Tab periodicals Committee Periodicals Review and Advisory Committee (prac) Report for the ieee transactions on Industry Applications Date of Review

2. How are special issues approved? How are they handled, particularly with regard to Guest Editors?
Special issues are initiated when an IAS member writes a proposal which includes the topic, the people who will be Guest Editors, the technical committees that will review the papers, and the schedule for receipt of papers, completion of reviews, and publication of the special issue. The proposal is reviewed by the Chair of the IAS Publications Department and EiC and, if deemed worthwhile, is brought to the IAS Executive Board for approval. The first special issue was published as the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of TIA, and was a joint effort with the Power Electronics Society. The second IAS special issue had 72 papers on the subject of power system grounding, and was published as Part II of the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of IEEE TIA. The third special issue is scheduled for publication as Part II of the May/June 2017 issue of IEEE TIA and will address electric machine and drive diagnostics. The experiences of the first two of these special issues led to creation of a document describing the process for organizing special issues and setting for the key deadlines in the planning timeline. In general, special issues are developed by a Guest Editor working under the supervision of the Editor-in-Chief.

3. Please also comment on the policy (if any) or practice for “Administrative Rejections” (that is, return of manuscripts without review, see Table in Section E. TIMELINESS, rows 3c and 3d for explanations).
As discussed above, the use of ScholarOne Manuscripts as the peer review management tool in IAS gives us the ability to impose a single workflow and operational constraints that apply to all papers and all IAS technical committees. As configured for use in IAS ScholarOne Manuscripts allows Administrative Rejections ONLY for the following situations:

• 
  The paper is outside the scope of the technical committee to which it was assigned. While this option exists, our preferred way to deal with the situation in which a paper is submitted to the wrong committee is to find the correct committee, and then do an internal transfer that is totally transparent to the author.
  
• 
  The paper is outside the scope of IAS. There are instances in which a paper appears to be within the scope of IAS and the technical committee, but the committee is unable to identify suitable reviewers. This is a fairly rare situation that generally means that while the paper describes an application that falls within the scope of IAS and one of its committees, the real focus is on a technology that is foreign to IAS. As an illustration, in 2015 IAS received a submission that supposedly addressed protection of electrical substations, a subject that is clearly within IAS scope. But closer examination of the paper disclosed that the real subject of the paper was the use of facial recognition algorithms to control personnel access to facilities.
  
• 
  There is a problem with the paper relative to IEEE Policies on Author Conduct. This provision has been applied twice to address submissions by authors on the IEEE Prohibited Authors List, and it is available to handle situations involving plagiarism or excessive recycling of the authors’ prior work.
  
• 
  The paper does not meet the IAS ‘presentation first’ policy. The most common application of this rule is with papers scheduled for a conference by not actually presented (so-called ‘no-show’ papers), but most IAS committees also require that the review be ‘timely’ meaning that the author must submit the revised paper for review within one year of conference presentation.
  
• 
  Other uncommon situations in which the submission was administratively flawed
  

So in summary –our review workflow, as enforced by automation within ScholarOne Manuscripts, does not allow an AE to reject a paper based on his personal subjective evaluation of the content of the paper. The only way for IAS to reject a paper based on subjective evaluation of the content is for the paper to go through a full review.

IAS has a ‘presentation first’ policy that requires that papers be presented at a qualified conference before they are eligible for consideration for publication. That requirement filters out substandard papers (including maliciously nonsensical papers generated using software such as SciGen) from ever being formally submitted to IAS and eliminates the need for a process for Administrative (Editorial) rejection based on substandard content.
To illustrate this point, the data presented in this document reports that seven papers submitted to IAS in 2015 were rejected for administrative reasons. Examination of the records for these submissions provides these additional details:

Out of scope 2

“No-show” or excessively-delayed papers 3

Rejected at the request of the author 1

Author error – duplicate submission 1
We also have an “unsubmission’ process whereby flawed papers are returned to authors for correction. This is the step that is taken, for example, on papers that have an excessive CrossCheck similarity score, or on submissions in which the authors made some obvious error in creating the manuscript (eg, an error in pasting in a figure that caused it to be superimposed over text). When this process is invoked, the author retains the right to submit the paper for review after making the correction, and in most cases, returned papers are resubmitted and reviewed. To be clear, when a paper returned for corrections is not resubmitted and reviewed, it is because the author has made a decision to abandon the submission.

4. What is the policy of publishing Conference papers? How much overlap is permitted?
IAS believes strongly that the ‘presentation first’ policy strengthens IAS publications. Presentation at a conference is a filter that very effectively eliminates seriously substandard papers. It is also a very strong deterrent to plagiarism. An author who chooses to plagiarize the earlier work of others would be very unlikely to stand before an audience of ‘experts’ to present a paper knowing those experts would very likely recognize when the material being presented is not original. In the worst case scenario, the author of the material that was copied could be in the audience.
We have no disagreement with the underlying principle that authors should never seek multiple publication of the same paper. The approach that IAS is taking is to treat this as matter of the ethical behavior of authors, and to put the responsibility on authors to make sure that they are not violating that fundamental principle. Starting in 2016, IAS authors are reminded that conference papers are often archived in IEEE Xplore and that Xplore is now considered to be the IEEE ‘publication of record’. Therefore, authors who submit papers for review for publication in IAS Transactions or IAS Magazine are responsible for asserting that the paper they are submitting has been revised to the extent necessary to be considered different from an earlier conference paper that is archived in Xplore.
The personal ethical standards of most authors should address the vast majority of problems. However, just as IEEE has had to create the Prohibited Authors List to deal with authors whose lax ethical principles allow them to self-justify copying the work of others, there is still a need for a policing function to deal with the small number of authors who refuse to follow the rules regarding republication of conference papers. Our approach to dealing with that is to rely on technical experts (the AEs and reviewers) to identify and reject papers that are essentially identical to earlier conference papers. At the conclusion of the review process, the AE responsible for recommending final disposition of each paper is reminded of the need to verify that a verbatim conference version does not exist in Xplore, and if necessary, return the paper to the author for a final revision. The EiC sends papers which do not cite the original conference paper in the references back to the authors for revision.

E. TIMELINESS
Is every issue of this periodical mailed on or before the cover date? If not, comment on the reason, and provide a corrective action plan.
For the years 2011-2016 every issue was mailed on or before the cover date.
The table below is a status report (a “slice in time”) of all actions for the past 5 years, as of the time in current year when the table was completed. This table is year driven; each entry describes the requested information for the column year under review, not the year in which the paper was first submitted. Please use the COMMENTS section below for explanation.
The formal IEEE definition for ‘administrative reject’ can be found in the PSPB Ops Manual:

http://www.ieee.org/documents/opsmanual.pdf Prescreening of articles by editors.

We repeat that section here for completeness:
8.2.2.A.3. Prescreening of Articles by Editors. Editors may prescreen articles immediately after they are submitted and before they are transmitted to referees for evaluation. The purpose of such prescreening is to verify that the article adheres to minimum criteria set forth by IEEE, as well as by the organizational unit responsible for the specific publication. Typical prescreening measures include the following:
a. The author(s) have followed the IEEE guidelines for style.

b. The author(s) have not obviously violated IEEE Policies.

c. The article is comprehensible (in other words, not so poorly written that it is unreadable).

d. The subject and contents of the article meet the scope of the periodical or a specific issue.

e. The article meets a minimum criterion for technical substance established for the periodical.
If the Editor assesses that a submission has met prescreening criteria 3.a through 3.d but has not met criterion 3.e, the Editor shall consult with at least two members of the editorial board for concurrence. Rejection on the basis of criterion 3.e shall require the general agreement of the Editor and those consulted.

Submission Year		2016	2015	2014	2013	2012
1	Original submissions during the submission year	1163	1078	856	895	644
2	Papers assigned for review	1121	1078	856	895	644
3a	Papers approved for publication (A)	288	654	496	471	361
	Approved for Transactions	242	553	398	390	292
	Approved for Magazine^2	46	101	98	81	69
3b	Papers rejected (B)	359	355	282	329	231
3c	Papers returned without review (per PSPB 8.2.2.A.3 )	2	7	14	10	0
3d	Papers returned without review (other reasons) ^3ER	0	0	0	0	0
3e	Acceptance rate (A/[A + B + ER])	44.5%	64.8%	63.8%	58.9%	61.0%
4	Withdrawals and other undecided papers^5	21	45	64	85	52
4b	Papers still in review (on 11/10/16)	347	10	0	0	0
4c	Papers in revision (on 11/10/16)	104	7	0	0	0
5a	First decision time (days) - papers approved for publication^4	77	81	85	96	98
5b	Final decision time (days) - papers approved for publication	136	176	186	195	203
6	Final decision time (days) - rejected papers	81	104	110	122	159
7a	For papers published electronically, time to ePub (weeks) Preprint_X_ or Fully Edited _____	31.7	30.4	33.4	48.9	53.1
7b	For papers published on paper, submission to publication time in months	12.1	13.3	15.3	17.4	13.2