Publication Guide
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the scholarly home of natural language processing. Founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL) and renamed in 1968, it is a non-profit membership society rather than a commercial publisher - and that shapes everything about publishing with it. There are no article processing charges anywhere in the portfolio, every paper is openly available in the ACL Anthology, and the most prestigious venues are conferences, not journals.
ACL publishes two journals - Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), both produced with MIT Press - alongside the proceedings of the field's flagship conferences: the ACL Annual Meeting, EMNLP, NAACL, and EACL, plus dozens of workshops and special-interest-group events. This guide covers how to choose a venue, how ACL Rolling Review (ARR) works, what publishing costs (nothing), and how to format and submit your paper.
Which ACL venue fits your paper?
In NLP, top conferences carry journal-level prestige, so venue choice is mostly about paper type, timing, and review preferences.
| You're most likely to... | Choose this route |
|---|---|
| Have a strong, timely research result and want maximum visibility | ACL, EMNLP, or NAACL main conference - the field's flagship venues, all submitted through ACL Rolling Review (ARR). Acceptance rates are typically in the 20-25% range. |
| Have a solid paper that missed the main-conference bar | Findings of ACL/EMNLP/NAACL - a companion track for technically sound work; papers appear in the Anthology and can be presented at the conference. |
| Have a longer, deeper contribution that doesn't fit an 8-page format | TACL - a journal with conference-style speed, action-editor decisions, and the option to present accepted papers at a major ACL conference. |
| Have a substantial survey, squib, or theoretical contribution | Computational Linguistics - the field's longest-running journal (est. 1974 as the American Journal of Computational Linguistics), open access since 2009. |
| Have early-stage, focused, or niche work | Workshops and SIG events (e.g., CoNLL, SemEval, WMT) - co-located with the main conferences, reviewed by the workshop's own committee, and archived in the Anthology. |
What ACL actually publishes
- Computational Linguistics - established 1974, current title since 1984, published by MIT Press for the ACL. Quarterly; surveys, theoretical work, and squibs. Open access since 2009 (articles carry a CC BY-NC-ND license).
- TACL (Transactions of the ACL) - launched 2013, published with MIT Press. A rolling-submission journal designed to combine journal rigor with conference speed; accepted papers may be presented at ACL, EMNLP, or NAACL.
- Conference proceedings - the ACL Annual Meeting (flagship, held each summer), EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, and regional/affiliated events, each publishing full peer-reviewed proceedings.
- The ACL Anthology - the society's open archive at aclanthology.org, hosting 130,000+ papers from 500+ venues spanning 75 years of the field. It is the canonical source for NLP literature.
Open access and cost: $0
ACL is one of the clearest examples of diamond open access in computer science:
| Item | Cost / license |
|---|---|
| Conference and workshop papers | $0 APC - publication costs are covered by conference registration; papers are CC BY 4.0 (since 2016) |
| TACL articles | $0 APC - institutionally funded; open access in the Anthology and at MIT Press |
| Computational Linguistics articles | $0 APC - open access since 2009; CC BY-NC-ND at MIT Press |
| Reading anything in the Anthology | Free - no subscription, no login |
Material published before 2016 in the Anthology is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Because there are no fees, waiver policies and transformative agreements simply don't apply.
Peer review: ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
Since 2021, ACL has centralized conference reviewing in ACL Rolling Review, built on the OpenReview platform; by 2024 it became the sole submission route for the main ACL, EACL, NAACL, and EMNLP conferences.
- Model: double-anonymized. Author identities are hidden from reviewers and vice versa; anonymity rules also restrict preprint posting near deadlines - check the current ARR policy.
- Cycles: ARR runs review cycles roughly every two months. Reviews are decoupled from acceptance: after receiving reviews and a meta-review, you commit the paper to a participating conference, whose senior committee makes the accept/reject decision.
- Revise and resubmit: if reviews are weak, you can revise and resubmit to a later ARR cycle, carrying your review history forward.
- Journals: TACL and Computational Linguistics run their own editorial processes (action editors at TACL; traditional editorial review at CL), separate from ARR.
How to submit
- Pick the venue and deadline. Conference submissions go through ARR cycles; check which cycles feed the conference you're targeting.
- Format your paper. Use the official ACL paper template (LaTeX or Word) - available on SciSpace - with the standard two-column format and the acl.bst author-year citation style (natbib).
- Anonymize. Remove author names, acknowledgments, and identifying links; follow the ARR anonymity policy.
- Submit via OpenReview. Create the submission in the current ARR cycle on OpenReview; journals (TACL, CL) have their own submission sites.
- After reviews, commit. Read your reviews and meta-review, then commit to a participating conference - or revise and resubmit to a later cycle.
Ethics and integrity
ACL maintains its own professional code of conduct and a peer-review code of ethics, with an ethics review stage for flagged conference submissions. Papers must disclose limitations and, where relevant, broader impacts. Plagiarism, dual submission (including overlapping ARR submissions), and anonymity violations lead to desk rejection. The society also runs mentoring and reviewer-training programs to sustain review quality as the field grows.
