Yes, the page limit is strict. First submissions should be no more than 18 pages to allow space for reviewer recommendations and biographies in the final file. Final Regular submissions may be a maximum of 20 pages long in Transactions format (see Manuscript Preparation for more details on the format).  For the final version of accepted regular papers, a mandatory page charge (see below) applies to each page beyond 12, up to a maximum of 20 pages.

No appendices or other materials can extend outside the manuscript file. Multimedia attachments cannot be used to circumvent the page limit.

Yes, if the paper incorporates substantial improvements over the previous conference publication.  This previous publication needs to be referenced in the submission.

No, this is unacceptable. This is considered a dual submission. A paper should only be under consideration at either T-RO or a conference, not both. Papers that are accepted to T-RO will have the opportunity to transfer to a conference.

There is no such deadline. For accepted papers, the reviewing process often takes 6 months or more. 

The paper must be transferred within 270 days of acceptance. Authors may not request any acceleration or delay of the review process based on these time windows.

The invitation to present at a conference is in the author’s workspace in PaperCept after acceptance of the paper. Eligible papers may only be presented at one conference.

No. You should submit to T-RO only a stable final version of your manuscript, just like you do with other journals. Incremental updates are typically not allowed by journal manuscript management systems.

No, T-RO is an electronic-only publication.

Yes, T-RO will be indexed in the major journal databases, as for all IEEE publications. At this time, T-RO is indexed in Scopus and Clarivate. In 2025 T-RO received an impact factor of 11.1.

Yes. T-RO is Hybrid Open Access (OA): authors can elect to make a paper freely accessible to everyone, if the author pays an open access fee.  This option is made available upon acceptance of the paper.  Whether a paper will be OA or not is not known during the review process and does not affect the process.

Authors can also post pre-prints publicly to approved not-for-profit third party’s such as ArXiv or TechRxiv, as explained in the Posting Preprints under Information for Authors.

No, it is not possible to re-open the transfer option for a given conference after it has closed. There are no exceptions.

Yes, as soon as IEEE provides the moderately edited version, this will replace the preprint camera-ready PDF.

There is no minimum page length in any RAS Journals. You can read more about paper types and page limits on the Information for Author’s page.

Yes. The IEEE recognizes that many authors share their unpublished manuscripts on public sites. Authors are supposed to include a specific statement for preprints that this work has been submitted to IEEE. The statement “This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.” implies that this exact version has been submitted. Thus the submitted and arxiv version should be identical.

Once manuscripts have been accepted for publication by IEEE, an author is required to post an IEEE copyright notice on the preprint. Upon publication, the author must replace the preprint with either 1) the full citation to the IEEE work with Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or a link to the paper’s abstract in IEEE Xplore, or 2) the accepted version only (not the IEEE-published version), including the IEEE copyright notice and full citation, with a link to the final, published paper in IEEE Xplore.

See details here: https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/publishing-ethics/guidelines-and-policies/policy-posting-your-article/

Similarly, videos and other multimedia attachments can be posted online e.g., through YouTube, in advance of publication. Once the video or multimedia material is published, the full citation to the IEEE materials must be provided along with the posted materials.

All citations must go to the T-RO paper only: you want to avoid splitting your citations and, by so doing, hurt your h index etc. You will be able to download the exact citation from the T-RO page on Xplore directly in most bibliography formats.

In your own CV, we recommend that you list a T-RO paper only among your journal papers. You may add a note to this citation such as e.g. “The contents of this paper were also selected by ICRA’16 Program Committee for presentation at the Conference”. Alternatively, you may have an additional list of Oral Presentations at Conferences (distinct from the list of Papers in Conference Proceedings) where you list the talk as such, possibly adding details such as e.g. the acceptance rate of the Conference.

This situation should not occur. If there is intellectual property contained in the paper, authors should complete the patenting process either before they submit the paper or within two months of the initial submission. Authors should handle any intellectual property issues well ahead of time. Delaying publication of an accepted paper negatively affects T-RO’s submission-to-publication timeline and results in additional work for our volunteers and staff. 

Please see the IEEE Style Manual, page 6, regarding the options for “Equally contributed authors” and “Co-first authors”.

No. T-RO papers are limited to 20 pages, including reviewer responses and author biographies and images. Even if the paper becomes longer in order to respond to reviewers’ comments, authors are responsible for editing their paper such that it fits into the 20-page maximum allowance. Multimedia materials (i.e. videos) are the only extra material allowed. Datasets can be posted online and cited by URL in the references. For more information on Datasets visit the Information for Authors page under Multimedia.

The IEEE does not require individuals working on a thesis to obtain a formal reuse license. However, you must follow the citation requirements described in the IEEE Author Center under “Can I use my Published Article in My Theses?“

To volunteer to be an AE, please fill out the AE self-nomination form.

To volunteer to be a reviewer, please contact please complete the Reviewer self-nomination form.

The acceptance rate is calculated as the number of “Accept” decisions issued divided by the total number of decisions issued. The T-RO rate is typically is around 20% acceptance.

If your manuscript is currently a pre-print, you can request corrections when you receive the galley proofs. If the proofs have already been approved and finalized, then the text of the article cannot be changed, but it is possible to publish an erratum if it is deemed appropriate after editorial review (see example here). You can read more about requesting an erratum within the IEEE Author Center.