Each Friday, 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 "Awaiting AE Preliminary Decision" recommendations that are substantially late, and reach out to AEs if they need assistance drafting recommendations.
• 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 Friday of each month, the EiC will also review new submissions. This happens monthly for a few reasons: 1) it gives a deadline 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). Overall, 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.
• After submissions are reviewed by the admin, the EiC will:
  • Review the submission's abstract to ensure that the paper is within scope of the journal charter. If it is out of scope, then the EiC returns without review, sending an email explaining the rationale.
  • Review the 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.
  • Identify an AE that do not have active assignments, assigning one with sufficient expertise to review the paper's methods and novelty, and identify suitable reviewers for the work.

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.

Any submission for which the Editor-in-Chief has a conflict of interest (e.g., they are an author on a submission, is at the same institution as an author, is a collaborator with an author) is handled by deputy EiC appointed by the EiC. The deputy EiC 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.