Tab periodicals Committee Periodicals Review and Advisory Committee (prac) Report for the ieee transactions on Industry Applications Date of Review

The number of pages published in the Transactions increased by 54% in 2014 and continued to increase in 2015 and 2016. As a result publication expenses have risen faster than revenue and net income has decreased. Once the page count stabilizes the net revenue should recover to some extent.

The subscription fee for the hard copy of the transactions has been increased at a rapid rate in recent years in an attempt to drive the number of print copies ordered by members to zero. To date there has been a small reduction in the number of print copies sent to members.

1. 
   PRAC recommends that IAS formulate a policy to handle transition of the editorial manager, an essential component, as presented, to the successful implementation of the IAS review and decision system.
   

Response: The term used by IAS for ‘editorial manager’ is Manuscript Administrator. The Manuscript Administrator trains the Editors and Associate Editors in the use of ScholarOne, assists authors who have issues using ScholarOne, and prepares reports to show performance of various aspects of the paper review process. The transition plan is similar to that of the Editor-in-Chiefs of the Transactions and Magazine, which is identification of candidates, review of candidates by the Chair of the Publications Department, and ratification of a candidate by the IAS Executive Board.

2. 
   Add an official time restriction to “papers under revision”. Timeliness table shows papers still in the process from 2008, 2009, and 2010. A time restriction with forced withdrawal will clear this up.
   

Response: Authors are allowed 30 days to revise and resubmit papers. Papers that are not revised prior to the revision deadline, and for which the author does not request an extension, are reclassified as ‘withdrawn’

3. 
   The main recommendation of PRAC is that IAS construct a plan to move the manuscript submission, content and review process more in line IEEE Societies standard procedures. The principle component of this migration is a rethinking of the presentation first format that causes the concerns raised in Section N.
   

Response: The presentation first policy has been reviewed and reaffirmed by the IAS Executive Board several times since 2012. The policy serves several important purposes: it provides papers which have been vetted and improved through the conference publication process, it helps to minimize the number of paper submissions which are out of scope for the Society, it helps the editor to direct each paper to the group of reviewers who are best able to assess the technical merits of the paper, and it provides an incentive for conferences and authors to strengthen their ties with IAS and IEEE. The last point is arguably one of the reasons the number of IAS members has increased 28% from 2010 to 2015. IAS does not believe that abandoning its traditional practice of requiring presentation before publication is in the best interest of the Society, its members, or constituents.

The Transactions is published six times per year. In recent years some volumes have contained over 900 pages. One option under consideration is transitioning to a monthly publication. This option would reduce the size of each volume and potentially decrease the delay between electronic publication and print publication.

The impact factor of our Transactions varied within a relatively small range from 2011-2015. On the other hand, the consistently long citation half-life is an indication of the value of the IAS Transactions as a reference journal in the long term, and may be a reflection of the number of papers based on industrial experience.

2) Difficulty in getting industrial authors to submit papers for publication. Industrial practitioners generally write papers for the purpose of presentation at conferences and often find that their managers are not willing to allow them to devote additional time to expanding those papers for republication. For this reason, the recent IEEE policy change forbidding verbatim republication of conference papers in Journals such as Transactions is a significant disincentive for industrial authors. This means that many non-academic authors from industry are discouraged from seeking publication in Transactions, and yet it is those authors who are responsible for the bulk of the strongly application-oriented material that IAS is seeking. Fortunately, many industrial practitioner authors do still value participation in IAS conferences, and are personally motivated to pursue publication in Transactions even without the support of their employers.

Increase the percentage of associate editors from Region 9 from 3% to 5%.

• 
  Along with the rest of IEEE, IAS is struggling to expand our activities in Region 9, measured both in the number of papers that we receive from that region, and the number of Associate Editors who reside in that area. As we have noted elsewhere in this document, one of the major challenges is that papers originating in Region 9 tend to target local audiences, which means that they are usually written in either Spanish or Portuguese. Among the initiatives we have undertaken to address the needs of Region 9 include:
  
  • 
    We have established cosponsorship relationships with several key Region 9 conferences including the IEEE/IAS International Conference on Industry Applications – INDUSCON (Brazil), the Power Electronics Education Workshop (Brazil), and the IEEE Workshop on Power Electronics and Power Quality Applications (Colombia). In addition, the IAS Petroleum and Chemical Industry Committee has actively pursued creation of regional technical conferences around the world, with good success in both Brazil and Mexico.
    
  • 
    IAS has also had some success in stimulating interest via membership growth of IAS Chapters in the region.
    
  • 
    There are isolated instances of active authors in selected areas (examples both mining applications and power converter/drives technology in Chile, research into lighting technology in Brazil, and power control technology in Ecuador) who want to share their work with scholars outside the region. We have been fortunate that they have identified IAS as a vehicle to accomplish their objectives.
    

• 
  IAS has been treading very carefully around the issue of manipulation of papers to drive impact factor or other publication metrics. It would clearly be inappropriate to issue instructions to authors to add references specifically for the purpose of enhancing the impact factor of Transactions. But at the same time, a number of our authors are clearly dissatisfied with the reported impact factor of IAS Transactions in comparison with some of the other IEEE publications. Our efforts have been focused in two areas:
  
  • 
    We have been encouraging authors to check that cited references reflect the most recent, peer reviewed versions of the chosen references. We also remind AEs that it is against policy to ask authors to consider citing papers published in IAS Transactions. We do not routinely count citations, nor do we give authors specific instructions to cite papers published in Transactions.
    
  • 
    We have noted that papers tend to be returned to authors for revisions more frequently, and each revision cycle is an additional opportunity for authors to update citations. A potential upside from encouraging authors to revise conference papers to address the IEEE republication policy will provide additional opportunities to cite recent Transactions papers.
    

• 
  Publication leaders in IAS have the perception that our overall Society average measured acceptance rate is a bit high. Of course, there is a paradox in that our policy requires that each paper be decided individually, on its own merits, which eliminates any possibility of imposing a target acceptance rate. Also, our ‘presentation first’ policy means that the author of every paper should have received input from the audience at the time of presentation, which should lead to some improvement in the paper when it is finally submitted for review. We don’t really know what the ideal acceptance rate should be, but we suspect that it should be different from what it would be if we did not have a ‘presentation first’ policy.
  

1) Use of Sister Society agreements to publish joint publications in areas of overlap with other IEEE Societies. IAS participated in five joint IEEE publications in 2016: Transactions on Smart Grid, Transactions on Sustainable Energy, Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics, Electrification Magazine, and Transactions on Transportation Electrification.

2) Periodic surveys to ensure that the publications are meeting the needs of the members. Some results from the 2016 survey related to publications are:

• 
  Question: How often or not did you participate in each of the following?
  

• 
  Question: How satisfied or not are you with each of the following as each relates to IAS?
  

3) Sponsorship of co-sponsored conferences that encourage other technical organizations to participate in IEEE/IAS activities; e.g. the International Conference on Electric Machines and Systems organized by the IEEJ Power and Energy Society (Japan), The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers, and the China Electrotechnical Society; and the Joint Conference on Electrostatics held every three years in conjunction with the Electrostatics Society of America, the Institute of Electrostatics Japan, the International Electrostatics Assembly (IEA) and the Societe Francaise d’Electrostatique (SFE).

• 
  To address the specific comment made in regard of impact factor, according to PSPB 8.2.1D.9, “An editor or associate editor shall not perform or accept any action that has the sole purpose of increasing the number of citations to influence the bibliometric independent measures of quality or impact of a periodical.”
  
• 
  Please explain why the Citation Half-Life is so long, >10 years. A journal with a long citation half-life generally implies that the papers published are well-fundamental subjects, but less cutting edge. Obviously for a journal such of a more theoretical natures this seems reasonable. But for a publication such as TIA, this seems to be odd. The EiC is asked to look into this issue further for an explanation.
  

• 
  Under Section L. Future Plans, the intent was made to increase the frequency of publication to twelve issues per year. The Society and Publication Committee are advised to carefully assess the financial impact for long-term sustainability before a change is implemented.
  
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  In response to a blue margin note, the periodical insists that the IEEE policy requiring two sets of eyes, in addition to the EiC, in order to prescreen and reject a submission for lack of technical content is being followed.  PRAC has chosen to believe this is the case and thus recommends that the report be accepted by PerCom
  

• 
  According to IEEE regulations and policy, “substantial change” to the conference papers need to be made in order for a journal publication regardless of transactions or magazine publication. As pointed out during the face-to-face meeting, there is no clear instruction posted in Society Publication website. E.g., “IAS Presentation First Policy” webpage provides no referral to the “substantial change” is ever been mentioned. Instruction on how the “substantial difference” is been measured needs to be clearly documented and communicated to the TIA authorships. The EiC and Editorial Board have to maintain proper oversight in this process, in particularly under the “Presentation First policy.” PRAC is looking forward to a positive move to become fully compliant with IEEE policy in term of “publishing conference papers” in TIA.
  

• 
  The distribution of AEs by Regions matches reasonably well with the distribution of society membership by Regions. Given only 4 women out of 135 AEs, please consider to add more women representations.
  

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  Compared to peer IEEE Transactions, the acceptance rate for TIA at roughly 60% is considered very high. The EiC is asked to evaluate its appropriateness.
  
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  The official scope of the transactions should be publicized in the Society/Publication webpage.