At ARR, we are slowly and steadily making changes to reflect the ACL reviewing survey results. In its October 15th cycle, we bring two key changes.
1) Starting this cycle, ARR will be a two-monthly cycle instead of a 1.5 monthly. Accompanying this change will be a (near)-guarantee (barring exceptional circumstances) that all papers will get their reviews before the start of the next cycle, in this case 15th December. We recognize that a two monthly submissions are less than ideal for the goal of encouraging rapid review cycles. And we might as well revisit this once ARR processes get stabilized. However, this is a price we ought to pay right now to ensure that all papers receive their reviews in time – authors can plan better, and reviewers start to be more accountable.
2) Based on popular demand (a.k.a. survey results), we have introduced “tracks” in the review mechanism. As a first step, tracks will provide some agency to the reviewers and action editors: paper-reviewer matching will highly encourage matches where the paper’s track is common with one of the reviewer’s tracks. In the long run, tracks will become a vehicle for scaling up ARR, as we will associate senior action editors with a track, who will oversee papers in their track. This latter functionality is yet to be implemented.
While we’re at it, please also welcome two new editors in chief, who joined us recently:
- Lilja Øvrelid, Professor at University of Oslo, Norway
- Viviane P. Moreira, Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
As always for any comments/suggestions, please write to editors@aclrollingreview.org