The “ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems” (ACM TORS) is revealed during the ACM RecSys Conference 2021

A new milestone in the history of recommender systems is being announced: At this very minute, Dietmar Jannach reveals at the ACM RecSys Conference 2021 the birth of a new journal for recommender-systems research: The “ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems”, in short, ACM TORS.

Just a few months after the ACM RecSys Conference received an ‘A’ ranking, the community now has its own journal, published by ACM. A journal dedicated solely to all the different aspects of recommender systems including algorithms, user aspects, evaluation methods, industry reports, literature surveys, and reproducibility studies. ACM TORS will enable the community to publish extensive research beyond the page limits of the ACM RecSys Conference, and regardless of conference submission deadlines.

Of course, there are other journals, in which recommender-system research is published. Among others ACM TOIS, Springer’s UMUAI, and IEEE TKDE. However, none of these journals has a sole focus on recommender systems. Therefore, until now, extensive articles on recommender systems are splattered around various journals, and keeping track of them is difficult. It should be noted though that there was already one other journal for recommender systems announced just a few months ago — the Frontiers in Big Data | Recommender Systems.

Dietmar Jannach (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) will serve as the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the new ACM TORS journal, together with Li Chen (Hong Kong Baptist University). Dietmar is a long-time member of the recommender-system community, co-author of one of the most popular recommender-system books, and member of the ACM RecSys Conference steering committee. Li Chen is also a senior member of the community, being on the ACM RecSys Steering Committee, on various editorial boards (Springer UMUAI, ACM TiiS, JIIS…) and (program) co-chair of various conferences including ACM RecSys 2020.

The editorial board (see below) of ACM TORS is also full of well-known names including Joseph Konstan, Robin Burke, and Francesco Ricci as well as some less well-known names, including me ;-). I, or someone else in my group, will also serve as the “Information Director”, i.e. the person taking care of the Twitter account, the website etc.

• Julian McAuley, UCSD, USA
• Christine Bauer, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
• Joeran Beel, University of Siegen, Germany
• Robin Burke, University of Colorado, USA
• Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
• Guibing Guo, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China
• George Karypis, University of Minnesota, USA
• Bart Knijnenburg, Clemson University, USA
• Joe Konstan, University of Minnesota, USA
• Bamshad Mobasher, DePaul University, USA
• Weike Pan, Shenzhen University, China
• Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bolzano, Italy
• Nava Tintarev, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
• Martijn Willemsen, TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• Xing Xie, Microsoft Research Asia, China
• Markus Zanker, Free University of Bolzano, Italy
• Jie Zhang, NTU, Singapore
• Yongfeng Zhang, Rutgers University, USA

Creating the journal was a long journey. Dietmar Jannach had the idea for the journal already in summer 2020, inspired by RS_c´s blog post Why is there no ‘International Journal on Recommender Systems’?. Dietmar prepared a proposal, and the proposal was discussed at the ACM RecSys Conference steering committee in late 2020. The committee was highly supportive of the idea. Then, after many iterations and feedback from many members of the community — especially from Joseph Konstan — Dietmar Jannach and Li Chen finalized the proposal and send it to ACM. Just in time, i.e. just a few weeks before the ACM RecSys Conference 2021, ACM accepted the proposal.

Given that the proposal was just accepted, there is no website yet, but we have already a Twitter account https://twitter.com/ACM_TORS. So, please follow @ACM_TORS on Twitter, tweet about it #ACM_TORS, and receive updates once the journal is fully launched and accepts submissions. Or, even better, get ready to be among the first ones submitting an article to ACM TORS (maybe an extended version of your ACM RecSys Conference article?).