If they get assignments, AC checklists must be completed by Jan 18th.

Reviewer checklists must be completed by Jan 21st. The deadline for reviews is February 7th, and for meta-reviews March 3rd. In the event of any emergencies, the chairs should be notified via the emergency declaration form.

From this cycle, we intend to strictly monitor adherence to reviewing responsibilities.

• Papers whose authors have not registered as reviewers or ACs or have not completed their checklists as Reviewers or ACs by the designated deadline will be automatically desk-rejected.

• Reviewers/ACs who remain unresponsive and do not submit their reviews or meta-reviews on time will be prevented from accessing reviews and/or meta-reviews for their own papers.

• Highly irresponsible reviewers may become ineligible from committing their paper(s) to ACL 2026 and (re-)submit or commit to the next cycle. The submitting authors should (a) make sure that all other authors are aware of this policy, and (b) check that everybody on their team(s) submits their checklists and their (meta-)reviews on time and in accordance with the guidelines.

All authors will have to register as reviewers or meta-reviewers (Area Chairs-ACs) on ARR. If you are already serving as Senior Area Chair (SAC) this is not necessary.

Papers whose authors have not registered as reviewers or ACs or have not completed their checklists as Reviewers or ACs by the designated deadline will be automatically desk rejected.

Reviewers/ACs who remain unresponsive and do not submit their reviews or meta-reviews on time will be prevented from accessing reviews and/or meta-reviews for their own papers. Further penalties may be incurred, for example by barring submission to a subsequent cycle.

After analyzing the server logs, OpenReview leadership met with ARR and informed us that the impact on ARR was very minor in comparison to other conferences hosted by OpenReview (especially ICLR). Since nearly all reviews had been finalized when the incident happened, only a small number of very late third reviews could have possibly been unduly influenced. However, there were nine papers where the area chair or senior area chair’s identity had been compromised. Consequently, we decided to replace the ACs and/or SACs of these papers to ensure that they received objective meta-reviews and to reduce the risk of retaliation against the AC or SAC for a negative meta-review. Please note though that we have no evidence that the unauthorized queries were issued by the authors, so the action we took was out of precaution.

For the next few cycles, ARR will additionally ensure that resubmissions receive new reviewers if the identities of the earlier submission’s reviewers were leaked.

The ARR October 2025 Editors-in-Chief and EACL 2026 Program Chairs

Our past experience suggests that only a small fraction of the papers submitted through ARR are based on the MS Word Template. However, they receive a comparably high number of desk reject flags, because most reviewers are not used to the considerably different layout resulting from this template. The processing of this desk rejects increases the workload on (S)ACs, PCs, and EiCs, and is stressful for the authors.

The rationale for maintaining the Word template has been to remain open to research communities from other disciplines who may be less used to LaTeX. However, at this point Overleaf also offers a WYSIWYG interface, the ACL template is available on this platform, and to the best of our knowledge it is not banned in any countries that have restrictions on e.g., Google products. This makes the burden for the few authors still relying on the MS Word Template more bearable and reduces the learning curve to adapt to LaTeX. At the same time, the overall benefit for the community is high enough to justify this move.

This move would also facilitate the effort of automating some of the formatting checks post-submission, in order to reduce the workload on Reviewers, (S)ACs, PCs, and EiCs. In the long run, we hope it will help to shorten the paper checklist.

ARR is increasingly used as the main submission channel for *CL conferences. In the recent two cycles for ACL and EMNLP, respectively, ARR has received over 7000 submissions in each cycle. To continue supporting these large cycles, there is a pressing need to scale the EiCs team managing the 10-week cycles. EiCs rotate to lead reviewing cycles. However, the entire team coordinates and oversees the following activities:

• Recruit and manage (senior) area chairs ((S)ACs) and reviewers
• Coordinate with conference program chairs, becoming guest PCs during cycles tied to *CL conferences
• Oversee review forms and CFPs
• Review and update submission tracks
• Make final desk reject decisions (in collaboration with PCs in conference-associated cycles)
• Provide reports to the ACL Exec
• General work on the ARR system hosted on OpenReview
• Coordinate with the rest of the ARR team, including support, communications, etc.
• Participate in review policy development in coordination with ACL peer review committee, Publication Ethics Committee and other ACL bodies

The ideal candidate would have a strong publication record across more than one NLP research area and a solid record as an outstanding member of the *CL community. Experience serving in ARR as SAC and/or AC is highly valued, as is having served as a past PC in one of our top *CL conferences and/or as an EiC for one of our *CL journals. At a minimum, candidates should have at least some experience in managing submission and reviewing processes, for example, as workshop co-organizers.

Being an ARR Editor-in-Chief is a major, ongoing time commitment requiring, on average, 2-3 hours a week but absorbing a significant amount of time during peak cycle phases. When an EiC is co-leading a cycle, it is expected that they can dedicate a large portion of their time during these peak critical times. However, contributing to our community this way is also a very rewarding experience. We are aware that the ARR process needs to continue to improve; we are looking for candidates with ideas on improving what we do who are also eager to dedicate their energy and time to help us implement better reviewing practices and workflows.

ARR is a diverse team, and we are determined to keep it that way. This includes researchers at different career stages, although we recognize that due to the requirements we specified, most junior researchers might not yet be eligible.

Nomination procedure

Nominations should be submitted via email to EiC member Jing Jiang (jing.jiang@anu.edu.au), with a Cc to EiC member Xiaodan Zhu (xiaodan.zhu@queensu.ca), by August 24th, 2025, subject line “Nomination for ARR co-EiC”, and should contain the following information:

• Name, email address, and website of the nominee
• If not a self-nomination, confirmation that the nominee is willing to serve (a dated excerpt of an email from the nominee suffices); if a self-nomination, a statement affirming willingness to serve.
• Statement of nominee’s goals/vision for ARR and/or relevant prior experience and/or reasons for interest in the position. The length of the statement is up to the nominator, but 1 paragraph may suffice, and more than 4 paragraphs are not anticipated to be necessary.

Nominations will be acknowledged by reply email; should acknowledgment not be received within 3 days, please resend your email.

The existing ARR EiC team will evaluate the nominations and make decisions, after which the search committee chair will contact the selected nominee via email.

While we recognize that case-by-case consideration might still be required, we provide the following as a rough guideline to inform both authors and future ARR Editors-in-Chief (and conference Program Chairs). The categories below stem from the assumption that reviewing as a service is a mandatory part of our work as researchers and inextricably linked to authoring research papers, consistent with the view that submissions foster a partnership between authors-reviewers and the conference. Most of us are busy people, but when we commit to being a co-author of a given submission, we also accept the responsibilities that come with that, and that includes budgeting the time for reviewing (or making plans with secondary reviewers). If an author is serving the same community under a different role, we consider their obligation fulfilled. The categorization has been developed by the EMNLP 2025 PCs together with ARR, and may evolve in response to community feedback in future cycles.

We consider the following peer review service–related reasons acceptable as exceptions to reviewing requirement (* marks NLP venues or strongly related venues with significant overlap in dates):

• AC/SAC for the same venue or a related* venue
• Program co-chair/local chair/general chair in the same or related* venue
• Editor-in-chief of a major journal*

We also consider the following personal reasons as acceptable under certain circumstances (e.g., the condition being unexpected or beyond the control of the individual):

• Medical emergency
• Parental leave
• Family medical leave (e.g., taking care of a sick parent)
• Other emergency (e.g., natural disaster)

Finally, we will consider exemptions for authors that although technically qualifying, feel that they cannot fulfil their duties due to lack of expertise. Again, these will be approved on a case-by-case basis.

We consider the following as unacceptable reasons:

• Department Chair, Dean, Associate Dean, Center Director
• Emeritus professors
• Being on sabbatical
• Being on vacation
• Reviewing for other conferences (whose service dates aren’t overlapping)
• Performing other service (not listed above)
• Changing jobs
• Studying for an exam
• Busy with work / over-commitment
• Known or pre-existing medical conditions (present at the time of writing the paper)

While some authors in these circumstances may feel that they are too busy to adequately review, ARR does allow the use of secondary reviewers that may help ameliorate concerns around time commitments.

What this means

If your paper gets accepted to EMNLP 2025, your completed responsible NLP checklist will be published alongside your paper as an appendix. This is a new requirement that will also apply to subsequent *ACL conferences.

Background

Authors are already familiar with the Responsible NLP Research Checklist - it has been part of ARR submissions for some time now. It covers areas such as:

• How you collected and annotated data
• What datasets you used and their limitations
• Your training and evaluation setup
• Potential impacts of your work
• Computational costs

We have always used these checklists during review. Filling them out incorrectly or misleadingly can result in desk rejection.

What changes for authors

If you are planning to commit to EMNLP 2025, here is what you need to know:

Your checklist responses will be public if your paper is accepted. Authors will therefore want to be extra careful and thorough when completing the checklist. Checklists do not count against page limits. They are included as an appendix.

Why we are doing this

Making these checklists public should help with transparency. Other researchers will be able to see how you handled ethical considerations, which datasets you used, what limitations you acknowledged, and so on. This may also encourage people to think more carefully about these issues when they know their answers will be visible to the broader community.

• All authors must complete a form to confirm their OpenReview profile is complete and they will serve if asked. (This form becomes available in the author console after submission.)
• Any qualified author may be assigned to review. Our analysis suggests that the average review load will become lower as a result.
• ‘Qualified’ means that a person has (a) at least two papers in main ACL events or Findings, plus (b) at least one more paper in the ACL Anthology or a major ML/AI venue. See the end of this post for lists of venues.
• Review duty exemptions are still possible on a a case-by-case basis. Anyone serving in another capacity (e.g., AC) does not need to review.
• The reviewers or chairs deemed ‘highly irresponsible’ by the program chairs will not be able to commit their work to EMNLP, or (re-)submit their work to the subsequent ARR cycle. This includes missing the review submission deadlines without a warning, egregious violations of guidelines on LLM use and professional tone, extremely terse reviews.
• The great reviewers and chairs will receive more recognition during conferences, and may win a free virtual attendee registration for an *ACL event!

Background

Starting in April 2024, ACL Rolling Review required that at least one author per submission volunteer to review for the same cycle. This helped to make the system more sustainable, but there was still a problem with obtaining sufficient reviewing capacity, and a concern with fair distribution of reviewer load. For example, some big labs had many submissions, but only nominated one senior author, the same one for all submissions. This meant those labs received a lot more reviewer effort than they contributed.

In the October 2024, December 2024 and February 2025 cycles we experimented with various forms of requests to the prolific authors to increase their reviewing load proportionally (while also allowing them to mentor subreviwers instead of performing all reviews personally). In February 2025 we added more specific guidelines for calculating the proportional reviewing contributions, and also allowed non-authors to be nominated (so that e.g. a senior postdoc in a big lab could help with reviewing). Still, so far these approaches have not solved the ‘big lab’ problem, and they became very complex for the authors, adding unnecessary stress over possible desk rejections. In such a lab, it is possible that not everybody even knows about all the submissions, and so they cannot coordinate their reviewer effort to correctly satisfy the requirements.

Meanwhile, our colleagues at CVPR 2025 have successfully experimented with an alternative, simpler approach: all qualified authors on any submission are required to review. They also introduced the penalty for ‘highly irresponsible’ reviews, rejecting 19 papers that would otherwise have been accepted to CVPR. Very recently, NeurIPS also announced a similar policy with desk rejection sanctions, as well as delaying the review release to the authors who are late reviewers.

Reviewer incentives

The ACL peer review committee, in coordination with EMNLP 2025, and learning from the experience of CVPR chairs, developed a comprehensive incentives policy proposal for peer review at *ACL venues, which has been adopted by the ACL exec and will apply at ARR starting from May 2025 cycle.

Positive incentives. The great reviewers and chairs will receive increased recognition during the conferences, and may also win a free virtual attendee voucher for an *ACL event that they may not have attended otherwise. See the full policy for more details.

Negative incentives. The reviewers or area chairs who the program chairs deem ‘highly irresponsible’, will not be allowed to (re-)submit or commit their work during the next ARR cycle (which would typically include the commitment date for the closest upcoming conference). Hence, the teams of papers with such reviewers/chairs as authors will have to sit out a cycle.

We hope that this policy will help to engage the authors to make sure that everyone on their teams submits their (meta-)reviews on time and in accordance with guidelines, and decrease the chasing effort for the chairs. The senior authors can still rely on and mentor secondary reviewers.

What qualifies as ‘highly irresponsible’? The EMNLP 2025 PCs published their initial set of criteria at https://2025.emnlp.org/reviewer-policies, based on discussion with CVPR chairs and ARR. As a quick heads-up, this policy covers the non-submission of (meta-)reviews on time without due warning, extremely terse reviews for good-faith submissions, and egregious cases of unprofessional tone and LLM policy violations. These criteria will be iteratively developed in future ARR cycles based on observed cases of misconduct.

Reviewer recruitment

New reviewer recruitment strategy. An ACL exec member asked us to consider the CVPR approach. Based on our communication with the CVPR chairs and our simulation of this approach for the February 2025 cycle, this would allow for a smaller average review load (about 4 per reviewer). It is also much simpler for the authors than calculating how much effort they need to contribute, given all the papers in the lab. In coordination with the ACL exec, the ACL peer review committee, and the EMNLP 2025 program chairs, ARR will implement this approach in the May 2025 review cycle. We will still allow the primary reviewers to mentor subreviewers instead of performing reviews by themselves. Nominating non-author reviewers will no longer be possible.

Note: ARR will continue to allow qualified authors to ask for an exemption, e.g., if they are on parental leave. If an author is serving in another capacity, e.g., as an AC, then that will be indicated in the form that all authors must complete.

Logistics. After a paper submission the openreview console will show a link to author registration (e.g. for May 2025 cycle the console will be at https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/ARR/2025/May/Authors). All authors must register before 48 hours after submission deadline (i.e. May 21 EoD AoE for EMNLP 2025). Based on qualifications, not all authors may actually be assigned reviews, but they all need to sign up. Since the reviewer pool will grow, we expect that the processing of exemption requests and compliance checks may take longer, and so it is possible that desk-rejects due to non-compliance for this requirement could happen later in the cycle. The authors selected as reviewers will receive kick-off emails with instructions and links.

The submitting authors should make sure that all authors on the team are aware of this requirement, and sign up to review on time. There will be an extra warning about this in the submission form. Later in the cycle, they should also coordinate within their teams to check that all (meta-)reviews assigned to the team are submitted on time and in accordance with the guidelines (reviewers, ACs). The planned review deadline for May 2025 cycle is June 18, meta-review deadline - July 15.

Reviewer qualitifactions. Among other feedback we received is that the requirement of having 3 main ACL conference or Findings papers is too stringent a requirement for reviewers. We will relax it to the requirements described at the top of this blog post.

The rationale for requiring prior work in ACL anthology at all is that each scientific community has its norms and expectations, and with too diverse a pool of reviewers the submissions may get judged by the standards of a different scientific community, which is frustrating for the authors. Even interdisciplinary submissions typically have at least some connection to the community in which they intend to publish. That said, when there are no qualified reviewers per paper, ARR does consider reviewer candidates on a case-by-case basis. All authors are expected to review if they receive assignments.

AC qualifications. We are also modifying our Area Chair requirements slightly. ACs need to meet three criteria:

• Either a completed PhD, or a main conference *CL publication from more than 5 years ago.
• Four papers in main ACL events or Findings.
• Two additional papers in either main ACL events or major ML/AI venues.
• Extensive reviewing experience.

Venues considered ‘main ACL’ are: ACL, CL, CoLing, CoNLL, EACL, EMNLP, HLT, IJCNLP / AACL, LREC, NAACL, TACL, *SEM, COLM. For conferences that have a main track and Findings, papers in both the main track and Findings count for our purposes.

Major ML/AI venues we consider are: AAAI, CVPR, ECCV, FAccT, ICCV, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, JAIR, JMLR, NIPS, NeurIPS, TMLR, TPAMI.

We introduced a reviewing workload requirement for submissions in April 2024 (link). This requirement has helped to significantly enlarge the reviewer pool, which is needed for major cycles that receive a large number of submissions. We thank all of you who have adhered to this requirement.

As we continue to fine-tune our review process, we would like to implement the following two important changes:

(1) If a person is nominated as the reviewing volunteer for multiple submissions, we now require this volunteer reviewer to provide 4 reviews per submission, with a cap of 16 reviews. For example, if a volunteer reviewer is nominated for 3 submissions, then we expect this reviewer to provide a minimum of 12 reviews; if a volunteer reviewer is nominated for 4 or more submissions, then the reviewer is expected to provide 16 reviews. We hope that by introducing this change, authors submitting multiple papers can share a larger reviewing load, which we deem a fair practice for all authors.

Clarification: If the same senior author has more than 4 submissions, then authors must coordinate so that the team overall contributes 4 reviews for each of their papers, but no one reviewer is responsible for more than 4 papers. If a qualified author already serves as an ARR AC in this cycle, this accounts for up to 4 papers they submit as authors. Serving as a SAC accounts for up to 6 papers as an author, and serving as a PC - up to 10.

(2) In the past there have been submissions with no authors qualified as reviewers based on our criteria. We are happy to announce that we will now relax the requirement to allow authors to nominate an experienced colleague who is not an author of the submission to be the reviewing volunteer of that submission. This non-author reviewing volunteer is also expected to provide 4 reviews per submission for which the volunteer is nominated for.

The above changes can also be found in the OpenReview submission form, as shown below. Please also note that we reserve the right to desk reject papers that do not contribute to reviewing effort without sufficient justification.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please send an email to editors@aclrollingreview.org with your comments and suggestions. We will continue to review our processes with the goal of improving the overall reviewing experience and increasing trust in the community.

POSITION SUMMARY

The editorial assistant will:

• Support the regular activities of the peer-review process in collaboration with the entire ARR team and conference PCs.
• Support the communication of the ARR with the rest of the community. This includes reviewing and improving existing information about the review process (website and template emails/answers).
• Handle standard tasks such as recognition letters, awards, and straightforward desk rejections.
• Support standard tasks of the review process, such as sending assignments and reminder emails.
• Provide support to handle reviewing situations that need special attention.
• Work closely with the ARR team and conference PCs to provide a smooth transition between the review and commitment stages.

REQUIRED SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

Candidates are required to have:

• Strong organizational and time-management skills
• Demonstrated attention to detail
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• Knowledge and experience interacting with different software and APIs
• Some awareness of the peer-review process in scientific communities
• Salary range: $12,000-$15,000/year

The work is done remotely; interaction with the ARR team and conference PC will be via online meetings.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The workflow manager works under the direct supervision of the ARR Editors-in-Chief.

The start date of this position is November 1, 2024.

The workload varies somewhat over the course of the bi-monthly cycles but averages approximately 20 hours weekly.

To apply, submit a cover letter, CV/resume, and three references.

If you have questions about this position or to submit an application, contact us via email at: editors@aclrollingreview.org [1] and thamar.solorio@mbzuai.ac.ae [2].