Organizers and convenors of community events carry heightened ethical responsibilities, especially as NLP systems move into production and everyday use. They must set and enforce clear standards for submissions and presentations, including requirements on data provenance and consent, privacy protections, bias and fairness assessment, safety and red‑teaming, environmental impact reporting, and disclosure of funding, conflicts of interest, and potential dual‑use risks.

They should ensure accessibility and inclusion, provide channels for community feedback and harm reporting, and require authors to articulate real‑world impacts, mitigation plans, and limits of generalization. By embedding ethics into calls for papers, reviewing rubrics, speaker guidelines, and on‑site practices, organizers shape a culture of accountability that protects participants, affected communities, and the broader public.

Below, we outline considerations for prospective organizers planning workshops or conferences, followed by timelines and logistics for organizers executing the event.

Prospective Organizers

1. Ensure Appropriate Gender, Geographic and Cultural balance

• Scientific events often feature plenary talks and panels where speakers are seen as representing the community or stakeholder perspectives. Aim for balanced representation, especially in plenaries and keynotes across multiple days.
• Panels should include diverse and, where appropriate, opposing viewpoints to enrich discussion. Budget extra time and resources to identify, invite, and support underrepresented voices (e.g., travel support, remote participation options, childcare). Appoint a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) chair to coordinate with sponsorship leads to enable these accommodations.

2. Reserve Sufficient Time for Ethical Review

• Ethical and scientific reviews should be given comparable attention and time. Ensure your reviewing timeline explicitly includes adequate time for ethics review, not just technical evaluation.
• See Recommendations for Conference Chairs has a full rundown of the timeline; review it even before submitting your proposal.
• Engage us as the current ACL Ethics Committee early to help seed your ethics reviewer pool and to advise on review criteria and triage processes.

3. Signal that ethics is a first-order priority

• Event webpages and calls for papers (CFPs) should clearly communicate ethical expectations and review policies. Include explicit ethics sections in CFPs, submission checklists, and reviewer guidelines.
• Publicly list the officers responsible for ethics (e.g., Ethics Chair, DEI Chair) and provide a contact channel for concerns, harm reports, and requests for guidance.
• Reinforce ethical commitments in author instructions, speaker agreements, and session moderation guidelines, and highlight them during opening remarks and author briefings.

Organizers

As an organizer, you are responsible for ensuring that the ethics review process runs smoothly and effectively. This involves coordinating with ethics reviewers, providing them with appropriate guidance, and ensuring that ethical concerns are properly addressed throughout the review cycle.

1. Form a Diverse Ethics Committee

• Build a large and diverse ethics committee with people from different countries and continents with different genders. Members should know about different areas like fairness, privacy, environmental impact, worker welfare, and specific uses (like healthcare or law). Use term limits so new reviewers can join and avoid having the same people review every time. See the NAACL 2021 committee as an example.
• Assign papers to reviewers from different countries than the authors to reduce pressure from governments or institutions. Pair new ethics reviewers with experienced ones for guidance and to improve quality.

2. Plan Enough Time and Manage Reviews

• Post the ethics committee information and author guidelines at least one month before submissions open on the conference website and email lists. Give at least 2-3 weeks for ethics review in your timeline, with a clear deadline for when papers can be flagged. The full process, including helping authors fix issues in conditionally accepted papers, takes a long time and needs careful planning.
• Set up clear steps for checking flagged papers, since some will not actually need full ethics review. Use tracking tools (like spreadsheets) to assign reviewers, watch ongoing reviews, and remind reviewers before deadlines. Make sure ethics chairs can access and use your conference platform (OpenReview, SoftConf). See ethics review logistics for detailed steps.
• Make sure ethics reviewers have sufficient time to conduct thorough evaluations — ethical reviews should be given comparable attention and time as technical reviews.
• Establish clear communication channels between ethics reviewers, area chairs, and program chairs to facilitate discussion of ethical concerns.

3. Define Scope and Document the Process

• Make it clear that ethics chairs only review ethical issues in how the research was done, not the scientific quality or future uses beyond what authors discuss. State this clearly in reviewer guidelines and make sure the Responsible NLP checklist asks authors to confirm they had legal permission to use their data.
• Write down details about the process using the ACL ethics committee's documentation form, including how many papers were flagged for ethics review, actually reviewed, accepted with conditions, and rejected for ethical reasons. This helps future chairs plan their work and improves the process over time.

4. Add Ethics to Calls for Papers and Policies

• Include ethics guidelines clearly in all Calls for Papers (CFPs) and state that papers can be rejected for ethical problems. This early warning may stop people from submitting papers with clear ethical issues, like using workers without mentioning fair pay.
• Use the same ethical rules for all conference tracks (main, student, industrial) and for Calls for Tutorials and Workshop Proposals. Workshop papers go into the ACL Anthology, so they must follow the same ethical rules as other papers. See Call for Papers suggestions for more details.

5. Support Your Ethics Reviewers

Ethics reviewers need clear guidance and adequate resources to perform their evaluations effectively:

• Provide ethics reviewers with access to the Ethical Review Recommendations and ensure they understand the review criteria and triage processes.
• Ensure that ethics reviewers know they can escalate complex cases to the ACL Ethics Committee for guidance.

6. Ensure Comprehensive Ethical Evaluation

Work with your ethics reviewers to ensure that submissions are evaluated across key ethical dimensions:

• Stakeholder considerations: Are all stakeholders (annotators, participants, downstream users, affected communities) properly considered and protected?
• Broader impacts: Do submissions adequately discuss limitations, potential misuse, environmental impact, and data sourcing?
• Transparency: Is there adequate documentation of ethical considerations, limitations, and potential risks?

7. Facilitate Ethical Dialogue

Ethics reviewing should be a collaborative process:

• Encourage open discussion between reviewers, area chairs, and authors about ethical concerns.
• Ensure that ethical feedback is constructive and helps authors improve their work.
• Normalize ethics as an integral part of scientific quality assessment, not a separate or secondary concern.

8. Provide Resources and Training

Help your ethics reviewers build their expertise:

• Direct them to the Ethics Reading List for curated resources on ethics in NLP research.
• Share the ARR Responsible NLP Research Guidelines as a comprehensive reference.
• Consider organizing ethics review training sessions or workshops for your reviewer pool.

9. Handle Ethics Flags and Escalations

Establish clear processes for managing ethical concerns:

• Create a clear triage system to determine which submissions need deeper ethics review.
• Have a process for escalating complex ethical questions to the ACL Ethics Committee.
• Ensure that ethics flags are addressed consistently and fairly across all submissions.

By supporting a robust ethics review process, you help ensure that published research is rigorous, transparent, and mindful of its broader impacts. This protects the integrity of the field and helps build a more responsible and sustainable NLP community.

10. Note Issues that have to do with Authors' Behavior with Respect to Professional Conduct and Publications

Note that the ACL has a separate unit established for review of authors' and members' professional conduct — the Professional Conduct Committee (PCC). There is also another unit for possible misbehaviour with respect to publications – the Publication Ethics Committee (PCC). Both of these committees serve the ACL membership in adjudicating cases that involve operational concerns. Actions on members of the community or their scientific output can include warnings, barring members from professional service, retracting papers, and ruling on improper behaviour with regards to authorship and AI use, among many other possible issues. We advise organisers to be familiar with these committees and their services.