2011Q3 Reports: Journal Editor
CL Journal Report for First Half-Year 2011
Robert Dale, Editor, Monday 13th June 2011
1 Summary
Mid-year results tell the same story as at the end of last year: our submissions are up, with our half-year total suggesting we'll match last year's submission count of 78, which was up from 69 in the previous year. An attached spreadsheet provides the detailed breakdown.
So far, this year's reviewing turnaround time is also tracking well, at around 58 days.
Our last few journal issues have been larger than in the past. Of course, this costs us more. It is not clear that the present funding model is sustainable, and attention should be directed to how we address this.
2 Submissions
See the attached tables for submission statistics for 2009, 2010 and 2011 so far. Media:Submissions2011H1.pdf; Media:Countries2011H1.pdf
As noted in the last report, we are receiving an increasing number of submissions that are considered to be inappropriate for CL.
We have two special issues in the pipeline: one on Modality and Negation, for which submissions have closed and 23 papers received, and one on Parsing Morphologically-Rich Languages, which has extended its submission deadline to September 30th.
3 Administrative Matters
As of the beginning of 2011, the editorial assistance role is now solely carried out by Suzy Howlett. Mary Gardiner has been separately contracted to do some work on extending the functionalities of the Open Journal Systems manuscript management software that we use. Efficiencies gained here have freed up some of Suzy's time; she has been working on compiling a recommended set of LaTeX packages, and on updating our style guide.
As always, running the journal would be impossible without the help of both Suzy and Mary.
4 Upcoming Changes
The journal is growing, although not massively. However, given the other changes in ACL's publication practices that are under discussion, now may be a good time to reassess the journal's financial model. Since going open access, the journal has been funded via the ACL's central budget, and therefore from a combination of membership fees and conference surpluses. This model does not scale well. One way forward would be to put in place publication charges.
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