IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems: Information for Authors

Scope

The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COGNITIVE AND DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS (TCDS) focuses on advances in the study of development and cognition in natural (humans, animals) and artificial (robots, agents) systems. It welcomes contributions from multiple related disciplines including cognitive systems, cognitive robotics, developmental and epigenetic robotics, autonomous and evolutionary robotics, social structures, multi-agent and artificial life systems, computational neuroscience, and developmental psychology. Articles on theoretical, computational, application-oriented, and experimental studies as well as reviews in these areas are considered.

TCDS is published four times a year. Authors are encouraged to submit papers that disclose significant conceptual, computational, or experimental discovery, technical and practical knowledge, exploratory developments, and applications to both artificial and biological cognitive and developmental systems. The Transactions encourage papers submitted from all areas related to cognitive and developmental systems, including, but not limited to, computer science, engineering, neuroscience, psychology, biology, medicine, and philosophy, emphasizing computational approaches to understanding cognition and development, and experimental studies that make contact with computational approaches.

Publication Timeline

Every effort is made to ensure minimum delay from submission to publication. Authors have a key role to play in minimizing the delay between initial submission and publication, largely by ensuring that manuscripts are of high quality both in terms of content and presentation. Use of a proof-reading service is highly recommended for any authors who are not native English speakers.

When the final version of a manuscript is accepted, it is immediately published electronically on IEEE Xplore and given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), at which time it enters the queue for publication in the paper version. In line with the IEEE's policy on scholarly publishing, authors are also free to archive the PDF of the published paper on their own web-site or institutional repository.

TCDS aims to publish a paper in less than 12 months from the date of its initial submission, and to post it online in IEEE Xplore in less than 6 months from the date of its initial submission.

Types of Contributions

TCDS publishes regular papers, correspondence papers, survey papers and comment papers.

A correspondence paper is manuscript that publishes an original research contribution in a shorter form, as well as a "perspective" that includes insights into issues of wider scope than a regular paper.

A survey paper is well-focused manuscript that puts recent progress into a broader perspective and accurately assesses the limits of existing theories.

A comments paper is a paper commenting on an error one has found in, or a disagreement one has with, a previously published paper. Comment papers should comprise a significant contribution. This could be the correction of a significant error, or correction to empirical findings that may be inconsistent with the original paper, or an extension of the results in a paper that are both significant and concise. The authors of the original paper will be invited to submit a rebuttal.

Review management is primarily under the direction of an associate editor, who will solicit reviews for each submission. The associate editor will ordinarily make a recommendation after receiving three reviews. To avoid delays in processing your paper, please follow these guidelines.

Submission of Manuscripts

We are accepting submissions through Manuscript Central at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee.

All correspondence concerning submissions is between the author, Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Assistant. To submit your paper for consideration, visit the web submission system at Manuscript Central. Here you can create a new account or use an existing one if you have one, and submit your manuscript.

This TRANSACTIONS is devoted primarily to archival reports of work that have not been published elsewhere. Specifically, conference records and book chapters that have been published previously are not acceptable unless and until they have been enhanced significantly. In special circumstances or on exceptional occasions, the editor may deem a contribution noteworthy enough to be exempted from this policy.

Style for Manuscript

The TCDS follows the format standards of the IEEE. The IEEE "Information for Authors" kit (PDF, 755 KB) can be downloaded from: http://www.ieee.org/documents/info_authors_kit.pdf.

Here are some of the general guidelines. A list of 4-5 keywords (index terms) and an abstract (described below) are required for all manuscripts submitted to this journal. A new article is submitted through the Manuscript Central System. The submitted manuscript must be in PDF, and singled-spaced, double column, standard IEEE published format.

All pages should be numbered. Provide an abstract that is a concise yet comprehensive reflection of what is in your article according to the following guidelines:

The abstract must be self-contained, without abbreviations, footnotes, or references. It should be a microcosm of the full article.
The abstract must be between 150-250 words. Be sure that you adhere to these limits; otherwise, you will need to edit your abstract accordingly.
The abstract must be written as one paragraph, and should not contain displayed mathematical equations or tabular material.
The abstract should include three or four different keywords or phrases, as this will help readers to find it. It is important to avoid over-repetition of such phrases as this can result in a page being rejected by search engines.
Ensure that your abstract reads well and is grammatically correct.
Authors are encouraged to put detailed derivations in appendixes.

Page Charges

After a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the author's company or institution will be requested to pay a charge of $110 per printed page to cover part of the cost of publication. Page charges for this Transactions, like those for journals of other professional societies are not obligatory, nor is their payment a prerequisite for publication. The author will receive 100 free reprints without covers if the page charge is honored. Detailed instructions accompany the proofs.

With effect from January 1, 2017,IEEE will impose a mandatory overlength page charge of $200 for each page in excess of 10 for a regular paper, 6 for a correspondence paper, 4 for a comment paper, and 15 for a survey paper. The total manuscript length (excluding supplementary materials) with over-length page charge must be less than 15 pages for a regular paper, 21 pages for a survey paper, 9 pages for a correspondence paper and 6 pages for a comment paper.

Open Access

This publication is a hybrid journal, allowing either Traditional manuscript submission or Open Access (author-pays OA) manuscript submission. Upon submission, if you choose to have your manuscript be an Open Access article, you commit to pay the discounted $1,750 OA fee if your manuscript is accepted for publication in order to enable unrestricted public access. Any other application charges (such as over-length page charge and/or charge for the use of color in the print format) will be billed separately once the manuscript formatting is complete but prior to the publication. If you would like your manuscript to be a Traditional submission, your article will be available to qualified subscribers and purchasers via IEEE Xplore. No OA payment is required for Traditional submission.

Copyright

It is the policy of the IEEE to own copyright to the technical contributions it publishes. To comply with the IEEE copyright policy, authors are required to sign the IEEE Copyright Transfer & Export Control compliance From before publication in either the print or electronic medium. The form is provided upon approval of the manuscript. Author must submit a signed copy of this form with their final manuscripts.

IEEE Preprint Policy

There is often questions about whether it is OK to post preprints of articles under review to arXiv or other preprint servers. Bottom line: it is fine to post to arXiv with certain conditions. The PSPB Operations Manual contains the policies related to posting of preprints of articles submitted to IEEE publications. First, here are some definitions (from p. 83):

a. An author-submitted article is the version originally submitted by the author to an IEEE publication. An author includes a completed IEEE Copyright Form during submission of the article to an IEEE publication and thereby transfers the copyright of the article to IEEE.
b. An accepted article is a version which has been revised by the author to incorporate review suggestions, and which has been accepted by IEEE for publication.
c. The final, published version is the reviewed and accepted article, with copy-editing, proofreading and formatting added by IEEE.
d. E-prints are digital texts of research articles. Electronic preprint is a form of an e-print where an author posts a draft article on the author’s or another web site. For purposes of this definition, a preprint is assumed to be the article in the form prior to submission to the IEEE, at which point copyright is transferred to IEEE. Authors who have submitted articles for publication by the IEEE may be interested in posting various preprint versions of the same article on e-print servers operated by third parties. E-print servers provide authors rapid dissemination of new results, with the opportunity of receiving comments from the peer community and with the opportunity to have a time-stamp associated with the announcement of results.

And now, the relevant policy (from Section (8.1.9, beginning on p. 82):

IEEE seeks to maximize the rights of its authors and their employers to post preprint versions of an article on the author’s personal web site, on a server operated by the author’s employer, or on a server operated by an approved not-for-profit third party as specified in 8.1.9.G.2 below.
IEEE allows its authors to follow mandates of agencies that fund the author’s research by posting accepted versions of their articles in the agencies’ publicly accessible repositories.
IEEE does not restrict the rights of authors to use their IEEE-copyrighted articles in their own teaching, training, or work responsibilities, or those of their institutions or employers. In any preprint version archived by the author after submission, IEEE requires that IEEE will be credited as copyright holder. Upon publication of the work, authors are asked to include the article’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
As indicated in Section 8.1.9.A.4 (above) and amplified in Sections 8.1.9.C through G below, IEEE’s policy for permitting posting of IEEE-copyrighted articles extends only to authors, their employers, approved third-party not-for-profit organizations, and IEEE organizational units. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office maintains a list of not-for-profit third party servers where material submitted to the IEEE may be posted. [The only approved third-party server is arXiv.]

E-PRINTS

Before submitting an article to an IEEE publication, authors frequently post preprints of their articles to their own web site, their employer’s site, or to another server that invites constructive comment from colleagues and provides a publication time stamp. Upon submission of an article to IEEE, an author is required to transfer copyright in the article to IEEE, and the author must update any previously posted version of the article with a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice (as shown in 8.1.9.B). Upon publication of an article by the IEEE, the author must replace any previously posted electronic versions of the article with either (1) the full citation to the IEEE work with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or (2) the accepted version only with the DOI (not the IEEE-published version). IEEE shall make available to each author the preprint version of the article that the author can post and that includes the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), IEEE’s copyright notice, and a notice indicating the article has been accepted for publication by IEEE.

Frequently Asked Questions

Please visit http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/authors/transjnl/faq.html.