IEEE T-AES Letters to End 31 December 2022

The IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems letter category is going away. The last day to submit is 31 December 2022.

The editorial staff at IEEE T-AES is always striving to provide timely and informative reviews for all of our submissions.  To best serve our authors, we have decided to disband the Letters category of submission.  The category was established about 12 years ago by the then EIC, Prof. Peter Willet, with the intent to publish critically important results that require expeditious dissemination to either the broad research community or a fast-moving sub-field. Unfortunately, this submission category was not popular as we published barely more than three Letter articles per year.  Therefore, we have decided to devote our editorial resources towards our regular papers and correspondence items. For authors who need to crisply report a singularly important result, the correspondence item is a good choice. 

We are not fully sure why the Letter category did not attract more attention.  We were never able to properly staff our editorial resources to deliver on the promise of timely reviews and speedy publications. Our average review times for Letters were never faster than those of our other categories. On the other hand, many of our Letter submissions did not represent works that demonstrated the need for rapid dissemination. Because of T-AES’ broad areas of technical scope, it is not clear a Letter category is needed to communicate a time-critical point for a tightly focused research community.

To be able to provide the infrastructure to review Letters with the required speed and quality would require significant changes that would take away from our editorial resources devoted to our other categories.  Given that we are unsure of the demand for Letters, we have decided it is better to drop the category rather than continue with the less-than-ideal status quo.
It is possible that there is demand for Letters that never got exposed because of our long review times.  If you feel strongly that a Letters format is needed in IEEE T-AES or as a new IEEE AES Society publication, please feel free to email the AESS VP for Publications to make your case. 

Thank you for your attention.  We are always interested in the needs of our readers and/or authors.  Please always feel free to also contact us if you have any other suggestions to better serve you.

Lance Kaplan
VP Publications, IEEE AES Society
Email: (Click to show email)

Michael Rice
EIC, IEEE T-AES
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