A: Indeed, there will be papers in the grey area between these two categories.  If you are only testing an existing idea to see its limits, choose Field Report, otherwise choose Regular Article.  Use your best judgment, and the Editorial Team will help refine your choice if necessary.  The main point here is to put the reviewers in the right frame of mind when evaluating the paper.  As long as you have outlined the contributions of your paper clearly, it will be fine.

A: Due to the soft double-blind policy applied to all IEEE RAS publications, these extended papers must be handled carefully.  We ask that you write your paper without framing it as an extension to your own work.  Instead, refer to your own work as though it is simply another paper from the literature upon which you are building.  If your extension is a novel improvement to the system or algorithm, it can be a Regular Paper, and your conference paper can be one of the baselines to which you compare.  If your extension is to the testing campaign, it can be a Field Report detailing the long-duration testing of the existing system or method from the conference paper.

A: We previously had a category of papers called System Articles, but received many submissions that simply described systems without testing them.  Please consider submitting your paper as a Field Report if it has extensive experimental testing or a Regular Article if the system itself is quite novel.

A:  The point of archival publications is that they will exist for a long time.  Hosting your data on, for example, your lab server, may result in a paper that links to data that are no longer available in a few years when that server becomes obsolete and the people involved in the dataset’s creation have moved on to other roles. IEEE Dataport and similar services were created to avoid this situation.

A: We do not want to archive data that can no longer be accessed easily in the future.  Therefore, having formats that are very likely to be standards or at least very common in the future is the way to go.  For example, image formats such as PNG, TIFF, and JPEG are well-known standards and are fine.  ROS bags are not ideal since the format is less stable and has already changed several times in recent years.  It is the authors’ duty to convince the reviewers that the format they have chosen will persist for several years and, therefore, that the data will remain usable.

A: While it is preferred that you make all your data public for others to reproduce your results for all paper categories, it is only Data Articles that we currently hold to the higher standard of hosting on an archival server because the data are the main contribution of the paper.

A: At T-FR we believe that there are few places in academia where the value of real-world experimentation is not only required but also valued and celebrated.  As such, we try to hold ourselves to each paper having experimental results gathered “in the field”, by which we mean in a challenging, high-fidelity environment that tests the assumptions of the paper.  This being said, we understand that in rare situations there may be practical reasons why the field experiments may be limited.  In these rare cases, we suggest that the authors provide a justification in the attached cover letter explaining the limited experiments.  The EiC, in consultation with the editorial board, will consider this explanation when deciding whether to send the paper for review.  For example, if all of your testing is carried out in a controlled laboratory setting, this would normally not meet the bar for T-FR unless you could provide a very compelling reason why a field test was not possible.