Information to Authors

The IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS is a bimonthly periodical that began as a quarterly in 1996 as a joint publication of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division, and ASME Design Engineering Division. The aim of the present TRANSACTIONS is to establish a high-quality archival journal which presents the state of the art, recent advances and practical applications of mechatronics. Its scope encompasses all practical aspects of the theory and methods of mechatronics, the synergetic integration of mechanical engineering with electronic and intelligent computer control in the design and manufacture of industrial products and processes. The covered ten technical areas included are:

The bimonthly Transactions publishes Regular Papers, Short Papers, and Letters.  Regular Papers publish of significant research and development in the technical areas listed above. Short papers usually describe a single result, experiment, or technique of general interest for which a short treatment is appropriate.  Letters are brief technical notes, comments on published papers and corrections to papers. Special papers (tutorials, surveys, and perspectives on the art, advances, theory and practice of mechatronics) are solicited. Unsolicited special papers are welcome, but prospective authors should contact the Editor-in-Chief before submitting such papers. Manuscripts submitted for consideration should report on new results. Authors should pay particular attention to documenting their work in relationship to the known literature, and should limit paper length eight TRANSACTIONS pages without impairing quality. Readers are encouraged to submit Letters to the Editor-in-Chief. Letters are typically summaries of important results to be published later at greater length; remarks on, or extensions to, material already published, or problem challenges.  Submission of material will be construed as indicating that the material has not been copyrighted or published, and not simultaneously under consideration for publication elsewhere, unless explicit notice to the contrary is given.  All papers will be reviewed, and the results will be forwarded to the authors. When a paper is accepted for publication, the author will be asked to furnish the text of the final manuscript electronically to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmech-ieee; the originals of all figures and tables; list of figure captions; a signed IEEE Copyright Form; and a biography and photograph of each author.

Procedure for Submission of a Manuscript

Submit the "PDF file" of the manuscript to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmech-ieee with abstract, references, and illustrations, to the Editor-in-Chief of the TRANSACTIONS. Indicate on the cover page whether your contribution is primarily a regular or short paper, which technical area you prefer for review, and from three to five keywords. The Editor-in-Chief will forward the manuscript to one of the Technical Editors. The reviewers, as designated by the Technical Editor, will complete the review process of the manuscript. Each copy should be accompanied by the complete set of (not the original) figures (of which there should be not more than 10), and regular papers are limited to eight Transactions pages and short papers four Transactions pages. Also, refer to Information for Authors, found at

http://www.ieee-asme-mechatronics.org  (or in China, use http://aimrl.gatech.edu/TMech/Index-TMech.htm)

Length and Style of Manuscript

1.  Manuscripts should be submitted in a double column format using an IEEE style file (downloadable from

http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/authors/transjnl/index.html#template).

       Regular papers are limited to eight Transactions pages and short papers four Transactions pages, with mandatory page charges imposed on extra pages beyond eight pages up to twelve pages for regular papers and beyond four pages up to six pages for short papers. Excessively long papers may be rejected without review. Papers requiring significant major revisions will be rejected. If the author resubmits an appropriate revision within six weeks, the paper retains its original submission date.

2.  The first manuscript page should contain author name(s), affiliation(s), and a corresponding author's address, phone/fax number, and e-mail address. If the corresponding author will be away for a length of time, please include an alternative contact.

3.  The paper should be written in correct English, and convey ideas of importance to the mechatronics community. Please write the paper so it can be useful to both the expert and neophyte. The references should help the neophyte expand his knowledge of the field.

4.   Provide a carefully worded abstract of a maximum of 200 words including what is the problem or topic discussed; what is the scope of its treatment; and what is the author's unique approach or important contributions.   Original prints for photographs, figures, and tables are required for an accepted paper. They should be black on white paper and heavy enough to remain legible after reduction.

5.   Succeeding pages should contain, in order, the body of the paper, acknowledgements, references, biography, and figure captions on separate sheet. All pages should be numbered with the first page being the title-abstract page.

6.   References should be complete and follow IEEE style: Style for Papers: Author (with initials first), title, journal title, volume number, inclusive page numbers, month, year. Style for Book: Author, title. Location of publisher: year, page, or chapter number, if desired.

Procedure for Submitting a Letter

All the above apply to correspondence items with the following exceptions:  Letters are limited to two Transactions pages, with mandatory page charges imposed on extra pages beyond two pages up to three pages.  Letters should not contain more than three figures, and should have an abstract of not more than 80 words.

Page Charges

After a paper has been accepted, the author's organization will be requested to pay a page charge per printed page to cover part of the publication cost. The author will receive 100 reprints without covers if the page charge is honored at the amount of US$110 per page. A mandatory over-length page charge of US$200.00 per page will be imposed on each page over the first eight pages for Regular papers, on each page over the first four pages for Short papers, and on each page over the first two pages for Letters, counted using the final print typeset pages not the manuscript pages. This mandatory over page charge is a prerequisite for publication.

Copyright

It is the policy of IEEE to own the copyright to the technical contributions it publishes on behalf of the interests of the IEEE, its authors, and their employers, and to facilitate the appropriate reuse of this material by others. To comply with the U.S. Copyright Law, authors are required to sign an IEEE copyright transfer form before publication. This form, a copy of which appears annually in the first issue of this Transactions, returns to authors and their employers full rights to reuse their material for their own purposes.

Final Submission on Electronic Form

The following are the general guidelines for submission of electronic media by authors whose papers have been accepted. A source file of the main document and figures must be uploaded. Acceptable source file formats for the main text are Tex, LaTex and Word. Color in print costs $1045.00 for each block of 4 color pages, and an additional $62.50 per color figure, and color on IEEE Xplore (greyscale in print) is free of charge. Generally, we assume that an author with color figures is choosing color on the web only unless they specify. Acceptable source files for figures are tiff, ps, eps, ppt, excel and Word. You do not need to submit separate figure files if you have submitted a Word file with the figures embedded as your main file, as long as the figures are publication quality.  Authors may use the Graphics Checker tool at http://graphicsqc.ieee.org/ prior to submission to check figure quality. JPEG files are permitted for author photos ONLY. Any figures submitted in JPEG or PNG cannot be processed. Additionally, a pdf of the manuscript that exactly matches the source files should be uploaded. Please try to submit pdfs created with Acrobat v6 or lower. Any changes made to the manuscript after acceptance must be incorporated into your final files. All final file submissions should be correct and complete; you will not be able to modify the submission after it has been submitted. Additionally, all author and co-author information should be updated in Manuscript Central prior to the submission of final files. Failure to provide complete and accurate author information in the system may result in publishing delays. The accepted style of this Transactions should be followed as much as possible. An IEEE LATEX style file, IEEEtran.sty, is obtainable by authors who e-mail a request tohelp@ep.ieee.org. Style guidelines can also be found in the tools for authors on the IEEE website at

 http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/authors/transjnl/index.html.

The following points are important to remember when submitting electronic manuscripts (compuscripts) in TEX or LATEX: Include all macros (\def) that are required to produce your document; IEEE TRANSACTIONS style dictates a 21-pica (3.5-in) column width. If in doubt, don't hesitate to ask help@ep.ieee.org.  The instructions for uploading the final files will be sent in the acceptance email letter.

Abstract Description and Specification

The abstract must be a concise yet comprehensive reflection of what is in your article. In particularn order for an abstract to be effective when displayed in IEEE Xplore® as well as through indexing services such as Compendex, INSPEC, Medline, ProQuest, and Web of Science, it must be an accurate, stand-alone reflection of the contents of the article. To assist you authors with writing good abstracts, IEEE provides an   Abstract Description and Specification.  Please download and follow this specification when submitting final manuscript.

Graphical Abstract Description and Specifications

In  an effort to enhance IEEE Xplore®, a Graphical Abstract can be displayed along with traditional text. The Graphical Abstract should provide a visual summary of the findings of the article by means of an image, animations, movies, or audio to help make clear the point of the article. To assist authors with providing graphical abstracts to be displayed with their articles, IEEE provides a Graphical Abstract Description and Specification.  Please download and follow this specification when submitting your manuscript.

Questions related to Published Conference Papers<

Papers in both conference proceedings and journals are now widely available on line. To cope with this rapidly changing trend, many societies and journals introduce new policies to discourage multiple submissions including re-publishing conference papers in journals. Questions related to published conference papers were discussed in AIM2009 TMech Editorial meeting. In general, TMech follows the IEEE guidelines on this:

A new TMech submission for which an earlier version appears in the previous proceedings should be substantially different from a previous conference publication. At a minimum, the difference might be in the form of additional explanation, experiments, and discussion. In the case that the conference and journal publishers are different; the author should be sure that the first copyright agreement to allow the material to be reused. If it does not, the author should get the required permission from the conference publisher to reuse text and/or figures.

Referencing Recently Published and Forthcoming TMech Papers

Before submitting your (original, revised or resubmit) paper, please review recent and forthcoming papers published in TMech, and include relevant references that are appropriate in your paper.  When referencing an accepted forthcoming paper (without pagination) in your paper for review purposes, please cite the DOI number and the first publication date of the paper.  Once your paper is accepted, please revise your references to include the pagination of previously cited forthcoming paper before submitting your final manuscript.  It is important to TMech that all papers refer recent articles to establish the context of latest research contributions; this will better serve our community of mechatronics.  Recent and forthcoming TMech papers can be found at the web address: 

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=3516,

You may also find the following links useful for survey of published TMech papers relevant to your paper: <

Author Names in Native Languages (pdf)

IEEE supports the publication of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) author names in the native language alongside the English versions of the names in the author list of an article. For more information, please visit the IEEE Author Digital Tool Box at the following URL:

Inquires

All technical correspondence relating to publications should be sent to the EIC, Professor Okyay Kaynak:

 UNESCO Chair on Mechatronics

Editor-in-Chief, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics