Information for Editors

1. The Time Line for ICRA 2012
2. Summary Rejection
3. Plagiarism
4. Award Candidates
5. Editor Endorsement of AE reports
6. Conflict of Interests
7. Managing Rebuttals

The CEB Editor Time Line for ICRA 2012

Summary Rejection

The Editor assigned to the paper makes the final determination as to whether the paper should be rejected without further review, or should go through the formal review process.

A paper should be rejected without review in any of the following cases:
- It clearly makes no novel contribution to the state of the art.
- It contains significant technical errors.
- The paper has been published previously (i.e., the paper is identical to, or nearly identical to previously published work by the same authors).
- The paper plagiarizes previously published research by other authors.
A paper should not be rejected without review merely because it makes only an incremental contribution, because it fails to report real-world experiments or because of poor writing quality. Further, a paper should not be summarily rejected because the AE feels its subject lies outside the scope of ICRA (this judgment is left for the Program Committee). If there is any doubt as to the decision, the paper should be sent for review. No more that 10-15% of submitted papers will be rejected without review.

Editors are requested to inform their AEs of the criteria and deadlines for summary rejections. Editors should notify the EiC of their proposed summary rejections with the associate rationale as early as possible during the review process.

Plagiarism

IEEE defines plagiarism as the reuse of someone else's prior ideas, processes, results, or words without explicitly acknowledging the original author and source. It is important for all IEEE authors to recognize that plagiarism in any form, at any level, is unacceptable and is considered a serious breach of professional conduct, with potentially severe ethical and legal consequences (source: Section "8.2 Publication Guidelines" of the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual, "Guidelines for Adjudicating Different Levels of Plagiarism." )

Plagiarism cases involve serious accusations, which should be dealt with carefully. IEEE has clear policies to follow.

When a plagiarism case is detected by a CEB reviewer, he/she should inform the Associate Editor who assigned the review, the Profile Editor, and the CEB Editor in Chief.  While informing the editorial chain and ultimately the CEB Editor in Chief is mandatory, confidentiality in this process is strongly recommended by IEEE.

It is important that the Reviewer is factual in his remarks, and that as ample and detailed evidence is provided as far as possible. For instance, this could be a copy of the supposedly plagiarized paper with the copied parts highlighted.  It should also be noticed that there exist freely available software that can detect plagiarism automatically: if this was used, details on the query and its outcomes could also be useful.

When a plagiarism case is detected, and Editors concur on its relevance, CEB stops the review process, and mark the paper for summary rejection. The Conference will then send a summary rejection message with a stern comment, referring authors to IEEE policies, and warning of possibly impending further actions (in serious cases of plagiarism, IEEE Central will contact the authors directly). The EiC submits the case, with all evidence available, to an ad-hoc Committee for follow-up actions at IEEE level - as plagiarism usually involve more than one publication, and are of big concern to the Society.

Award candidates

Associate Editors are asked this year to identify which papers in their assignments they would consider as potential candidates for an award. To do so, they will use the "Confidential comments to the Program Committee" textbox in their AE Report form. It is not necessary to identify which award would a paper be a suitable candidate for.

Editors will consider the candidatures from the AEs, and will filter them in the light of their technical expertise, broader scope and editorial experience. Roughly speaking, ten candidates should be nominated in each profile.

Editors will communicate their candidates to the EiC, who will pass the info to the Senior Program Committee for the actual selection of finalists for each award.

Editor Endorsement of AE reports

The AE's recommendation, expressed in the report, will be overviewed by the supervising Eds, who will be responsible for checking that the quality standards of the review process (including number and depth of reviews, significance of AE's reports avoiding undecisiveness) have been met. The Eds will issue a brief statement for each recommendation, whereby the correctness and completeness of the revieweing procedure is endorsed.

Editors will also overview and endorse the processing of award candidatures by the AEs.

How to prepare your Endorsement Spreadsheet:
After logging in PaperPlaza as Editor, go to  Tools>Digests> then choose the data you need for the endorsement report, i.e.
Nr., Award, AE, R, R-AE, PgCnt
You will get an .xls file which you can use in a spreadsheet, and add your endorsement comments in new columns.
An example is available here. 

Conflict of Interests

A CEB Editor is deemed to have a conflict of interest in a submitted paper if he or she is a (co-)author of the paper.

Managing Rebuttals

 DUE TO THE EXPECTED HIGH NUMBER OF SUBMISSIONS, THE REBUTTAL TOOL  WILL  BE USED VERY SPARINGLY, IF AT ALL, FOR ICRA 2012.

In a few cases, even two or more reviews are not enough to make a fair and informed report. Though this problem does not happen very frequently (we estimate no more than 20% of submissions), we want that every author is convnced that the best effort has been spent to arrive at a thorough and constructive recommendation. Starting with ICRA 2010, CEB Associate Editors have new tools to go deeper in the discussion of difficult cases:

1) The first is to stimulate reviewers who have diverging views on a paper to read each other's comments, discuss and try to come to a consensus;

2) The second is to let authors know the reviews before the recommendation is made, and ask them to write a short and factual rebuttal comment.

It is up to the Associate Editor to decide whether to use either or both these possibilities. The decision is approved by the supervising Profile Editor, who will also provide assistance and advice.

From the viewpoint of the Editor, the first item above is not technically different from other reports.

The rebuttal system instead is new. Extensive help is available in Paperplaza. Here is a short "storyboard" illustrating how the system of rebuttal works in standard cases.

For ICRA 2010, on November 8, 2009 (or earlier) editors should send a reminder to their Associate Editors that any paper needing rebuttals should be flagged by the AE by making a report and checking the "Need Rebuttal" option

On November 9, 2009 (or earlier) Editors
1) go to Tools>Rebuttals>Manage Decisions
2) click the REVIEW button
3) make a decision for rebuttal of each paper (the system suggests by deafult the AE recommendation)
4) check the box to Apply, hence Submit
5) "Go to" the papers needing rebuttal, click "Advise " in the Submissions Menu, then "GO" for "Request a Rebuttal".
6) Review the email that is generated automatically, hence click the "SEND" button.

After the AEs in their profile have reviewed the rebuttals and made a reassessment (by November 23 or earlier), the Editor will check completion of all recommendations (including papers with rebuttals).

The final step for Editors is to prepare endorsements for all papers (Nov. 23 - Nov. 30) (see HERE).