ACL Policies for Review and Citation
The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing.
- For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the report of the working group appointed by the ACL Executive Committee: File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf.
- For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
Submission
*ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized. A submission will not be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an anonymity period lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
- Anonymized preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
- Non-anonymized preprints before the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until after the anonymity period.
- If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
The notion of preprint is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.