Very interesting (and pleasing!) to hear about the plans for supporting data being submitted to accompany papers. I think this is an excellent, and long overdue idea.

In terms of paper lengths, I was thinking more along the lines of accepting more papers per issue, rather than increasing the length of individual papers, which as you point out, has lots of implications for reviewing which already seems to be a major bottleneck in the publication process.

I would hope (and assume) that submissions would increase if the turnaround time can be reduced. Encouraging high quality conference papers from ACL etc. to be polished up into even short CL papers could also be a good way to increase submissions.

Again, thanks for taking the time to comment, and a huge thank you to everyone involved in this significant and very worthwhile change for the CL journal.

The “business model” is that the ACL will continue to subsidize the journal. The cost to the ACL will go up about 50%, but the CL exec board has OK-ed the plan, so we should thank them, too. The cost includes the fixed cost of the journal’s one day/week editorial assistant, with other costs for typesetting, copy-editing and production management.

Yes, MIT will still handle production and copy-editing. I don’t know who’s going to be hosting the site.

Yes, we’ll be able to take supporting code, data, etc., up to some limits (we obviously can’t support terabytes of data). Each paper will get its own page with a PDF version, an XML version (don’t know how that’ll be formatted), and room for supporting materials. This may be enriched in the future with everything from cross-references to a Wiki for comments.

I don’t think there’re any new types of submissions being considered. As is, we get almost no short paper submissions, but still do get squibs. We’re open to suggestions.

Paper length may go up, but there’s still costs associated with reviewing, editing and copy-editing, which may place practical limits on how much input we can take.

The next question is: how can we get more people to submit papers and how can we goad reviewers into a faster turnaround time?

Over the past year, there’s been a lot of discussion among the editorial board and others on the journal versus the conferences in terms of quality, timeliness, referenceability, and so on.