ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy [D]

ACL just announced on X how they are planning to handle the increased submission numbers. Interestingly enough, they call it "the proposal".

My understanding is that, in a nutshell, each submission should come with someone who can review, otherwise it may only get a slot through a lottery. Additionally, they cap total submissions at 20 and first-author submissions per cycle at 5.

What do you think of it? IMO it makes a lot of sense - especially given the large numbers of submissions without any author qualified to review. It is a bit of gatekeeping but in my opinion highly required. And the caps of 20 and 5 are still quite generous.

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Here is what they posted on X:

ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy: We are introducing changes in the ACL ARR reviewing and submissions. The changes will cap authors and introduce changes in the reviewing to keep our community sustainable. #NLPro

**The proposal:** cap reviewed submissions to available reviewer capacity. Each submission must "pay" for itself by providing a qualified service contributor (reviewer or chair). Submissions without service capacity go into a lottery for whatever spare capacity remains

Service from qualified contributors counts towards the venue capacity, and a mentorship system will be built for those not qualified yet. If a qualified service contributor is not available among the authors, non-author designated contributors can be nominated..

...but must vouch for the work (arXiv-endorsement style). Measures for system abuse will be implemented. For example, accounts that systematically submit or endorse low-quality work, and accounts that misuse the system in other ways, will be penalized or even banned.

Additionally, per-author quotas are introduced, where authors are capped at 20 total submissions and 5 first-author (including shared first-author) submissions per cycle. More details will be posted on the ACL web and here shortly. #NLProc