Timeline

Phase 1: Before the call for papers

Roughly nine months before the conference, the call for papers will be prepared. This is a shared responsibility of the entire organizing committee. You will have to pay attention to the following points:

• Make sure the camera-ready deadlines are early enough that you can do your job.
  • long papers: 9-10 weeks before the conference
  • short papers, all workshops: at least 6 weeks before the conference
  • Decide on a deadline by which you want all the books in hand from the book chairs – at the latest, four weeks before the conference. Make sure you plan for enough time to make the book chairs fix problems with their books; note that this may involve them making authors fix problems with their papers.
• You need to upload the versions of the Latex and Word style files that you want to use by the time the CFP goes out. You can take the style files and author instructions from earlier years as a starting point.
• If you want to make major changes to the publication process, it will be useful to discuss these with the other organizers before the CFP. For instance, if you want to make a major change to the style file, or change the way in which the proceedings are published.

Phase 2: Before the camera-ready deadline

The time before the camera-ready deadline is relatively quiet for you. You can sharpen your axe in the following ways:

• If you have specific instructions for preparing the camera-ready papers, be sure to get in touch with the program chairs well before the acceptance decisions so they can include them in their emails to the authors.
• Don’t forget to ask program chairs to put a field for uploading latex sources. It is also nice to put fields for uploading supplementary materials, which can be included in the online proceedings.
• Set up a mailing list where you can reach all the book chairs, and send them a welcome email where you explain what will be expected of them in terms of book preparation.
• Enter the metadata for your own books as well as all the other books in the START system.
• Recruit helpers for the paper-checking process if you like. This is a job that a PhD student could do to gain a bit of credit for their CV, or an undergraduate student could do for a bit of money. You will spend at least 100 hours checking papers and communicating with authors, so recruiting two students is not too much. These helpers should be on the publication chair mailing list, and they need manager access to the START system to do their job. Get in touch with the ACL treasurer; in principle, you can get a bit of money for students.
• Get a test site in the START system and try out the publication process on some demo papers.
• Once you have formal titles of all the workshops and main conference volumes, email Priscilla Rasmussen to obtain ISBN numbers for them. The normal practice is that each book gets its own ISBN, so if you, for example, split the main conference proceedings into separate long and short paper volumes, there will be two books and two ISBNs.

Phase 3: Before the conference

The time between the camera-ready deadline and the conference is when the majority of the publication chair’s work happens. This falls into two major categories.

Preparation of the main conference volumes

• Go through every single long and short paper for the main conference and make sure it conforms to the style rules. Coordinate with the authors so they make all the necessary changes. You should only edit their papers in extremely rare, exceptional cases. The authors will not be able to upload papers after the CR deadline, but they can email you the papers (plus supplementary material) and you can do the upload.
• Make sure that all people on your team know what the status of each paper is at any given point. A shared Google spreadsheet helps for this. Also take note of style decisions that go beyond the official style guide, document them for your own team, and consider amending the style rules on this website after the conference.
• You should occasionally generate the proceedings volume in ACLPUB to see whether it still compiles. See the link for advice on what to do if it doesn’t.
• The program chairs are responsible for preparing the schedule for the long papers, short papers, and TACL papers that are presented at the conference. They do this by editing the order file for each of these three sites in the START system. ACLPUB will produce a separate program.html file for each of the three sites. You or the program chair should consider unifying the three schedules into a single HTML file once the schedule has stabilized.
• Prepare the frontmatter. You have to collect all the contents of the frontmatter from relevant people, and compile them in the final proceedings. See ACLPUB for details of putting them in the proceedings. At least you will need the followings:
  • Cover page (including the cover image from the local chair)
  • Sponsor logos (from the local chair)
  • Prefaces (from the general chair and the program chairs)
  • List of organizing committee members (from the general chair and the local chairs)
  • List of program committee members (from the program chairs)
  • Abstracts of invited talks (from the program chairs)

Managing the books from the book chairs

• Go through each book that comes from the book chairs with a fine-toothed comb and check that they all conform to the style guidelines. If they do not, get in touch with the book chair and ask them to fix the problem. You should only edit their book in extremely rare, exceptional cases.
• The START system manages the schedule of each event in an order file, which lists all the talks along with their times. ACLPUB uses the order file to generate the schedule in book.pdf and program.html. The order files are also used by the local chairs when they prepare the conference handbook. You should impress it upon the book chairs as early as possible that they need to produce well-formed order files to simplify the local chairs’ job.
• When you check the books, you need to look not only at the book.pdf which they sent you, but at the complete proceedings volume. In particular, it is easy to confuse ACLPUB into not producing proper Bibtex by entering the wrong metadata. Open their index.html in your browser and check that you can click through to their papers and the associated Bibtex entries.
• Typical mistakes that book chairs make are:
  • overlooked that some papers are in Letter style when the proceedings are all in A4, or vice versa
  • copyright stamp on the first page of each paper does not have the right name for the workshop, or the wrong date or location
  • copyright stamp is not positioned correctly on the page
  • cover page does not list the name and location of the workshop correctly
  • Bibtex entries are not generated correctly, or at all (this is usually because the “Bibtex URL” field in the CDROM metadata was entered incorrectly).

Submitting the proceedings

As a general rule, the complete and finished proceedings should be available online and in the Anthology at least a week before the conference starts.

• Try to have all the books together 1-2 weeks before the conference. At the very end, you will be waiting for the prefaces from the General Chair and the Program Chairs, the abstracts from the invited speakers, the sponsor logos (from the local chairs), and the artwork for the cover page (from the local chairs). The earlier you can get people to send these to you, the better.
• The program chairs will be tempted to make last-minute changes to the schedule. Agree with them on a deadline after which schedule changes will no longer be reflected in the proceedings. (The local chairs can still edit the HTML schedule on the local website by hand.)
• When you have well-formed versions of all books, you need to collect them all together into a single download, which the local chairs can put on the local website, and the Anthology editor can put in the Anthology. This is described in more detail on the CD-ROM page.
• Nowadays, we are distributing the ACL proceedings purely in electronic form. It is a good idea to offer a ZIP file of the entire proceedings (including all books) as a download on the conference website, so conference participants can download them before their trip. This avoids bringing the conference wi-fi to its knees. You should therefore prepare such a ZIP file and have it uploaded to the local website, and perhaps have the local chairs email all participants about it.

Collecting copyright transfer agreement

Program chairs are also responsible for collecting copyright transfer agreement from all of the authors of main conferences and related events including workshops, tutorials, etc. In principle, the submission site has an online form to sign up for agreement, and what you have to do is to check whether authors correctly input their names in the form. However, some authors might have a problem with the agreement form of ACL, and in this case you have to contact the authors directly and solve the issue.

For details, see Copyright.

Phase 4: After the conference

If you go to the conference, enjoy it: Your work is done. Once you have recovered from the publication process, please consider editing this website to keep it up-to-date with the latest technological and organizational developments, and add your own advice.