by Jason Moore
We wrote a paper for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans about the manually controlled bicycle. It’s finally available.
Our paper is available as early access on IEEE Explore: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSMCA.2011.2164244 The software used to do the analysis and extra information is available on the human control page.
This is only the second journal publication I’ve been apart of and it was an extremely slow process. We submitted the original paper in September 2010. The first review came back around February 2011. We made minor changes, but didn’t address the anonymous reviewers adequately, so we received a second review on May 1st 2011. It took me a month to write the software and rework all the plots so that the reviewers would accept. On June 18th the paper was accepted. We received the galley proofs August 22, 2011 (plus a $175 fee for having too many pages! and $1000 fee for color images! wtf?). The details of the galleys took till September 19, 2011 to get sorted out. I emailed IEEE on February 8th, 2012 asking what was taking so long for the final publication. They replied and said “The article is now on IEEE Xplore under Early Access. It has not been chosen for a print issue yet.”. So at least it is available (closed access of course), but still no ETA on it being published.
I just saw Dr. Gary Ward (Chair of PLoS’s board) speak and their model blew me away. They are actually trying to get the publication time down to 3 days (it’s 3 weeks now). It took us a year and half from submission to online release (not publication). Unbelievable! Science must progress insanely slow if most publisher’s operate like this.
IEEE changed their more liberal author posting policy in 2010. It seems they used to let authors post final publication versions of their papers on their own websites. But they’ve since changed their minds and their copyright forms so that final versions can’t be posted. As soon as I get the “accepted manuscript” from Dr. Hess, I’ll post it here for free access.
Update (Monday, February 13, 2012 14:03): Here is our accepted manuscript version. There may be a few minor errors as opposed to the published version, I’ll try to update them at some point.