New Desk Rejection Practice for EMNLP 2025
For some time there has been substantial concern within the community regarding many aspects of reviewing, from poor quality, to too few reviewers in the pool, to poor quality reviews, to reviewers not even doing their reviews or resorting to AI generated reviews. In light of these circumstances, this year’s EMNLP PCs are taking reviewer responsibility very seriously as a step towards incentivizing more conscientious reviewer behavior.
In our communication with the community, we – the EMNLP 2025 PC chairs – have already indicated that desk rejections would be levied in the case of reviewer irresponsibility. As a first step, in this cycle, we are only desk-rejecting (and disallowing submission to the next ARR cycle) papers where at least one author met all the following criteria, as these represent severe violations of our reviewer policy https://2025.emnlp.org/reviewer-policies:
- They were assigned papers to review at the beginning of the review cycle (i.e. not emergency reviews).
- They were a reviewer with at least 3 assigned papers and failed to submit 100% of their reviews despite multiple reminders.
- They did not submit an Emergency declaration or a Delay notification. In future cycles, this effort will extend more broadly to include those with a reduced workload, or did some portion, but not enough, of what they were assigned. So be mindful in order to avoid suffering one or more desk rejections.
We hope that this measure will ultimately help improve the overall quality and consistency of reviews, benefiting both authors and the community as a whole.
The following is our reply to the authors who have requested an appeal of our decision.
We understand that receiving a desk rejection, particularly after the considerable time, effort, and care invested in preparing and submitting your work, as well as going through the initial review and author response process, can be deeply disappointing. Please know that these enforcement actions were not taken lightly and were reached after two months of careful discussion among the EMNLP PCs, the ARR EiCs, and the ACL Publication Ethics Committee. Out of the 13,048 reviewers recruited this year, only 69 were deemed “highly irresponsible” under our standards, and enforcement was applied solely in those cases. We truly recognize the contributions these community members intended to make when they committed to the role of reviewer. These reviewers were contacted multiple times regarding their review duties, as well as being personally contacted by the area chairs and senior area chairs, but still failed to fulfill them. It is regrettable that co-authors of these reviewers were also affected by these consequences, and we acknowledge the impact this has on authors who fulfilled their own obligations.
Following the notifications, some authors asked whether it would be possible to remove the irresponsible reviewer(s) from the author list so the paper may proceed. This would have allowed the paper to be considered for EMNLP or resubmitted to ARR. Though we seriously considered this, we and the ACL Publication Ethics Committee determined that this would be in violation of the ACL Authorship guidelines.
We do want to emphasize that the consequences for highly irresponsible reviewing behavior were explicitly stated on the ACL Rolling Review’s 2025 Incentives page - although we acknowledge that clearer alignment between ACL’s policy language (“not be able to commit […] to EMNLP”) and the term “desk rejection” could help avoid confusion:
“The reviewers or chairs deemed ‘highly irresponsible’ by the program chairs will not be able to commit their work to EMNLP, or (re-)submit their work to the subsequent ARR cycle.”
In addition, shortly after the submission deadline, on May 22, we sent reminder emails to all authors whose co-authors had not yet completed the author registration form. These emails explicitly mentioned the consequence of desk rejection if the form was not submitted, and encouraged submitting authors to ensure that all co-authors were aware of and completed the requirement. Importantly, the author registration form explicitly asked each author to confirm their availability and consent to serving as a reviewer. This step was a key part of ensuring that all authors were aware of and agreed to the reviewing requirements before the process began.
We recognize that more frequent reminders throughout the process may help reinforce these expectations. We will take these into account for future communications. Our goal remains to maintain fairness in the process while upholding the integrity and timeliness of the review cycle.
Regards, Christos, Tanmoy, Carolyn, Violet - EMNLP PCs