As of January 1, 2025, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE RAS) employs a double-anonymous peer review process for all of its fully sponsored journal publications. A double-anonymous review process, also called double-blind review, means that neither the authors nor the reviewers know each other’s identities. The IEEE RAS double-anonymous process is meant to eliminate personal biases related to factors such as gender, seniority, reputation, and institutional affiliation. Given that the field of robotics often requires papers to include images, schematics, and pictures of robots and devices that may be unique to a specific lab, the IEEE RAS adopts a more flexible approach to the double-anonymous peer review process. While the process aims to anonymize authors and reviewers, it does not restrict authors from including essential images or videos of robots, devices, or setups that are critical for understanding the research and its scientific evaluation. This “soft” version of double-anonymous review ensures that technical clarity and transparency are maintained without compromising the integrity of the review process.

IEEE RAS provides specific guidelines for authors when submitting their work for review. However, these guidelines do not apply to the final submission of papers accepted for publication.

IEEE RAS Guidelines for double-anonymous submissions:

1. Names and affiliations should not be included anywhere in the manuscript, appendix, and supplementary material.
2. Acknowledgments to people or funding agencies should only be included after acceptance of the manuscript.
3. When self-citing their own previous work, authors should avoid expressions such as “In our/the authors earlier work…”. They should rather use neutral expressions such as “In previous work…” or “In related work…” so that one cannot distinguish their own work from the work of others just based on the formulation.
4. The authors should remove any author/affiliation/lab names and logos from figures and videos.
5. The authors should blur faces from people in videos and pictures.
6. The identities of robots do not need to be hidden for unique robots. They are allowed to appear in pictures and videos. However, the individual names of the robots should be hidden from the paper except if it is a widespread robot name (e.g., Nao, Spot,…).
7. The authors should abstain from adding any author information from the submitted files’ metadata. This information is often added automatically from the identity information and can be found in “properties” under the “File” menu in word processors and PDF readers.
8. There should be no links to external websites that reveal identity (e.g., YouTube, GitHub, or authors’ institute pages) or use tools to anonymize them like https://anonymous.4open.science/.
9. Self-citations should be reduced to a minimum.
10. Authors are allowed to use tools such as arXiv. Reviewers should not actively search for those articles to identify authors.

Violations of those rules for material submitted for review can result in the paper being desk rejected. Most of the information mentioned above (except excess self-citations) can be added after the completion of the peer review process and when the manuscript has been accepted for publication.