Submitting a Previously Published Conference Paper

The Robotics & Automation Magazine will consider submissions for which earlier versions of the work may have appeared in an IEEE-sponsored conference proceedings. However, for such submissions, the paper must not be just a mere extension of the conference proceedings paper filling in, e.g., details of proofs or additional corollaries, additional experiments, or more detailed background and narrative. Rather, the journal submission must contain new results of substantive research significance and impact beyond the conference version. The authors must make clear in the text of the paper the importance and research significance of these additional results, including any changes and additions to the original material presented in the conference version. Sources must be indicated during the submission procedure and explicitly cited in the manuscript. If the copyright holder of the conference paper is not IEEE, authors should also be aware of potential infringement in case of major overlap in material with the paper submitted to the Robotics & Automation Magazine. Moreover, keep in mind the style of a conference proceeding is different compared to the magazine-style.

This modified policy is in place to comply with IEEE guidelines on reducing as much as possible the overlap between conference and journal publications archived in IEEEE Xplore, and also to reduce the phenomenon of split citations between the conference and journal versions of the paper. Moreover, the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) now allows for direct publication of a conference paper in an archival journal; authors who may be planning to submit a conference version and later extend it to a journal submission are strongly urged to instead submit their work to RA-L (unless if the new material added to the journal version meets our earlier requirements for research significance and importance).

The Magazine will NOT consider submissions that are currently under review for a conference; such submissions will be returned immediately without review.