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Publication of IFAC Meeting Papers

In announcements for IFAC meetings, the IFAC copyright policy for submitted papers is summarized. It includes the statement:

"Any paper submitted for an IFAC event is automatically considered for publication in the IFAC Journals."

In order to prevent any misinterpretation, a further explanation of the procedures involved in publishing IFAC meeting papers in Control Engineering Practice (CEP) is given below.

The statement does not mean that all papers submitted for IFAC meetings will be formally reviewed for possible publication in CEP. Instead, application-oriented papers of high quality and general interest are recommended by meeting organizers and/or Editors for further review and rapid evaluation by the CEP staff. These recommendations are made quickly on the basis of the preliminary reviews required to select papers for the meeting programme. (Click here for more information about CEP's review criteria.) Of course, these recommendations are delayed until after the meeting has been held, and papers which are not presented at the meeting will not be recommended. (However, authors may send meeting papers for possible publication in CEP, either before or after the meeting is held, without a recommendation, using the procedure described below.)

If you wish to have your paper considered individually for possible publication in CEP, then please follow the steps outlined below:

• Submit the paper following the instructions on the submission website (www.elsubmit.com/esubmit/conengprac);
• State clearly in an accompanying letter that the paper has been accepted for/presented at an IFAC event;
• Give the name of the event.

You may also send an expanded version of an event paper for consideration. In that case:

• Prepare the expanded manuscript in single-column, double-spaced format (LaTeX users may use the standard elsart style file).
• Manuscripts should be prepared according to the order: Title, Author(s) name(s), Address(es), Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Body, Conclusion, Acknowledgements, References, Appendices, Figure captions, Figures, Table captions, Tables.
• Submit the paper following the instructions on the submission website (www.elsubmit.com/esubmit/conengprac).
• Give the name of the IFAC event at which the original is to be/was presented.

Note that if your submitted paper does not appear to meet the standard typical of Control Engineering Practice, it may be returned immediately with appropriate comments.

For further information please contact CEP's Editor-in-Chief:

Professor A.H. Glattfelder
Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zürich / ETL K 22.3, CH-8092 Zürich, Switzerland.
Tel: +41 1 632 5300
Fax: +41 1 632 1211
E-mail: glatt@aut.ee.ethz.ch
Main journal website for online access to published papers

Aspects considered by reviewers of papers for Control Engineering Practice

The questions listed below appear on the CEP Review Form, and are considered by the reviewers and editor when assessing papers for possible publication. Authors may, therefore, find it useful to bear them in mind when preparing papers for submission.

1. Is there an immediate "appeal" to a practising industrial engineer? Is the title explicit, attractive and interesting? Is the abstract clear and to the point, stressing both the specific application and the generic aspects of the work?
2. Does the Introduction clearly state the field of application?
3. Is there real evidence of the practical industrial benefits of the technologies/methods introduced, e.g. where they were applied, and what improvements resulted? Does the Conclusion state these clearly? Work using simulations should have been properly validated for a real process. (Papers which are purely theoretical will be sent back to the authors after the preliminary assessment, and without further review.)
4. Are there generic aspects which make the work applicable beyond a narrow range of applications? Are these clearly brought out in the paper, so as to broaden its readership?
5. Is the paper correct technically?
6. Is there some aspect, in either theory or application, which is new or innovative?
7. Is the paper intelligible by, but non-trivial to, a practising professional engineer in the field of intended application?
8. Is the paper intelligible by, and of some relevance to, practising professional engineers in other fields?
9. Is the paper easy to read, i.e.
   • Is it to the point?
   • Is it grammatically and semantically simple and correct?
   • Are the figures, graphs, etc., clear, explicit and properly labelled?
   • Are the mathematics essential? Enough detail should be given so that numerical examples can be reproduced exactly, but mathematical proofs should be referenced, rather than spelt out in tedious detail.
   • Are the references complete, and relatively easy to obtain?
   • Is the length appropriate? Most papers will tend to be between 5 and 10 pages in length (final journal article), but shorter or longer papers are acceptable if their lengths are appropriate to their contents.
10. Survey/review papers should be authoritative and of high quality.
11. Finally,
    • Would the paper justify the time spent by a busy person in reading it?
    • Would the reviewer, or reader, learn something from it?

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