Highly Cited Emails
The Editor-in-Chief has been reviewing practices from other publishers. This led to the implementation of bi-monthly emails relating to highly cited articles and an alternating bi-monthly email conveying interesting articles titled “editor’s selection”. These are also catalogued on the society webpage. The highly cited papers are selected according to the monthly weighted citations of papers published within the last 1.5 years. Citation reports from Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), Scopus (Elsevier) and Google Scholar divided by the number of months that a publication was available online is used to rank the papers. As the number of citations does not always reflect the quality of a publication, another email is distributed bi-monthly comprising the editor’s selection of interesting articles.

Removal of Major Corrections
Every 5 years, IEEE reviews its periodicals. It was following such a review in 2009 that the previous Editor-in-Chief (Dr Marj Yuhas), performed a Root Cause Analysis on the review process. One outcome of this analysis was to recommend removing the “Major Corrections” route and replacing it with “Reject with a Recommendation to Resubmit.” The intention being to relieve authors of committing to a timeline determined by publication needs and focus on achieving a high level of technical content. As well as improving quality, this helps the journal’s timeliness as it tends to reduce successive cycles of Major Corrections. Although evidence for quality improvement is difficult to quantify, statistics for timeliness have improved. We have reduced the submission-to-publication time down by 29% from 41 weeks to 29 weeks. The IEEE average submission-to-publication time is 33.6 weeks. We are currently undergoing trials of Rapid Post (a form of electronic publication ahead of print). Once fully operational the submission-to-publication time will be below 20 weeks.

IEEE Pre-screening and Editorial Reject Policy
In alignment with IEEE policy, the Editor-in-Chief performs administrative checks and pre-screens for: scope, IEEE style guidelines and policies (for example general formatting and referencing). Manuscripts are checked for length compliance with the various formats (letter, correspondence and full paper). Editorial rejects for technical content and plagiarism are reviewed by two independent Associate Editors. A combined short report is sent back by the Editor-in-Chief explaining why the manuscript has not gone for full review. Authors benefit from prompt feedback and early detection of any errors without having to wait for the full review process to take its course.

When authors resubmit a manuscript it is vital that manuscript changes are clearly marked and a response to reviewer comments is uploaded to Manuscript Central. Changes clearly delineated in a manuscript greatly assist reviewers and help to speed up the review process.

Transactions Moves to Electronic only Print
Following a motion at a recent UFFC society AdCom meeting, it has been decided to move to electronic only publication of the Transactions on UFFC. Print subscriptions have been in long term decline and currently there are fewer than 400 print subscribers. Print subscribers currently pay $40 per annum, however the actual costs per printed copy is $167. It was decided this funding can be better directed at supporting other activities, for example, student activities.

Steven Freear, Editor-in-Chief,
Sevan Harput, Administrative Assistant

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