The IEEE-TAS publishes only selected, peer-reviewed articles. Submitted articles will be given an initial assessment for suitability. Articles that do not pass this check will be rejected from the system and returned to authors under a very short deadline for re-submission. See policies about Suitability.
IEEE policies on plagiarism, re-use of material, rights, permissions, and duplicate publication apply to the ASC 2014 special issue. These can be reviewed here: http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html. IEEE may directly scrutinize articles with more than 30% re-used content, outside of the Special Issue editorial process. Authors should take note of the corrective and punitive measures discussed under the links above.
A manuscript that does not adhere to these policies will be rejected at any stage of the peer review process.
After submission, editorial staff will enlist two or more referees to evaluate the technical content and other aspects of the manuscript. Referees will provide comments via the standard IEEE-TAS Review Form.
Authors should take care to respond to every issue raised by the referees and editor, and to enumerate their responses explicitly in the Author Response Letter. Also, authors should explicitly summarize all changes in the manuscript. Indicating changes by red text in the revised manuscript is very useful for the editor and referee. Authors may reject or rebut comments made by referees, and in this case an explanation and specific materials or changes to the manuscript should be pointed out.
Upon receipt of the revised manuscript, the editor will evaluate the author responses and the changed content. For major revisions, a previous referee may be consulted a second time by the editor to confirm that concerns were indeed addressed by the changes in the manuscript. Also, new referees may be contacted for their opinion.
A manuscript is expected to improve at every step of the peer review process. Authors should notice that, at most, 2 stages of revision (major revisions improve to minor revisions, which improves to accept) are recommended by editorial guidelines. Papers that do not improve at each stage will motivate editors to issue a reject decision under typical circumstances.
After receiving a final “accept” decision, authors will be asked to upload their final files. These files should be clean copies that include all revisions made during the peer review process. Also, authors should note that revisions or final files that are not returned in a timely manner may result in a deferral to the regular issue of IEEE-TAS.
In all cases, it is the editor who makes the decision to accept a manuscript for publication. Most ASC 2014 papers will be accepted by Technical Editors. Combined papers will be managed and accepted by special Combined Paper Editors. Technical Editors and Lead Editors or the Editor-in-Chief shall be consulted for all papers facing rejection. That is, two editorial levels will evaluate recommendations before a reject decision is made. These policies are also required by IEEE publication standards.