TACL Editors-in-Chief (One of Three)

The ACL is seeking nominations for a 3-year term of Editor-in-Chief of the ACL's journal "Transactions of the ACL" (TACL).

TACL is a rapidly-growing, premier journal in the area of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. It is distinguished by its monthly submission deadline, fast turn-around, and reviewing structure that involves a reviewing pool and a large team of action editors. Authors of TACL publications are customarily invited to present their work at a major ACL conference (see www.transacl.org for details). See the TACL reports to the ACL Exec at https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2017Q3_Reports for further details.

TACL is lead by a team of three Editors-in-Chief, who oversee the entire journal, including the day-to-day reviewing and publication processes, as well as longer-term strategic planning. We are considering arranging for a major academic publisher to publish TACL, and the new Editor-in-Chief would play an important role in this transition.

The duties of the Editors-in-Chief include:

  • day-to-day management and oversight of the journal's operations,
  • assigning submitted papers to action editors, who select appropriate reviewers from TACL's reviewer pool, at the beginning of each month,
  • supervising the reviewing process, providing advice and direction where appropriate,
  • checking the proofs of accepted papers,
  • interacting with the ACL Anthology and the publisher to ensure publication,
  • interacting with ACL conference Program Chairs to check for duplicate submissions and arrange conference presentations for TACL authors,
  • recruiting suitable reviewers and action editors for TACL's reviewer pool,
  • strategic planning for the journal, and
  • reporting to the ACL executive, and the ACL community at ACL business meetings.

Because TACL is run by three Editors-in-Chief, the candidate should be able to work well in a team. The ideal candidate would have broad knowledge and interests across the whole field of computational linguistics, and be able to deal with a wide range of people. They should be detail-oriented, and able to and interested in formulating policy. Most importantly, the candidate should be willing and able to devote the time required to the position. The new EiC would be responsible for assigning papers to action editors every other month. When responsible for assignments, the EiC typically spends around 10 hours checking the submissions and making assignments, which should be completed by the seventh day of the month. The rest of the time commitment involves dealing with issues as they arise. The total workload averages about 36 hours per month. The position is unpaid, but the ACL pays for an administrative assistant for one day per week. The journal currently uses a highly customised version of the Open Journal System web-based manuscript submission platform.

Being a TACL Editor-in-Chief is a major, on-going commitment that involves a lot of work. On the positive side, contributing to the ACL community by working with colleagues on TACL is very rewarding. Discussions are open and constructive, and debates are resolved in a friendly and rigorous manner. The current TACL EiCs think that being part of the broader TACL community, including AEs, reviewers and authors, is a wonderful experience.

Previous and current TACL Editors-in-Chief are: Michael Collins (2012-2015), Dekang Lin (2012-2014), Lillian Lee (2014-2019), Mark Johnson (2016-2020) and Kristina Toutanova (2016-2018).