NEJLT welcomes new excellent submissions of completely original content, and follows globally-recognised academic best practices in publication and attribution. Our goal is to publish excellent research, while protecting authors from biases, and also ensuring that readers receive high-quality and interesting papers that have been rigorously reviewed.
NEJLT is full open access. This means that accepted papers may be downloaded directly from the web and will not be charged for. There are also no fees for submitting or for publishing. There are no plans to collect fees at any point in the future from any part of the NEJLT process.
From 2020, paper published in NEJLT will also appear on the ACL Anthology, which is a fully open access library with direct PDF download, managed by ACL volunteers.
The business model of the journal relies on publishing support, and on the donation of volunteer time and effort from the editorial team and reviewers. NEJLT does not accept commercial sponsorships and does not pay for reviews or academic editing; in turn, work published in NEJLT is also available free.
Papers are published under the CC-BY 4.0 license. This means that NEJLT is an Open Access Gold journal.
The Vancouver Group are the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), who in 1985 introduced a set of criteria for authorship. The criteria have seen many updates over the years, to match the latest developments in research and publishing. Their scope far surpasses the topic of authorship, and spans across the scientific publication process: reviewing, editorial work, publishing, copyright, and the like.
NEJLT expects all submissions' author lists to include all and only relevant authors, following the ICMJE recommendations.
The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following four criteria:
Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
Final approval of the version to be published; AND
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged.
These authorship criteria are intended to reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take responsibility for the work. The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criteria 2 or 3.
NEJLT adopts a light anonymity policy. We ask that authors do not publish, promote, or update preprints of the work during the review period, i.e. from the time of submission.
The notion of preprint is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by “flag planting” with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.
Submissions that are deposited to institutional registries as a process requirement, e.g. for the submission of documents in partial fulfilment of a qualification, are exempt from this policy at NEJLT, as long as at least one author’s affiliation matches the affiliation of the registry. ArXiv, and similar sites where author affiliation is not necessarily linked to the repository owner, are not considered institutional registries.
In exchange for asking that author identities are not published during the review period, NEJLT endeavours to provide a rapid but diligent process. Evidence indicates that knowing a paper comes from a prestigious source distorts reviews, both in computer science and in other fields. In-process anonymity should reduce, or at least not amplify, this effect.
If in doubt, you are welcome to contact the EiC or a board member to work out a solution for your manuscript.
NEJLT offers a high degree of anonymity during review. This means it is possible for sitting board members to be co-authors on submissions. However, the following rules apply:
NEJLT follows TACL in using the definition of conflict-of-interest (COI) set forth by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), namely, a person has a COI with a submitted paper if that person:
NEJLT mediates no data sharing and does not mandate data sharing or reproducibility of submitted papers. However, reviewers made give submitted works decreased scores if they fail to share data or reproducible code where relevant, which may lead to paper rejection.
NEJLT does not give any awards to papers where relevant code and data are not publicly available, accessible, and reproducible.
Authors retain full ownership of their papers and the intellectual property therein during the entire review and publication process. Submissions that infringe on others intellectual property rights are not welcome, and may be desk rejected or withdrawn from publication at any time without prior consultation.
Policy on consent to publication
All persons named in a publication must be aware of the publication’s existence and have consented to their name being used in connection with the publication. This includes offering them a copy of the final manuscript (minus other people’s names) to review, so that they can give informed consent over what they are being named in.
Policy on research on vulnerable populations
Research on vulnerable populations is in general only welcome at NEJLT if a member of that population has been included in the design and conduct of the research in an authoritative position, and also receives prominent placement in the authorship list, commensurate with their contribution. Research on vulnerable populations that was not conducted in collaboration with researcher from those populations should not be submitted to NEJLT.
Policy on ethical conduct of research using animals
Research using animals is not welcome at NEJLT.
Policy on ethical conduct of research using human subjects
Research using human subjects is only welcome at NEJLT if they have given informed consent to being used in the study, and are demonstrably compensated for their work at the rate of the living wage in the researcher’s country or higher. Please retain documentation of this payment rate in case the editors ask for it.
Policy on handling confidential data
Confidential data – except author names and affiliations – must not be submitted to NEJLT and will not knowingly be published or publishable at NEJLT. In GDPR terms, “confidential data” can be interpreted as Sensitive Personal Data.
Overseeing authority
NEJLT operates under the Northern European Association for Language Technology, NEALT.
NEJLT does not accept advertising. NEJLT only communicates broad announcements to mailing list and those who have a pre-existing connection with the journal.
Authors of published works may request retraction of or minor updates to their articles. NEJLT expects to process these within two weeks. In case of a larger update (alterations to the finding or results of the paper that affect the conclusions, or an edit of more than 3% of the text), the action editor of the paper will decide whether re-review is needed, or if the update can be made without review.
Complaints are in the first instance to be sent to the editor-in-chief, or the editorial office, using the email addresses on the NEJLT contact page. Complaints about the NEJLT editor-in-chief can be sent to members of the NEALT executive board.
NEJLT will acknowledge the complaint as soon as possible and progress the case with weekly updates, aiming for a resolution within six weeks of receipt.
NEJLT may refer concerns of a harassing, offensive, threatening, or defamatory manner to legal counsel or other appropriate authorities. Complaints made in such language will not be investigated.
If the investigation finds that the concern is valid, follow the appropriate COPE guidance for dealing with the issue.
The correspondent’s right to anonymity is respected, and their identity will not be revealed to the party facing concerns without the correspondent’s explicit permission.
When the investigation is closed, the complainant will be informed of the action NEJLT takes.
NEJLT defers to the recommended COPE processes on complaint handling.
NEJLT follows the COPE guidelines on handling allegations of unethical practice, following TACL, and currently also follows TACL guidelines in general.
Plagiarism or redundant (duplicate) publication:
Research Fraud:
Reviewer or editor misconduct during the review process:
Other ethical problems: