TAES Preprint Policy

The material below comes from the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual, also called the PSPB Ops Manual. This document describes the policies for posting your own versions of submissions to TAES on your own website, your institution's website, IEEE websites such as TechRxiv or third-party servers such as arXiv. The policy begins with definitions then moves to the policies based on those definitions. AESS adopts the IEEE policy as the AESS policy. TAES neither encourages nor discourages the posting of preprints on servers such as TechRxiv or arXiv. Whether a preprint is posted or not has no bearing on the editorial decision.

8.1.9 Electronic Information Dissemination

A. General Principles of Electronic Information Dissemination

  1. The requirements in this subsection shall apply to all articles submitted to IEEE journals, transactions, letters, magazines, and conference publications. The requirements of this subsection do not apply to articles published under IEEE open access conditions.
  2. The terminology used in this subsection is defined as follows:
    1. An author-submitted article is the version originally submitted by the author to an IEEE publication.
    2. An accepted article is a version that has been revised by the author to incorporate review suggestions and which has been accepted by IEEE for publication.
    3. The final, published version is the reviewed and accepted article, with copy-editing, proofreading and formatting added by IEEE.
    4. E-prints digital texts of research articles. Electronic preprint is a form of an e-print where an author posts a draft article on the author’s or another website. For purposes of this definition, a preprint is assumed to be the article in the form prior to submission to the IEEE. Authors who have submitted articles for publication by the IEEE may be interested in posting various preprint versions of the same article on e-print servers operated by third parties. E-print servers provide authors rapid dissemination of new results, with the opportunity of receiving comments from the peer community and with the opportunity to have a time-stamp associated with the announcement of results.
  3. IEEE seeks to maximize the rights of its authors and their employers to post preprint versions of an article on the author’s personal web site, on a server operated by the author’s employer, or on a server operated by an approved not-for-profit third party as specified in 8.1.9.G.2 below.
  4. IEEE allows its authors to follow mandates of agencies that fund the author’s research by posting accepted versions of their articles in the agencies’ publicly accessible repositories.
  5. IEEE does not restrict the rights of authors to use their IEEE- copyrighted articles in their own teaching, training, or work responsibilities, or those of their institutions or employers.
    In any preprint version archived by the author after acceptance, IEEE requires that IEEE will be credited as copyright holder. Upon publication of the work, authors are asked to include the article’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
  6. As indicated in Subsection 8.1.9.A.4 (above) and amplified in Subsections 8.1.9.C through G below, IEEE’s policy for permitting posting of IEEE-copyrighted articles extends only to authors, their employers, approved third-party not-for-profit organizations, and IEEE organizational units. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office maintains a list of not-for- profit third party servers where material submitted to the IEEE may be posted.

B. Copyright Notice

In any electronic posting permitted by this Subsection 8.1.9, the following copyright notice must be displayed on the initial screen displaying IEEE-copyrighted material: 

“© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.” 

C. Personal Servers

Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE, provided that the posted version includes a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice (as shown in 8.1.9.B, above) and, when published, a full citation to the original IEEE publication, including a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their articles. 

D. E-Prints

Before submitting an article to an IEEE publication, authors frequently post preprints of their articles to their own web site, their employer’s site, or to another server that invites constructive comment from colleagues and provides a publication time stamp. Upon submission of an accepted article to IEEE, an author is required to transfer copyright in the article to IEEE, and the author must update any previously posted version of the article with a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice (as shown in 8.1.9.B). Upon publication of an article by the IEEE, the author must replace any previously posted electronic versions of the article with either (1) the full citation to the IEEE work with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or (2) the accepted version only with the DOI (not the IEEE-published version). IEEE shall make available to each author the preprint version of the article that the author can post and that includes the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), IEEE’s copyright notice, and a notice indicating the article has been accepted for publication by IEEE.

E. Classroom or Internal Training Use

An author is expressly permitted to post any portion of the accepted version of his/her own IEEE-copyrighted articles on the author’s personal web site or the servers of the author’s institution or company in connection with the author’s teaching, training, or work responsibilities, provided that the appropriate copyright, credit, and reuse notice from 8.1.9.B (above) appears prominently with the posted material. Examples of permitted uses are lecture materials, course packs, e-reserves, conference presentations, or in-house training courses. 

F. Collected Works

IEEE organizational units wishing to place previously published collected works, such as Transactions, Journals, Magazines, conference proceedings/digests or collections of published articles on their web sites for limited-time promotional purposes must request permission from the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office. Such permission will be contingent upon the placement of prominently displayed copyright and reuse notices. Another condition in granting permission will be that the posted collected work includes a monitoring mechanism (e.g., simple password protection) for authorizing access to the material.

G. Third-Party Rights to Post IEEE-Copyrighted Material

  1. With the exception of approved servers as indicated in Subsection 8.1.9.A.3 above and specified in 8.1.9.G.2, no third party may post IEEE-copyrighted material without obtaining the necessary licenses or permissions from the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office or other authorized representatives of the IEEE, and only under terms approved by PSPB. 
  2. The IEEE permits posting on certain approved third-party servers. The list of approved servers shall be reviewed annually, and a complete and up-to-date list shall be maintained by the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office. The process by which a third-party server can gain acceptance to the approved list is given in 8.1.9.G.4.
  3. The same rules regarding versions that apply to individual IEEE authors shall be enforced for third-party hosting. Specifically, the rules of 8.1.9.C will apply.
  4. PSPB shall have the authority to approve or disapprove a third party for hosting IEEE copyrighted content. Approval of third- party hosting shall only be granted to not-for-profit organizations. Application to become an approved third-party host of IEEE copyrighted content must be made to PSPB. All applications shall be received and reviewed by the Chair of PSPB along with a two-member committee that the Chair appoints. The committee shall make recommendations for approval or disapproval to PSPB, and PSPB shall vote on acceptance at the first meeting to occur after receiving the recommendation.
  5. Third parties that are approved by PSPB to host IEEE content shall be included on a list maintained by the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office.

Additional Information Not Contained in the PSPB Ops Manual

TechRxiv: All preprints (of articles submitted to TAES) posted to IEEE’s TechRxiv receive a DOI and are fully citable. If the submitted article is accepted for publication, the author completes an IEEE Copyright Form thereby transferring the copyright of the article to IEEE. The final, published version receives its own DOI. IEEE will update the DOI of the preprint posted on TechRxiv to point to the DOI of the final, published version.

For more information on TechRxiv, see frequently asked questions.

arXiv: Preprints (of articles submitted to TAES) posted to arXiv are not assigned a DOI. arXiv has an automated DOI and journal reference update feature. This applies to preprints that are published by a journal. Information about this feature is available here.