Computational Linguistics Journal Opens Ethics Special Issue

The Computational Linguistics journal, published quarterly by MIT Press, is opening a dedicated special issue on ethics in natural language processing and computational linguistics, according to the ACL Member Portal. Submissions are due November 27, 2026, with notification expected February 2027 and publication planned for October 2027.

The issue is guest edited by Karën Fort (Université de Lorraine/LORIA), Margot Mieskes (University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt), and Zeerak Talat (University of Edinburgh). The call explicitly invites inter-, cross-, and transdisciplinary work addressing what it terms "algorithmically mediated harms" from language technologies. Topics in scope include bias, fairness, and discriminatory technologies; power relationships and conflicts of interest; multilingual and decolonial considerations; environmental impacts and data labor concerns; and Luddite and decomputing perspectives.

That scope is notably wide. Most ethics work in NLP tends to appear in venues favoring short papers and empirical results. A quarterly peer-reviewed journal offers a different kind of home, one suited to longer theoretical arguments and interdisciplinary frameworks that do not fit neatly into a conference format.

The journal operates on a diamond open access model with no publication fees and Creative Commons licensing, which lowers the barrier for researchers at institutions without large publication budgets. That also means whatever gets published will be freely available to policymakers and practitioners, not just academic subscribers.

What the call does not spell out is how submissions will be evaluated when the work is primarily theoretical or sociological rather than technical. The breadth of topics suggests the editors are drawing a deliberately large tent, and whether that produces a coherent body of work is a genuine open question. The October 2027 publication timeline also means research filed now could be overtaken by rapidly evolving language technology deployments before the issue reaches readers.