ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy
In light of challenges with unsustainable rate of submissions at EMNLP'26, ACL Peer Review Standing Committee has developed a proposal for a sustainable reviewing policy. It has now been approved by ACL exec team, and it will apply for submissions to ACL Rolling Review (ARR) starting from October 2026.
TLDR:
ARR faces a reviewing crisis: submissions are growing far faster than reviewer capacity. 38% of the ~17K May 2026 submissions came from authors with no available publication record, and there are cases of outright spam, for which we so far had no established protocols.
**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 up 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.
**Offsetting measures:** to keep things as inclusive as possible, reviewer qualification criteria are being broadened (already implemented in Aug 2026), with further proposals for a manual application path for those with equivalent experience, a mentor-matching program for newcomers, and a certification path to let experienced secondary reviewers become fully qualified.
Please see the proposal for more details: <LINK HERE>
The new reviewer qualifications, capping of reviewing to available capacity, AND requirements for all authors to have completed OpenReview profiles including ORCiD come into effect immediately, and will apply to submissions to NAACL and COLING 2026 (ARR submission deadline - October 12).
We advise the following steps for those who are planning to make a submission for NAACL/COLING:
1) **Make sure that ALL co-authors have OpenReview profiles including ORCiD - and, if available, DBLP/ACL Anthology links**. It was previously possible for some co-authors to only be registered by email, but this will no longer be possible. Since it may take a while to coordinate with all authors, we recommend everyone to do this as soon as possible. The OpenReview profiles can be registered and updated before the official submission form opens. 2) Check the new reviewer qualifications, and decide who will serve as the designated service contributor. Further make sure that this person has a full OpenReview profile with all publications, is qualified to review, and will not be named on more than two submissions. Any submissions with over-committed service contributors will be subset to max capacity randomly. The submissions that do not provide service capacity will enter a lottery, and may be assigned to reviewers or desk rejected based on available capacity. 3) The designated service contributor will need to vouch that the submission is at the expected quality level: ready for consideration for acceptance at a top-tier conference. 4) Those who are not yet qualified in terms of past publications, but have a stellar record of reviewing or secondary reviewing at ARR, will be able apply for manual verification. Early applications are highly encouraged, close-to-deadline requests for manual verification may not get processed on time. 5) Check the new service obligations: if a designated service contributor has any emergencies, the responsibility to notify about that and to provide a suitable and willing replacement is now on them. Otherwise any submissions they are serving for, and any they co-author, will be desk rejected. 6) Make sure that you are not planning more than 20 submissions, and not more than 5 as a first or joing-first author.
The updated reviewer qualifications are as follows:
- Those who have obtained their PhDs and/or have senior academic positions (postdoc/faculty), automatically qualify if they have at least 2 publications in major ACL events, Findings of the ACL, or major ML venues. - Doctoral students (but not bachelor and master students), as well as industry researchers with at least a Masters degree, automatically qualify if they have at least 2 publications in major ACL events or Findings or major ML venues and a total of >= 3 publications in total. - Those who do not automatically qualify by these criteria can serve as secondary reviewers, mentored by a qualified primary reviewer (see (4) below), but cannot be designated service contributors by themselves.
Venues considered 'major ACL' are: ACL, CL, COLING, CoNLL, EACL, EMNLP, HLT, IJCNLP / AACL, LREC, NAACL, TACL, *SEM. Venues considered 'major ML' are: AAAI, COLM, CVPR, ECCV, FAccT, ICCV, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, JAIR, JMLR, NeurIPS, TMLR, TPAMI. Venues considered major may be expanded over time and additional qualification criteria may be added over time as appropriate.
The ARR submission form opens two weeks in advance (available from September 28 for October'26 review cycle). ARR team is currently working on an automated tool to check reviewer qualifications and streamline applications for manual verification. This tool will be announced separately as soon as possible, and linked from the submission form.
ACL Peer Review Standing Committee https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-peer-review-standing-committee