Just officially announced. Minor details: as of Mar 2009 (first issue next year), there will be no print version (electronic only) and will be open access. Also switched to an online electronic management system.
Obviously I think this is fantastic. Many many thanks go to Robert Dale and the other ACL and CL board members for making this happen.
Anyone who has ever read this blog before knows that I'm a huge supporter of moving our Computational Linguistics journal to open access. Those who talk to me, know I'm in favor of more drastic measures, but would be content with just this one small change. I'm not here to beat a horse (living or dead), but to say that this appears to be something on many people's minds. I just got an email for voting for new members of the ACL board. I think only members get to vote, but I don't see anything that says that everyone can't view the statements. The list of candidates with their statements is here.
What I find promising is how often open access CL is mentioned! Indeed, both candidates for VP-elect say something. Ido writes:
Among other possibilities, the proposal to make CL open access, with a shorter reviewing cycle, seems worth pursuing. Additionally, we can increase the annual capacity of journal papers and include shorter ones.And Jan writes:
Third, ACL's role is to help the widest possible dissemination of the field's results, including novel ways such as electronic and open-access publications, training workshops and summer schools (to attract excellent "new blood").The issue comes up again for one of the Exec members. Hwee Tou says "I believe some issues of current concern to the ACL membership include the role of open access journals..."
Journal publication is not too popular for NLPers -- we tend to be a conference driven bunch. While I could care less about some arguments for journals (eg., the folks on tenure committees like them), I do feel that they serve a purpose beyond simply acting as an archive (which things like arxiv.org, the ACL anthology, citeseer, rexa, etc. do anyway). In particular, a journal paper is often a place where you get to really set the stage for your problem, describe your algorithms so that they're actually reimplementable, and go in to serious error analysis. Certainly not every paper that appears in a *ACL should continue on to the journal path, but many times a handful of papers could be merged.
One significant problem is that we're currently really limited in our choice of publication venues. Computational Linguistics (MIT Press) is definitely the place to publish a journal paper if you can. Unfortunately, CL only puts out four issues per year, each with about 4-5 papers. Sure there aren't hundreds of good papers per year, but I have to believe there are more than 16-20. Moreover, I don't feel that CL actually mirrors the *ACL proceedings -- there are many papers published in CL that I don't think match with the general sensitivities of *ACL. In addition to the small number of CL papers, the turn around time is quite slow. I was personally very impressed with my turnaround time two years ago (date of submission -> date of publication was about a year) and I know that Robert Dale (who's editing now) has done a lot to try to improve this. But still, a year is a long time. And I've heard of papers that take several years to get through. Finally, it's not open. I hate pay-for-access journals almost as much as I had pay-for-access conference proceedings. Sure, if you attend an *ACL you get it for "free" and most universities have agreements, but this is more a principle thing than a practical thing.
Things were similar in machine learning land about six years ago (though in fact I think they were worse). The big journal there was Machine Learning (published by Springer). They had roughly the same problems, to the extent that a large fraction of the editorial board resigned to found the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). JMLR has since become very successful, publishes dozens of papers per year, and has incredibly quick turnaround (I have seen a journal version of a NIPS paper appear in JMLR before NIPS even happens). The creation of JMLR was greatly assisted by the SPARC group, which helps fledgling journal get off the ground.
I would love to see a similar thing happen in the NLP community. I, personally, cannot make this happen (I don't have enough weight to throw around), but in talking to colleagues (the majority of whom also don't have enough weight) this seems to be something that many people would be in favor of. I don't think it has to be a "JCLR is better than CL" sort of thing; I think it's very possible for both to co-exist, essentially serving slightly different purposes for slightly different communities. In particular, aside from fast turnaround and online pubs, some things that I would love to see happen with such a journal are: Strongly encouraged sharing of code/data (if one could build in some sort of copyright protection for private data, this would be even better since it would let more people share); and a built-in board for paper discussion (probably with membership); ability for authors to easily submit addenda.
A while back I went through the SPARC suggestions of how to begin such a thing and it's very non-trivial. But it's doable. And I'd be willing to help. The biggest thing that would be required would be a bunch of people with white hair who are willing to commit body-and-soul to such a move.
