Submissions recently spiked to 500 papers every 19 days
TMLR has been facing an significant uptick in the number of submissions since the start of the year. This is placing an extreme burden on our amazing team of reviewers and action editors.
To ease this burden, TMLR will be implementing submission quotas, effective July 1. 1/n
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Near the end of 2025, TMLR got 500 submissions every ~60 days. Most recently: it took 19 days. This is unsustainable for a volunteer team of reviewers and action editors.
TMLR is implementing authorship quotas to help relieve the significant pressure on their time and energy.
TMLR has been facing an significant uptick in the number of submissions since the start of the year. This is placing an extreme burden on our amazing team of reviewers and action editors.
To ease this burden, TMLR will be implementing submission quotas, effective July 1. 1/n
Members of our editorial team, including AEs and reviewers, enjoy doubled quotas. You can self-nominate to be an AE or a reviewer, see our FAQ: https://jmlr.org/tmlr/faq.html 4/n
Quotas follow the generalized harmonic quota rule. It's a bit tough to describe succinctly. Each individual has a budget starting Jan 1, partially spent on each submission. Cost of a submission depends on its # of authors. All authors must have enough budget to submit. 2/n
An individual's budget can be spent with 2 1-author submissions. Alternatively, it can be spent on 9 9-author submissions. Other cases interpolate or extrapolate from these, and you can play around with numbers here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nihars/quota/author.html?rule=generalized&N1=2&A=9&NA=9 3/n
More details in our post: https://medium.com/@TmlrOrg/annual-author-submission-quotas-for-tmlr-1db785e51548
We understand this will (by design!) prevent submissions that authors would have liked to undergo review. But strong measures (this is one of several) are necessary to protect our valuable and human team of reviewers and AEs. 5/5
Yay mechanism design in practice! This one feels similar in spirit to quadratic voting -- you can either spend all your "paper credits" on a few papers you really care about (assumed to correlate w author contribution), or spread them out over many paper submissions.
An individual's budget can be spent with 2 1-author submissions. Alternatively, it can be spent on 9 9-author submissions. Other cases interpolate or extrapolate from these, and you can play around with numbers here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nihars/quota/author.html?rule=generalized&N1=2&A=9&NA=9 3/n
@thegautamkamath If you start accepting less fewer people would submit. All ML conferences scaled their acceptance with submission volume and now are getting DDOSd
Near the end of 2025, TMLR got 500 submissions every ~60 days. Most recently: it took 19 days. This is unsustainable for a volunteer team of reviewers and action editors.
TMLR is implementing authorship quotas to help relieve the significant pressure on their time and energy.
this is why TMLR is such a high quality journal—great to see quota system
TMLR has been facing an significant uptick in the number of submissions since the start of the year. This is placing an extreme burden on our amazing team of reviewers and action editors.
To ease this burden, TMLR will be implementing submission quotas, effective July 1. 1/n
