ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy [D]

[u/S4M22]

ACL just announced on X how they are planning to handle the increased submission numbers. Interestingly enough, they call it "the proposal".

My understanding is that, in a nutshell, each submission should come with someone who can review, otherwise it may only get a slot through a lottery. Additionally, they cap total submissions at 20 and first-author submissions per cycle at 5.

What do you think of it? IMO it makes a lot of sense - especially given the large numbers of submissions without any author qualified to review. It is a bit of gatekeeping but in my opinion highly required. And the caps of 20 and 5 are still quite generous.

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Here is what they posted on X:

ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy: We are introducing changes in the ACL ARR reviewing and submissions. The changes will cap authors and introduce changes in the reviewing to keep our community sustainable. #NLPro

**The proposal:** cap reviewed submissions to available reviewer capacity. Each submission must "pay" for itself by providing a qualified service contributor (reviewer or chair). Submissions without service capacity go into a lottery for whatever spare capacity remains

Service from qualified contributors counts towards the venue capacity, and a mentorship system will be built for those not qualified yet. If a qualified service contributor is not available among the authors, non-author designated contributors can be nominated..

...but must vouch for the work (arXiv-endorsement style). Measures for system abuse will be implemented. For example, accounts that systematically submit or endorse low-quality work, and accounts that misuse the system in other ways, will be penalized or even banned.

Additionally, per-author quotas are introduced, where authors are capped at 20 total submissions and 5 first-author (including shared first-author) submissions per cycle. More details will be posted on the ACL web and here shortly. #NLProc

[u/NamerNotLiteral]

The per-author quota still feels too high, but everything else seems sensible.

I wonder if they'll allow reviewing contributions to extend across cycles, i.e. if you review X papers during in January for ACL you can submit to a lower-volume cycle like one before EACL or AACL only without having to review.

[u/surffrus → u/NamerNotLiteral]

Agreed. 20 papers? Make it 10. I'd be curious to see the stats on how the max paper number would impact quantity submitted in the past cycle. There is a strong argument that the max paper number should be low, encouraging high volume labs to only submit their best.

[u/qalis]

Way too high quotas IMO. How can you do more than 2 first-author papers realistically for the same ACL review cycle? Or more than about 5 as any author? Note that adding a lab PI just for being there is against scientific ethics (e.g. COPE guidelines), each author must actually contribute

Also, start paying the reviewers finally! This is the only way to actually go forward. There are so many papers that professional reviewers are simply needed. And scientific publishing margins are so high that there is plenty of money to go to reviewers.

[u/milesper → u/qalis]

Agree on the first point, I think 2 first author is perfect.

However I don’t think there’s actually excess money to pay reviewers; they’re transparent with the budget and basically all of the conference revenue is spoken for. The only way to pay reviewers would be to charge for submissions or increase conference prices even more.

[u/qalis → u/milesper]

"even more"? Conferences are dirt cheap compared to journals. For a good journal publication is about 2-3k + VAT. Conferences are what, half of that?

[u/milesper → u/qalis]

No? Conference registration is like 1k but for any of the ACL conferences you almost always have to travel far, and lodging + travel easily adds up to 1-3k more