Once a week, the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) conducts editing activities on the ACM TOCE Manuscript Central website's EiC-Admin tab, which provides a view of all submissions for which the EiC does not have a conflict of interest.

On a weekly basis, they will:

• Identify any "Overdue Reviewer Response", "Overdue Referee Invitation", or "Awaiting Referee Selection" papers that are substantially late, and reach out to AEs if they need assistance in getting reviewers to review.
• Review any "Awaiting Decision Approval" recommendations from Associate Editors (AEs)
  • Review the email drafted by the AE.
  • Review the reviews obtained by the AE.
  • Communicate with the AE via Manuscript Central if their recommendation or the reviews are out of compliance with the journal's reviewing guidelines or there are other concerns.
  • Once the AE's draft email is final, correct any typos and send the decision to the corresponding authors.

On the first Thursday of each month, the EiC will also process new submissions.

[!IMPORTANT]
The monthly cycle is for several reasons: 1) it gives a due date for authors to target, 2) it helps keep the editing workload more predictable for the EiC and Associate Editors (AEs), and 3) it sets a healthy pace for review assignment (which should take about 1 month), reviewing (which should take about 1 month), and recommendation (which should take less than a month). This pace creates a roughly 3-month cycle for a paper.

New submissions are processed by the EiC as follows:

• All submissions are first reviewed by the journal admin for formatting and anonymity requirements. If they find problems with these, the submission will be "unsubmitted." Authors have a week to resubmit a properly formatted and anonymized submission, otherwise they will have to wait for a future submission deadline.
• The Deputy EIC reviews submissions for scope, recommending any out of scope desk rejects, explaining the rationale.
• After submissions are reviewed by the admin and Deputy, the EiC will:
  • Send out desk rejects
  • Identify all AE's who have received 3 or fewer assignments in the past 3 months and are not on leave, and sort them in decreasing order by number of current assignments.
  • Review each paper's cover letter and history of submission to gather any context about the submission.
  • Review the paper's automatically generated plagiarism check to see if issues need further investigation. If there is an issue, the EiC will research the overlap and communicate with authors or ACM as necessary.
  • Choose the most expert AE from the eligible list to assign.

[!IMPORTANT]
The AE assignment order above ensures that all AEs are getting a similar workload but also not too overloaded at any given time, while maximizing expertise.

After an AE is assigned and accepts, they follow the process described in the Associate Editor guidelines.

Conflicts of interest

AEs are allowed to submit to the journal. Since this creates an obvious conflict of interest, the EiC ensures that AEs are never assigned to edit their own submissions and that they have no visibility into the confidential review process.

EiCs are also allowed to submit to the journal, as are authors who have a conflict of interest with the EiC (institutional, collaborative, personal). Any submission for which the EiC-Chief has a conflict of interest is handled by Deputy EiC. The Deputy follows the submission process above and makes the final decision on the submission. The EiC has no visibility into the confidential review process, no influence over its outcomes, and only receives the same communication about the submission that other authors do.

[!IMPORTANT]
Editors are allowed to submit for several reasons: 1) they may have collaborators and doctoral students who need to be able to submit to ACM TOCE, 2) disallowing submissions would disincentivize research-active scholars from volunteering for the role. There are tradeoffs with allowing this, primarily perceptions of conflict of interest.