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



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Total Creation Expenses

224.0

210.9

253.0

317.4

368.2

424.7

360.6

























Pursvc-XPLORE

8.2

8.4

7.5

5.6

6.1

6.0

6.2

Total Electronic Expenses

8.2

8.4

7.5

5.6

6.1

6.0

6.2

























Commission - Salary Special

0.0

1.1

1.1

1.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

Commission Expense

0.0

2.5

1.6

0.4

2.3

0.8

1.0

Commissions - Shanghai

1.5

0.0

0.0

1.2

0.0

0.0

0.0

Unidentified & Miscellaneous

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

Total Other Expense

1.5

3.6

2.7

2.6

2.3

0.8

1.0

























Rmb Services-BEL

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

Total Reimbursed Services

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0




 



















Total Expense/PurSvc/ReimbSvc

312.1

287.2

340.8

422.9

492.0

545.3

467.5




 



















Total Net

295.1

432.3

390.3

159.7

156.2

124.6

296.7

ITEM

2011A

2012A

2013A

2014A

2015A

2016B

2017B


H. FINANCIAL AND SUBSCRIPTION DISCUSSION
1. Comment on any financial anomalies (if any) which may be evident for the data in Section G.

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.


There is negative income from the category Subscriptions - Corporate and Library Single Copy Sales in 2014 and 2015. The reason for this is unknown.
2. Comment on any subscription anomalies (if any) which may be evident for the data in Section G.

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.


I. COMPLIANCE WITH IEEE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES

The EIC shall have in his/her possession a current copy of the appropriate IEEE manuals regarding policies and procedures for publications. The EIC shall have read and be familiar with all sections of the above documents concerning publications. Please visit the following sites for such documents:

http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/pspb/index.html

http://www.ieee.org/documents/opsmanual.pdf
Comment regarding compliance with the above requirement, and compliance with the individual publication related policies of each document. If this IEEE periodical is compliant, please state so. Otherwise, please describe action plans to come into compliance.
The Transactions is compliant with IEEE policies regarding review and publication of papers.
Starting in 2015, IAS implemented changes intended to support the process proposed by the TAB Conference Publications Committee for ‘marking’ papers in Xplore to give readers the ability to trace papers published on an evolutionary basis either backwards to the original conference paper or forward to a subsequent journal paper; we were disappointed that IEEE chose to not carry this excellent proposal forward to implementation.
In 2016, we implemented procedural changes to comply with the new change in IEEE policy forbidding verbatim republication of conference papers. Since then, this change has been the subject of several of the periodic FAQ messages sent to AEs. In addition, every author receives a submission invitation e-mail, and this change is discussed both in the text of that e-mail and in submission instructions attached to the e-mail.
Authors who submit papers for review through the EiC are sent the following paragraph: ‘Please note that IEEE policy currently prohibits the addition of duplicate papers to Xplore. Since your conference paper has been or will be posted in Xplore as part of the conference record you should update your paper before submitting it for review. Examples of possible updates are improved text, new figures, additional experimental results and/or more recent references. Authors may select the type and amount of updates with two limitations: 1) the conference paper must be added to the references of the updated paper and 2) all authors of the conference paper must be included as authors of the transactions paper except in cases where the omitted author asks to be removed.’.
J. RECOMMENDATIONS FROM PREVIOUS REVIEW OF THIS PERIODICAL

If applicable, list the date of the last IEEE TAB Periodicals review, and include a summary of recommendations made at that time. Describe how each recommendation was met.
The previous PRAC review of the Transactions was in 2012 and contained a number of recommendations:


  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.




  1. 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’




  1. 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.


K. NOTABLE FEATURES

Describe notable features for this periodical, such as special issues, ties to conferences, etc.
In 2011 the Society developed a plan to publish special issues of interest to our members. The first special issue was published as the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of TIA, and was a joint effort with the Power Electronics Society. The second of these special issues was published in Nov/Dec 2015 and entitled ‘Special Issue on Grounding’. The third special issue entitled ‘Special Issue on Fault Diagnosis of Electric Machines, Power Electronics and Drives’ is planned for publication in May/June 2017. A fourth special issue is in the early stages of planning.
The IAS Transactions has an annual feature recognizing the people who participated in the paper review process during the previous calendar year. Reviewers are identified by name, technical committee, affiliation, and location. Reviewers from academia are particularly appreciative of the feature since it allows them demonstrate to their departments that they are active in the greater technical community. In 2016 more than1500 individuals were recognized for their service as reviewers.
Since 2015 authors of papers published in the regular issues of the IAS Transactions have included the DOI of the original conference paper in ScholarOne Manuscripts. It is hoped that someday the DOI’s will allow users of Xplore to find updated versions of conference papers.
The six issues of the 2016 IAS Transactions include papers derived from 56 conferences sponsored or co-sponsored by IAS. IAS requires the participation of IAS members in the organization of those conferences and in the selection of papers sent for review for possible publication in the IAS Transactions and Magazine. The conferences are held in a wide variety of locations around the world to minimize the travel expenses of individuals who are interested in publishing papers in the IAS Transactions or Magazine.

L. FUTURE PLANS

Describe future plans for this periodical, including plans to reduce backlog, upcoming special issues, etc.

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.


M. SELF ASSESSMENT

This section provides an opportunity for self-assessment of this periodical.
1. Please list the following JCR indices available for the past 5 years starting from the most recent year: Impact Factor with and without self-citations, Citation Half-Life, Immediacy Index, Eigenfactor and Article Influence Score for this periodical. Please comment on the position and trends for this periodical’s JCR indices.



Year

Impact Factor

(regular, with self-citations)

Impact Factor (w/o self-citations)

Citation

Half Life

Immediacy Index

Eigen-factor

Article Influence

Score

Articles Published

2015

1.901

1.436

>10

0.223

0.01736

0.781

551

2014

1.756

1.431

>10

0.198

0.01646

0.817

435

2013

2.046

1.797

>10

0.178

0.01606

0.802

281

2012

1.672

n/a

>10

0.207

0.01547

0.778

227

2011

1.657

n/a

>10

0.266

0.0128

0.670

256

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.


There is an active debate underway within IAS on the issue of impact factor. This debate was triggered by authors from academia who reported that they were being encouraged by their institutions to seek publication in Journals with higher impact factor. The heart of the discussion is the question of whether impact factor is something that IAS Publications should attempt to manipulate, or if it is a metric that provides insight into the nature of the technologies we publish. We are aware that some publications have been taking active steps to manipulate impact factor. At this point, the outcome of the debate within IAS is not known. The TAB PRAC committee guidance in this regard would be helpful.
2. Please complete the information below regarding IEEEXplore usage in terms of total yearly “Usage” (or paper “Downloads”) and IEEE download-based ranking for this periodical. The total count is readily available in the columns “SUM by Pub” and “RANK in Periodicals” at http://statistics.ieeexplore.ieee.org/report/external/index.html for each review year Usage by Publication → Usage for IEEE Publications IEEE Xplore Statistics for , IEEE Periodicals, order by Title. Please comment.






2016 (June)

2015

2014

2013

2012

SUM by Pub/RANK in Periodicals

349,015/17

691,563/14

661,501/17

598,111/18

592,219/18


3. Please compose a narrative to reflect your S/C viewpoints on this periodical; in so doing, cite specific examples of strengths and weaknesses.
The main strength of the Transactions is its applications orientation. Inputs come from many diverse industries where electrical/electronics is not the primary thrust (e.g. petroleum and chemical, mining, cement, automotive, etc.), but where electrotechnology is critical to successful and profitable operation. The Transactions provides a forum where successful applications developed in one industry can be applied in another. It also provides a venue for a cross-disciplinary synergy in the areas of power devices, controls, machines, and drives, all with an industrial-applications bent. In the area of electrostatic applications the Transactions has no other domestic competitor. The equivalent Japanese journal is not published in English and the Journal of Electrostatics is at least an order of magnitude more expensive. Finally, it is truly a transnational publication; about 70% of the authors are from outside of the US.
The Journal faces two major challenges which are actually a subset of the family of issues facing the Society
1) Difficulty in obtaining qualified reviewers for the all of the technical areas within the Scope of the Transactions, and particularly within some Technical Committees within the Society. With a limited number of reviewers, it will inexorably take longer to review papers.

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.


4. In this subsection, please add some commentary on what your targets and goals are on several metrics you deem to be important for this periodical with regard to timeliness and quality. For example, such quality benchmarks could be number of submissions, target acceptance rates, target citation metrics, and so forth, whereas timeliness benchmarks could be target review period (in months), target sub-to-print (in months), and so forth. Feel free to add any other benchmarks that you believe are important. In the next review (presumably in approximately five years), you will be measured against these self-defined benchmarks.
Targets:
Increase the percentage of authors from Region 9 from 5% to 7%.

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.

It must be understood that these initiatives were designed to promote IAS as a whole, not just IAS Publications. In addition, these efforts have required some investment by the Society, both in the form of startup funding for IAS Chapters, and the expenses of holding IAS Executive Board meetings at various locations in the Region. Our basic strategy is to first establish IAS as a viable institutional home for engineers in the Region, with the expectation that will eventually lead to more involvement by those engineers in various IAS activities, including publications. However, we are realistic enough to understand that this strategy will take time to yield results. In addition, we also recognize that there are potential barriers to penetration in the Region that are beyond our control, including both economic and geopolitical factors.
Increase impact factor from 1.8 to 2.1. Retain Citation Half Life above 10 years.

  • 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.

We are very proud of the fact that the citation half-life of IAS Transactions is at the highest level reported in the Journal Citation Report. This metric highlights the value of IAS Transactions as a journal of application practice. When combined, these metrics reflect the unique strength of IAS as a Society that engages in research that is focused on practical applications in industry.
Maintain the acceptance rate at or below 60%.

  • 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.

IAS is comprised of twenty uniquely different communities. We have noted that there are differences in the internal acceptance rates within these communities. One observation is that some of the communities which sponsor their own conferences often have a higher acceptance rate. This is to be expected; communities that are more selective in choosing the papers to be presented at a conference will naturally have a higher measured acceptance rate than the Society as a whole simply because they do a better job of vetting papers before they are presented, therefore resulting in an overall increase in the quality of papers that are subsequently submitted for the formal peer review process. However, to be clear, the pre-conference vetting process is not done under the auspices of IAS Publications, and we do not have access to information that would allow us to ‘adjust’ our overall Society acceptance rate to reflect pre-presentation rejections.
The other issue is more subtle. We believe that there is a tendency in communities that represent a narrow technology niche to also have a higher acceptance rate. We are acutely aware of the concern about active collusion between authors, reviewers and Associate Editors in these niche areas, but have no reason to suspect that anything like that is going on. But the fact remains that where the technical activity is confined to a fairly small number of individuals, there is a natural tendency for a few people to be identified as leaders in the field, and if those individuals also comprise the bulk of the author pool, there is a natural tendency for the acceptance rate to be elevated.
5. Please compose a numbered list of what you consider to be “Best Practices” of processes in place that you feel give you an advantage in terms of competitive positioning in the marketplace (for example, practices that affect timeliness and quality); the PRAC may eventually use this list to pass along best practices to other IEEE S/Cs

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?

IAS Publications: 75.36% said somewhat regularly to regularly

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

IAS Publications: 75.92% said satisfied to very satisfied

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).



N. PRAC REMARKS REGARDING THE TRANSACTIONS.


  • 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.

  • 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


O. PRAC RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE TRANSACTIONS.


  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The official scope of the transactions should be publicized in the Society/Publication webpage.


P. PERIODICAL FEEDBACK TO IEEE

(To be completed by Periodical Leadership)


S/C# 034

Mo/Yr Feb/2017



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