How to submit a paper

IARIA conferences provide an appropriate forum for the oral presentations and discussions of all accepted papers. When submitting a paper to a conference, it is assumed that, once accepted, at least one author is present at the meeting to orally present the paper. In the event that circumstances unknown at the time of submission or of acceptance of a paper preclude its presentation by an author, arrangements for substitutes should be made. To reduce no-shows to the IARIA events, the advance registration before submitting of the final manuscript is enforced.

All presented papers enter the 'best paper lane' for potentially having an extended version invited for IARIA on-line journals . 

Paper submission is handled electronically by the IARIA site. In order to submit a paper you must follow the steps

• Go the conference page
• Click on “Submit a Paper”
• Fill out the "submission form"; a paper number as well as access information will be sent to you in a notification email
• Use the link from the email to access your paper's record; then use the “Upload” link to select and upload the file with your paper
• Please fill out the information on all the co-authors
• Please use e-mail addresses that represent your affiliations, as opposed to @gmail, @ieee, @acm, etc, e-mail accounts.  
• When a problem must be reported, please send details on the facts, to help the logistics team support you.

Note that registering a submission and uploading a submission are two distinct steps.

Keep the original paper submission sent for review stable; the original submission must not exceed the length of the final version by too much. This will help our committee members provide comments on the exact material to be published and the chairs and the logistics team to select the best papers.

In  any e-mail exchange with the organizers and logistics, please include the following items in the email subject: (i) conference name and the(ii) paper number.

Selection process

Submissions are peer reviewed by 4-6 members of the International TPC (Technical Program Committee). TPC consists of international experts who are leading researchers in the field, working in academia and industry. The comments are intended to drive the authors to provide a better camera-ready or to improve the future submissions, when rejected.

IARIA also provide a dedicated review on the editorial/grammar/punctuation. Before and after the camera-ready version there is a cross-validation of the accuracy of updated version. The last validation is performed on the publisher's site.

Articles that are promising but need more work enter a full second round of review and assisted improvement. The acceptance is based on the reviews and the quality of the submissions. There is no target for the acceptance rate; practically excellent papers are accepted. On average, the acceptance rate after the first revision varies from 27% to 36%, depending on the conference and workshop; the percentage may drop a little after the second revision.

Accepted papers are in two categories: (i) with minor revision, and (ii) with special request for revisions. Accepted papers with special request for revisions are submitted to a second round of revisions.

Papers with very valuable ideas, but in much need of presentation improvements, are given special attention; a TPC member from the IARIA “task force” will be coaching the authors to improve the paper. The final version is again revised by a IARIA member to validate the quality.

Accepted and rejected papers are acknowledged; reviews are sent to the authors in both cases.

Camera-ready versions are validated again on the Publisher site, for accuracy; fraudulent final submissions of substituted or of on purpose unprofessional content will be rejected.

Reviewers are instructed to keep confidentiality on the submissions /either accepted or rejected/; only accepted papers are exposed to the public audience.

Note that while we strive to have 100% accurate information, there is always the possibility of human error. IARIA is not responsible for inaccuracies, typos, or misprints presented online, electronically, in print, or otherwise.

The accept/reject decision for any given submission is final. However, at its discretion, IARIA may reconsider specific works for a reassessment with regards to the accept/reject decision. If deemed necessary by IARIA, a committee will reassess the work and render a final decision. The decision of such committee is final and no further appeals will be possible.

Update as of 2013 events and ongoing:

The submitted works are expected to be scientific in nature, free of politics,religion, or propaganda. Any contribution found to violate this will be removed from the event and publication.

Camera ready formatting guidelines

[for convenience, we keep the submission format as the IEEE two column format]

Camera ready papers are handled by the Publisher production editors and their contractors. Every conference has a link to a document on how to prepare your document for publication. The link is under "Manuscript Preparation". Please follow the steps indicated in that document:

• Open an account using the conference code at that link
• Reformat and validate the format of the camera ready
• Assure the copyright transfer form is finalized as per on-line indication of our Publisher.
  

Authors should prepare an Adobe Acrobat PDF version of their paper. Papers must be in English and follow the format indicated in the Call for Papers.

Extra pages, in a limited number, at additional costs, are possible, as mentioned in the registration form of each conference.

Manuscript preparation details contain information on the paper formatting guidelines. Please follow these guidelines for the paper version to be uploaded on the publication site. The manuscript preparations are available from the specific conference page after the notifications are sent out. 

A good reference site to help preparing with your paper is the formatting rules. Latex templates are also available.

Please carefully follow the editorial rules that are enforced when the camera-ready paper is inspected.

Registration

An accepted paper must be registered, following the registration form posted on the conference site. IARIA registration is “per paper”, this means that each accepted paper must be registered on a separate registration form. If many authors of the same paper intend to attend the conference, a registration is needed for each attending author.

The logistics work and conference services are offered by IARIA via many contractors and the registration fees cover these costs only.

The registration form contains several categories: students, IARIA Fellows, academic, and industry.

When registering, please use the online registration form. Only after the payment transaction succeeds is a paper considered registered.

When paying via the “wire transfer”, make sure the paper ID and the name of the contact author is listed properly on the transfer form at your bank. This is the only way that the sender can be properly identified. In this case, the registration must be initiated early enough to ensure a successful transaction before the registration deadline.

Indexing

Indexing is an old fashion for paper-based articles to locate a given publication; helpful before the digital era. In the digital era, indexing is uselessly duplicating (even multiplying) an already existing information.

Even more, indexing entities are overwhelmed by the requests for indexing and only a tiny fraction of requests [i.e., 3-5%] receive attention, due to lack of personnel. As a result, there is a tremendous backlog in processing the requests for indexing. As there are more than 10,000 subtopics, and a large variety of scientific events, it is impossible to use any quality-based selection criteria, as the indexing entities have no sizable personnel and no top-experts in particular fields either.

Sometimes, indexing is now based on special needs of some (paying) customers of the indexing entities (as fee-based subscribers) and, therefore, is not longer preference-free.

With open indexes, like Google Scholar and others, and with existing free-access digital libraries (ThinkMind, European Union, French Scientific Council, etc.), targeted indexes becomes obviously obsolete in our digital era. Most probably, they will disappear in a few years.

Despite of this evidence, the IARIA publisher still submits the conference and journal proceedings to the appropriate indexing entities (even though they are freely accessible and the conference program are accessible. Some of papers/conferences/journals are indexed by Google Scholar, some by SCOPUS; however, it is outside the target to uselessly keep indexing with all the existing indexes.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee on 'if' and 'when' the events will be indexed, as, barely 3-5% of yearly requests can be handled (backlogs just accumulate)

Visibility index

Visibility index is a metric focusing on online events/publications. Two extensions are considered in the 'visibility index', when compared to other existing metrics:
i) covering several databases and other publications sites,
and
ii) considering the downloads of the published articles (from ThinkMind digital library, www.thinkmind.org)

There are many metrics used to characterize a publication, an event, or a personal contribution, e.g., impact factor, Eigenfactor, R-Factor, Y-Factor, etc. They were all used to estimate an impact, not related to the value of a contribution, but rather to how much it is known.

Note that it is especially difficult, if not impossible, to correlate values expressed in different metrics. Therefore, each metric has a value per see.
Originally, the impact factor was used as an indication of how relevant a publication (journals, conference) is and is based on the references to the articles of that particular publication. The impact factor was designed for print publication references.

As an example, for the impact factor, a standard formula for computation exists; variations of this formula also exist, which lead to a large spectrum of values, for the same event. The standard calculation is very simple: “In a given year, the impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years.[1]"

For example, if a journal has an impact factor of 3 in 2008, then its papers published in 2006 and 2007 received 3 citations each on average in 2008. The 2008 impact factor of a journal would be calculated as follows:
A = the number of times that articles published in that journal in 2006 and 2007, were cited by articles in indexed journals during 2008.
B = the total number of "citable items" published by that journal in 2006 and 2007. ("Citable items" are usually articles, reviews, proceedings, or notes; not editorials or letters to the editor.)
2008 impact factor = A/B.
(Note that 2008 impact factors are actually published in 2009; they cannot be calculated until all of the 2008 publications have been processed by the indexing agency.)”

Visibility index (r)

Citations were the basis on print-only published articles. However, in the digital era, electronic versions are more popular. Therefore, considering article downloads from digital libraries seems a legit extension of the visibility of a contribution on a given community. This makes the reproducibility calculation more difficult, but this considers the digital evolution of publications.

Therefore, a visibility index was defined to capture various facets of digital publications and not only one well-established database/digital library (e.g., ISI Thompson database, SCOPUS database, etc.)

r (|Reference-to {p1, p2,…pk} + |Downloads|}, |Total-of {p1, p2,….pN}|, {D1, D2, …Dm}, T; [t, t’]) --> R+

with

r = |Reference-to {p1, p2,…pk} + |Downloads|} / |Total-of {p1, p2,….pN}|

with pi referring to a paper, over a set of publishing domains, {D1, D2, …Dm}, like digital libraries, web sites, social networks, etc., and  over a time period T.

Considering the Downloads, searching over multiple Domains, and various lengths of the time period leads to different values for the visibility index.

The intent is to capture more accurate statistics, and not to refer to the quality of the content/paper/event/journal.

Any impact factor is subjective, as it is almost impossible to capture all references at a given time, and then continuously update it.

Methodology:
- computed using the formula mentioned above
- from open-access databases, without username/password
- from selected free-based subscription databases, with username/password
- from selected fee-based subscription databases
- selected posting sites (university, personal web sites, blogs, social media, etc.)
- downloads from free-access www.thinkmind.org digital library
- updated every year
- based on the last 5 years
For a more in depth discussion of impact factor methodologies, you can refer to this article. Also, you might visit many other pages discussing the impact factor, Eigenfactor, R-Factor, Y-Factor, etc., their accuracy, and their usefulness.  

Usefulness

#1
We estimate that the impact / visibility metric based on a unique database is not representative and provides less visibility for an author, as it is inaccurately limited to about 3-5% of publications potentially indexed by an indexing entity (and captured in that given database).

#2
Visibility index does not refer to the value of a particular publication; it is only provided as an online-oriented metric, as all downloads are from the free-access proprietary ThinkMind digital library; downloads have a major weight in computing the visibility index.

Rank

Conference ranking is a subjective evaluation (e.g., A, B, C, etc.) of conferences.

The drawback of any ranking approach is that there are too many domains/sub-domains and very few specialists attending all conferences in a given domain/sub-domain to have a global idea.

With different categories of publications (academic, industry, research, etc.) and different kind of reports (new research, surveys, benchmarks, etc.) it is difficult, if not impossible, to have an objective ranking. Moreover, a sound methodology is hardly exposed by most of the currently known ranking lists. Some lists get no updates for years, making them obsolete.

Withdrawal and Plagiarism policy

IARIA encourages young researches, professors, and engineers to submit new idea papers, practical results, lessons learnt, as well as any substantial contributions to the scientific community.

We strongly advise that the papers be carefully edited to improve the legibility of the text. The length of the originally submitted papers must not vary too much from the camera ready version.

While withdrawing a paper may happen in a limited number of cases, we support the fairness of the submission. Please take note of the following with respect to paper submissions:

(i) A submission SHOULT NOT be intended to get reviews from the TPC for the sole purpose of improving on the quality of the paper. A submission implies that the author intends to ultimately register the paper upon a favourable response from the organizers. IARIA doesn’t encourage withdrawals after the paper is accepted.

(ii) Once submitted, a contribution should not be resubmitted to another event before a conformation of acceptance or rejection. As e-mail may fail, it is the responsibility of the authors to ensure there is no double submission based on an assumption that the paper was rejected, but the e-mail failed to be received.  IARIA doesn’t support double submissions. Once a paper is submitted elsewhere, and no decision was clearly received, don’t submit the same paper to IARIA conferences.

(iii) Small amounts of already published material are allowed in any submission, under the condition that the source be clearly identified. If the reference is missing [quotes and citation], and the paper is published, the publishing authors must write a letter of apology to the original author. If the paper is not published, the review process must enforce the authors to make this reference; publication process continues only after the text was properly corrected.

(iv) IARIA fully follows ACM and IEEE plagiarism polices and cooperates with ACM and IEEE to enforce them.

If plagiarism is discovered during the review process, the paper is automatically rejected; the author must explain the cause and write a letter of apology to the original author.

If plagiarism is discovered after the paper is published, the following rules apply.

For ACM Plagiarism policy, see: “Plagiarism on the rise”, Ronald F. Boisvert, Mary Jane Irwin, Communications of the ACM, June 2006, Volume 49, Number 6, pp.23-24.

As per the authors of the article mentioned above “the verbatim copying, near-verbatim copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author’s’ paper” is plagiarism.

IARIA endorses and applies the levels of offense, investigation and penalties set by the ACM Code of Ethics.

Litigations must be properly followed; the offending authors must apologize to the offended authors. IARIA will inform the authors’ organization about the plagiarism facts. If subsequent offenses occur, the author is banned from publishing in IARIA conferences. This rule is 100% enforced.

Unexpected Circumstances

IARIA and its contractors ensure to the best of their ability that the scheduled events will take place in a most welcoming manner, both from a technical stand point, as well as attendees' well being perspective. Certain events beyond our control may occur, which can directly affect the event schedule and/or participants' security and health. Such cases can be earth quakes, major floods, hurricanes, contagious disease epidemics, hostile social movements, wars, general strikes, and disfunctional infrastructure (e.g., transportation, food, police).

In cases falling under the above described scenarios, IARIA reserves the right to relocate the event, postpone the event, adapt the offered services. Additionally, the above described situations can affect the ability to deliver other local services (e.g., shuttle, shows, social events, etc.).

IARIA and its contractors commit to professionally handle the submissions, ensure their publication, and eventually provide the electronic proceedings to the authors who registered for the event.

IARIA and its contractors do not carry any insurance against event cancellation, postponement, relocation to alternate premises, or non-appearance of attractions.

To this effect, you are encouraged to purchase individual insurance on your own.

Code of Conduct

• Constructive criticism is welcome
• Unfounded and anonymous defamatory statements are discouraged and disregarded
  • In the past, different sites, Beall's list (~2012/2013, now internationally retracted), other lists, were used to promote fraudulent news and defamation on various organizations
  • Currently, fake news are common in social media; the educated reader is expected to use appropriate judgement for getting the real news
• To get a feeling for IARIA's selection and publication process, we recommend you become a committee member, submit a contribution, attend the event, etc.
  • Essentially, the conference peer-review process is one of the most comprehensive one, with a few review rounds and updates
  • Conference Proceedings are gold free-access in the ThinkMind digital library
  • Journals with extended version publications are by invitation only, and selected from articles already presented at a conference. Journal submissions are peer-reviewed, publication free, gold free-access, and in the ThinkMind digital library
  • Both Conferences and Journals are
    • Registered: with the Library of Congress of the United States of America (ISSN)

Organization

The Board, Chairs, Speakers, Panelists, and Technical Program Committee members act as volunteers. Everybody pays the registration to any event when attending.

Lowest fees are for IARIA Fellows and full time students.

There are
- 17 Board members
- more than 100 IARIA fellows
- more then 6-7,000 committee members and reviewers

The logistic services are ensured by 18 paid staff members and 7 specialized contractors. The conference logistics teams have 14 members [http://www.iaria.org/conferences.html] and the journal logistics team 4 members [www.iariajournals.org]

The logistic teams provide basic services (site maintenance, registration, support letters, program scheduling, etc.) and coordinate the 7 contractors delivering special services: hotel/tours, financial/accounting, legal, publication, publicity, post-event services, long term services (www.thinkmind.org digital library, printed proceedings, etc.).