2020Q1 Reports: TACL Journal

Journal indexing

With the assistance of MIT Press, we have been applying for inclusion in major indexing services such as Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), both of which are still pending. We expect to hear back from them sometime in 2020. We have been approved for inclusion and are already present in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Professional submission-system support

In November, we successfully transitioned to having our submission-system hosted by the PKP Publishing Services. The transition was seamless and resulted in minimal lost time for authors, reviewers or editors.

Personnel updates

Lillian Lee's term as co-Editor-in-Chief (co-EiC) finished at the end of 2019, closing out a remarkable 5 years at the helm. Her single-minded leadership and persistent hard work on behalf of the journal is, more than any other factor, responsible for its transition from an initial homespun proof-of-concept to an institution with the policies and procedures to permit relatively straightforward transitioning of editorship. No problem was too specific or too general for Lillian to work to solve — she wrote code and performed sys admin tasks, drafted many of the journal's explicit policies on topics large and small, and advocated for important initiatives to the ACL executive board. All while also managing the monthly submission process. The remaining editorial team extends our warmest thanks to Lillian on behalf of the entire TACL community for all she has done for the journal — our jobs are much easier due to her foundational work.

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, and Ani Nenkova's June 2022.

Statistics

Number of submissions, days to first decision and distribution of decisions

In the table below, we present statistics on submissions to TACL over the past five years. These include the total number of submissions, broken down by quarter, as well as the peak number of submissions in any month of that year. The results also include the distribution of paper decisions (see key below) and how long it took to reach those decisions, mean with standard deviation and median.

       === submissions ===    peak  |  === decision pct. ===  | days to 1st decision
Year   Q1  Q2  Q3  Q4 total   month |  (a)   (b)   (c)   (d)  |   mean (std)  median
2015   29  42  27  51  149     21   |  6.7  22.8  37.6  32.9  |   52.8 (18.0)   48
2016   44  29  31  58  162     21   |  4.3  24.1  41.4  30.2  |   52.4 (17.1)   49
2017   33  35  46  67  181     25   |  6.6  16.0  49.2  28.2  |   55.2 (15.4)   53
2018   41  19  40  54  154     20   |  3.2  24.7  45.5  26.6  |   54.4 (14.4)   53
2019   39  39  38  51  167     29   |  3.6  23.4  43.1  29.9  |   50.1 (13.1)   48

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

Observations:

We see that the number of submissions has remained fairly stable, with slightly more peakiness this past year, perhaps due to authors strategizing with respect to the timing of their submissions more than previously. Our mean time to decision has reduced slightly, as has the variance, but overall these numbers demonstrate stability in the reviewing process.

Of the 31 (c) resubmissions during 2019, the decision percentages were: (a) 16%; (b) 45%; (d) 39%

Number of TACL papers presented at conferences

42 TACL papers were presented at ACL-sponsored conferences in 2019: 21 at ACL; 10 at NAACL and 11 at EMNLP.

Publishing statistics

45 papers were published in vol. 7 (2019) compared with 48 in vol. 6 (2018).