to first decision, grouped by round (=nearest first-of-the-month). The decision time for papers submitted for a given month's is counted as starting from the first of that month.

June and July 2017 actually had 22 and 19 valid submissions, respectively, so the last data points will change as those decisions come in and are included. Also not counted: papers handled using START (the early days of TACL) and the 146 papers archived for some technical or formatting problem.

[[File:Time to first decision.no desk rejects.png]]

We provide a sense of the variance in time to first decision by re-plotting the data above on a per-individual-paper basis, where the x-axis is again the submission round (month) in which the paper was submitted. 45 days (third line from the bottom) would be our ideal. Note that one reason the variance for the last round is less than other years is because papers that are overdue from the May or June rounds are not yet in the data.

[[File:2017Q3_TACL.Time_to_first_decision.each_paper.by_sub_round.png|800px]]

The distribution of first decisions for papers submitted for the July 2016 round or after (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), not counting papers that were resubmissions of a (c), and not counting the 20 desk rejects or the larger number of other papers ruled out for technical problems, is as follows. (Denominator = 129)

5% (a) = accepted as is
12% (b) = conditional accept: acceptance guaranteed if conditions met
50% (c) = rejected, encourage resubmission but no guarantee of acceptance
33% (d) = rejected with 1-year moratorium on TACL submission.

Of the additional 19 decided-on papers that were resubmissions of a (c) submitted between July 2016 and now (i.e, the most recent 12-month period), the decisions were:

26% (a)
42% (b)
5% (c) This is one paper: TACL highly discourages consecutive (c) decisions
26% (d)

=== Publishing statistics ===

16 papers have been published so far in 2017. 22 are in some stage of the publication queue.

File:2017Q3 TACL.Time to first decision.each paper.by sub round.png

2017-07-26T03:23:12Z

LillianLee: LillianLee uploaded a new version of File:2017Q3 TACL.Time to first decision.each paper.by sub round.png

File:Time to first decision.each paper.by sub round.png

2017-07-26T03:10:31Z

LillianLee:

File:2017Q3 TACL.Time to first decision.each paper.by sub year.png

2017-07-26T03:05:21Z

LillianLee: LillianLee moved page File:2017Q3 TACL.Time to first decision.each paper.by sub year.png to File:2017Q3 TACL.Time to first decision.each paper.by sub round.png

#REDIRECT [[File:2017Q3 TACL.Time to first decision.each paper.by sub round.png]]

File:2017Q3 TACL.Time to first decision.each paper.by sub round.png

2017-07-26T03:05:21Z

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2017-07-26T03:04:54Z

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2017-07-26T01:40:20Z

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