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Submission Guidelines

On this page you will find the following:

  • A Submission Checklist to review and check before you submit your article. Article submissions that do not follow the guidelines below will be returned to draft or immediately rejected. 
  • A list of manuscript types acceptable for peer review. You will be required to select a manuscript type during submission. If you are unsure, please select “Research Article”.

How does the peer review process work?

See Stages of Peer Review

Submission Checklist

Download Checklist
  1. The manuscript should be prepared in a double column, single-spaced format using a required IEEE Access template. A Word or LaTex file and a PDF file are both required upon submission. The content on each file must match exactly. File sizes should not exceed 40MB. Download IEEE Access Templates for Microsoft Word and LaTex.
  2. The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text. For more information please click here.
  3. Author lists should be carefully considered before submission. For more information on what constitutes an author, please click here. Contributors who do not meet IEEE’s definition of authorship should be included in the Acknowledgment section of the article. Omitting an author who contributed to your article or including a person who did not fulfill authorship requirements is considered a breach of publishing ethics. Any change to the author list after the article has been submitted is considered rare and exceptional, and the decision to allow such changes rests with the Editor.
  4. The submitting author is required to have an ORCID ID associated with their account. The ORCID profile must be publicly visible and populated. For more information on ORCID, click here. The author designated as the corresponding author in the submission system will be the main point of contact for the article and will be responsible for approving the proof if the article is accepted for publication.
  5. All authors should be listed on both the source file (Word of LaTex file) and the manuscript PDF file. When submitting your files ensure the submission system successfully extracts the full author list from your files.
  6. Short biographies are required for ALL authors on an article submission. As indicated in the required IEEE Access templates, biographies of all authors should be included directly within the article below the references section.
  7. The article should be thoroughly reviewed for proper grammar before being submitted. Articles with poor grammar will be immediately rejected. If needed, IEEE Access offers Paperpal Preflight to assist authors in checking their manuscript for grammar issues prior to submission. Check your manuscript on Paperpal Preflight by clicking here.
  8. All research works should be carefully referenced. To learn more about avoiding plagiarism please click here. Do not include references that are not relevant to your work, and carefully check each reference for accuracy and ensure that they have not been retracted, as retracted references can undermine the validity of your work. Articles submitted with retracted references will be returned to the author for removal, or may be rejected if the validity of the research is affected.
  9. The article should not be submitted elsewhere at the same time. More information about duplicate submission can be found here.
  10. If applicable to your research, have any supplementary material for review ready for the submission process.
  11. Authors must define abbreviations and acronyms the first time they are used in the article, even if they have already been defined in the abstract. Acronyms and abbreviations can have multiple meanings so it is important that these are clearly defined.
  12. You must select a minimum of 3 (and a maximum of 10) manuscript keywords upon submission. Be sure the keywords are as accurate as possible to ensure a relevant Associate Editor is matched to manage the peer review of your article.
  13. You will be required to select a manuscript type upon submission. A list and description of manuscript types are listed below. If you are unsure, please select “Research Article”. *Please note that should your article be accepted, the manuscript type will be published on the article.
  14. If applicable, have a list of opposed reviewers ready.
  15. If your article has video (maximum file size is 100MB), have it ready to upload with the submission since all video must be peer reviewed with the article.
  16. If the article was previously rejected after peer review with encouragement to update and resubmit, then a complete “list of updates” must be included in a separate document. The list of updates should have the following regarding each comment: 1) reviewers’ concerns, 2) authors’ response to the concerns, 3) actual changes implemented. Refer to the original rejection letter for more information on requirements for resubmitting.
  17. While IEEE Access does not have a page limit; we strongly recommend keeping the page count under 20 pages for ease of readability. Longer articles may result in longer peer review times. Additional content can be added as supplementary material. Authors who have a special reason to submit a paper over 20 pages (not including Supplementary Material or Appendices, or if the article type is a Topical Review or Survey) must first make a pre-submission inquiry to seek permission from the EIC.
  18. In alignment with the IEEE Code of Ethics and with respect to the wishes of the subject of the image, IEEE will no longer accept submitted papers which include the ‘Lena image’. For more information please click here.

Manuscript Types Acceptable for Peer Review

All article types undergo the same rigorous peer review. The manuscript type should be selected carefully since it will be included in the published article.

Research Article

This is a classic research article that has a hypothesis, investigation, solution, model, physical experiment and/or simulation and a result that is of value to the community within that area of expertise.

This is a review of an emerging area within the journal’s scope that performs a technical and critical review of other articles. Calculations are performed and conclusions are drawn on the strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion can also discuss future challenges. An article that is descriptive, without a framework, and instead expounds a particular topic should be this type.
 
Furthermore, a Topical Review must:
 
  1. Demonstrate the need and novelty of the Topical Review in terms of other recent Reviews. Reviews conducted in this field and explain what in the field has changed and why the current Review is timely and necessary.
  2. Demonstrate that the authors have considerable scholarly backgrounds in the field under consideration, and a sustained scholarly record to provide an authoritative and technically informed assessment.
  3. Have specific research questions, goals, and scope.
  4. Compare and contrast the competitive methods according to well-defined technical criteria, presenting quantitative information, benchmark results, or structured comparison tables whenever necessary.
  5. Reconcile the discrepancies between the findings, trace the trends, highlight problems, open issues, gaps, and barriers in the development of the field.
  6. Provide conclusions that could not have been drawn from the individual papers alone.
  7. Propose an evidence-based future research directions and explain their technical or practical importance.

Finally, it should be emphasized that listing publications and discussing the works individually; reporting bibliometric statistics without any further technical synthesis; having no clear research questions; serving essentially as a tutorial or historical overview, are not the qualities of a Topical Review.

This is a scholarly article that uses mathematical methods to develop new theoretical results of importance to the field.

A Survey article analyzes, summarizes, systemizes, and presents fresh conclusions from a large number of recently published scholarly articles. A review article that has a well-defined framework for selecting and excluding papers and draws an overall conclusion from the body of those papers should be this type. An example of this would be a Systematic Literature Review (SLR).
 
Furthermore, a Survey must:
 
  1. Demonstrate the need and novelty of the survey in terms of other recent surveys conducted in this field and explain what in the field has changed and why the current survey is timely and necessary.
  2. Demonstrate that the authors have considerable scholarly backgrounds in the field under consideration, and a sustained scholarly record to provide an authoritative and technically informed assessment.
  3. Have specific research questions, goals, scope, and inclusion and exclusion criteria.
  4. Explain the literature search and screening procedure.
  5. Compare and contrast the competitive methods according to well-defined technical criteria, presenting quantitative information, benchmark results, or structured comparison tables whenever necessary.
  6. Reconcile the discrepancies between the findings, trace the trends, highlight problems, open issues, gaps, and barriers in the development of the field.
  7. Provide conclusions that could not have been drawn from the individual papers alone.
  8. Propose an evidence-based future research directions and explain their technical or practical importance.
Finally, it should be emphasized that listing publications and discussing the works individually; reporting bibliometric statistics without any further technical synthesis; having no clear research questions; serving essentially as a tutorial or historical overview, are not the qualities of a Survey article.

This category of article is an in-depth viewpoint article intended to bring together a big picture in a fast-evolving landscape of technological development. It will typically be a topic where there is community uncertainty and/or disagreement. Since IEEE Access does not have a page limit, publishing perspective articles will allow more technical discussion. This category of article will typically be written by a leading authority in an area.

This article describes challenges and practical solutions for topics within the journal’s scope. Quantitative results for validation of the approach are expected.

This is a non-trivial theoretical or experimental negative or null result that does not support a hypothesis. Provided that the research question posed is meaningful and the study is rigorously conducted, this type of article has value to the engineering community.

This article will report the development of new or improved fabrication or manufacturing technique, or a new experimental, measurement or mathematical technique. Applied research articles focus on practical systems, while here the focus is on methods.

This is a pedagogical article to assist readers to learn and familiarize themselves with a topic. The topic may be be an emerging one that is not well understood in the community, or a difficult traditional topic that can benefit from an up to date exposition. The topic should not be one that is well understood or well represented in textbooks. The article must add to the existing literature to benefit the readership. The objectives and prerequisite background required by the reader should be clearly identified in the introduction. The references should cite both background material and advanced material for the reader to dig deeper.

This article summarizes and expounds new or revised IEEE standards. This can also be a scholarly discussion paper for new IEEE standards or a critique of existing IEEE standards with recommendations.

This is an article that comments on another published article within IEEE Access. A comment points out a technical error, oversight, or presents an opposing position. It is a critique, providing corrections, and performs analyses. IEEE Access does not accept comment articles on articles published in other journals. The maximum page limit for a comment article is 2 pages; anything longer will require EIC approval.

A reply article is submitted by the authors of a published paper in response to a Comment article. Please note that we only allow one Comment and one Reply in response. We do not allow subsequent Comments and Replies.

There are topics within the scope of IEEE Access where there is disagreement between experts. A debate paper will be a scholarly technical research paper that makes the case for a particular position. The EIC may invite an opposing debate paper to create balance. A perspective article looks at the big picture, whereas a debate paper is highly technical.

This is an expository scholarly article that does not produce a new result but revisits a complicated or poorly understood result and elucidates it with a fresh approach. It is a very technical article that digs into theory and interpretation. As opposed to a tutorial article, which is a “how” article, an exposition article is more of a “why” article.

A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple published scientific studies addressing the same question. A meta-analysis concludes by identifying effects that are statistically significant across the many studies. Such a paper not only can provide an estimate of the unknown common truth, but also has the potential to contrast results from different studies and identify sources of disagreement among these results, patterns among study results or other interesting results that may come to light in the context of multiple studies.

This is a technical scholarly article that investigates a tough problem that is not yet solved. The article is not able to solve it either. The article’s analysis concludes with identifying a clear set of open questions that the community needs to work on in order to make further progress. Papers such as this are expected to add clarity to complex issues and create a roadmap of questions for researchers to follow.