Effective the 15 April 2022 deadline, with permission of the ACL executive and the ACL committee on reviewing, ARR will be moving to a six-week cycle with deadlines every six weeks.
Why?
The original proposal for ACL Rolling Review was for a five-week cycle with monthly deadlines. However:
- It takes more time than anticipated to check submissions and resubmissions and handle (re)assignments and desk rejects each cycle, especially in months with more than 300 submissions. Just running the code for reviewer assignment takes several hours, and then action editors and reviewers propose modifications which are made by hand.
- Chasing after reviewers, and doing emergency reviewing and meta reviewing, takes time.
- It is confusing for action editors, reviewers and the tech team when cycles overlap.
What Will Be The New Deadlines?
There will be nine per year:
- 1 March
- 15 April
- 1 June
- 15 July
- 1 September
- 15 October
- 1 December
- 15 January
This set of deadlines avoids the dreaded “holiday deadline” that was 15 December 2021.
How Long Will I Have to Revise and Resubmit?
With this cycle, authors will typically have six weeks to revise their submission if they want to resubmit it to the next cycle; slightly less if their submission requires emergency (meta)reviews or ethics reviewing. Authors are always welcome to resubmit to a later cycle, as long as their paper has not been accepted to a publication venue and otherwise meets the conditions outlined in the Call For Papers.
Now Can We Have Author Response?
A six-week cycle allows for a very brief period for in-cycle author response to reviews, to correct errors of fact or alert action editors to serious reviewer confusion. The primary means for authors to respond to reviewers will still be revise and resubmit. There will be more on this in the next blog post!