The EiC's primary duty is to oversee how submissions are reviewed and what gets published. This includes:

• Handling submissions
• Inviting and training new Associate Editors (AEs)
• Communicating regularly with AEs about journal changes
• Soliciting proposals for special issues

But there are several other duties they have related to this. Here's a calendar of their ad-hoc work each year:

Annual tasks

January

• Schedule April board meeting. We hold two of these for different time zones, usually in the first week of April at 7 Pacific (for CST, EST, and CET) and 2 Pacific (for PST, CST, EST, Australasia, and Asia). (This week was voted one of the least bad by board members in 2022).

February

• Plan and hold an informal SIGCSE gathering. We typically gather whoever is at the conference and whoever wants to join virtually to socialize, discuss issues top of mind, and make space for advocacy. ACM will sometimes pay for this.

March

April

• Hold board meeting to build community and discuss journal policy.

May

June

• Documentation audit. Year-round documentation maintenance will only go so far in preventing this documentation from going stale. Each June, the Editor-in-Chief will review all of these pages for accuracy, and coordinate any revisions with the editorial board and broader research community.

• Plan an informal ITiCSE gathering. We typically gather whoever is at the conference and whoever wants to join virtually to socialize, discuss issues top of mind, and make space for advocacy.

July

• Hold an informal ITiCSE gathering.

• Plan an informal ICER gathering. We typically gather whoever is at the conference and whoever wants to join virtually to socialize, discuss issues top of mind, and make space for advocacy.

• Begin formation of the Distinguished Paper selection committee. The committee should be formed by the beginning of September.

August

• Hold an informal ICER gathering.

• Schedule October board meeting. We hold two of these for different time zones, usually in the third week of October at 7 Pacific (for CST, EST, and CET) and 2 Pacific (for PST, CST, EST, Australasia, and Asia). This week was voted one of the least bad by board members in 2022.

September

• Solicit interest in presenting at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. The EiC asks the ACM journal administrator for a list of eligible papers and their corresponding authors' email addresses — papers with an Accept or Accept with Revisions decision before September 1 (see the author guidelines for the canonical eligibility rule) — and then solicits interest from authors in presenting at SIGCSE.

October

• Hold board meeting to build community and discuss journal policy.

• Send ACM TOCE article nominations to the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. The EiC works with the Board to rank the papers expressing interest according to the board's opinion of what work would be best to share and discuss at the conference. The EiC then shares the ranked list with the upcoming SIGCSE Technical Symposium program co-chairs and they select from the ranked list and send invitations. This step follows the Distinguished Paper Award decision, due by the end of October, so that award winners can be included.

November

December

Ad hoc tasks

The editor also keeps an eye on the Reciprocal Reviews token supply. Welcome grants are minted automatically without minter approval, so the currency page is the one part of the economy with no human in the loop; review it periodically and coordinate with the venue's minters if the supply is drifting.

Sometimes the editor does data pulls, in order to contact authors and reviewers. For example, we have a few saved reports that are useful for this work:

• User performance reports > Standard Reports > Reviewer summary on the admin page shows all reviewers within a date range
• Invited Paper Reports > Publication Folders > ACM TOCE EiC-Admin > TOCE All Authors will show all authors within a date range.

Delegation

When possible, the Editor-in-Chief delegates tasks. For example, many journal process and policies can be proposed, planned, and even executed by volunteers from the broader community. Additionally, the Editor may also delegate tasks to an assistant of their choice. Tasks appropriate for delegation include, but are not limited to:

• Planning and maintaining a communication strategy, to ensure that the broader community is aware of the journal, changes to its policies, and opportunities to support and engage with it.
• Triaging and managing the backlog of change requests for the journal, to ensure the Editor is attending to backlogged, pending, and ongoing projects, and connecting with community to advance them.