ICUAS’27 will employ a double-anonymous peer review process, also called double-blind review, for all submitted (contributed, invited) papers to the conference. The rules to be followed will be the same with those followed by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, see here for more information.
This double-blind review aims to eliminate biases related to factors such as gender, seniority, reputation, institutional affiliation, and to maximize paper review objectivity.
However, it is recognized that it may be essential to include in submitted (contributed and invited) papers images, figures and diagrams, robot platform prototypes, and other pictorial and multimedia (video clips) material that may be unique to a specific lab and/or research group. For these reasons, authors are allowed to include essential images or videos of robot platforms, devices, or setups that are critical for understanding the research and its scientific evaluation.
The guidelines for double – anonymous submissions, following IEEE RAS are listed below – please follow all rules when submitting your paper(s):
- Names and affiliations should not be included anywhere in the manuscript, appendix, and supplementary material.
- Acknowledgments to people or funding agencies should only be included after acceptance of the manuscript.
- When self-citing their own previous work, authors should avoid expressions such as “In our/the authors earlier work…”. They should rather use neutral expressions such as “In previous work…” or “In related work…” so that one cannot distinguish their own work from the work of others just based on the formulation.
- The authors should remove any author/affiliation/lab names and logos from figures and videos.
- The authors should blur faces of people in videos and pictures.
- The identities of robots do not need to be hidden for unique robots. They are allowed to appear in pictures and videos. However, the individual names of the robots should be hidden from the paper except if it is a widespread robot name (e.g., Nao, Spot,…).
- The authors should abstain from adding any author information from the submitted files’ metadata. This information is often added automatically from the identity information and can be found in “properties” under the “File” menu in word processors and PDF readers.
- There should be no links to external websites that reveal identity (e.g., YouTube, GitHub, or authors’ institute pages).
- Self-citations should be reduced to a minimum.
- Authors are allowed to use tools such as arXiv. Reviewers should not actively search for those articles to identify authors.
If/when the submitted paper is officially accepted, then, the above-mentioned information can be added to the paper during its final upload.