What Is a Proceedings Editorial Board?

A proceedings editorial board is the governance body of an academic or professional journal that is responsible for setting publication policy, overseeing the peer review process, maintaining editorial standards, and making final decisions on manuscript acceptance. For the Proceedings of the IEEE, which has operated since 1913 as the flagship journal of the world's largest technical professional organization, the editorial board includes an Editor-in-Chief, Senior Editors, Associate Editors, and an Industry Ad Hoc Committee that together coordinate the evaluation of submitted survey, review, and tutorial articles across the full breadth of electrical engineering, electronics, and computer science. The editorial board is not merely an administrative layer: its members contribute substantive judgment about whether a submission meets the journal's scope, technical standard, and quality thresholds before a manuscript reaches formal peer review.

Editorial boards of proceedings journals carry a particular responsibility because proceedings-style publications document the intellectual record of a field over time. Decisions about what is included, at what length, and under what standards shape how knowledge in a discipline is organized and preserved. The Proceedings of the IEEE, having covered technological evolution from early wireless telegraphy through radar, integrated circuits, and wireless networking, illustrates how an editorial board's accumulated decisions constitute a disciplinary archive.

Composition and Roles

The Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the IEEE holds final editorial authority on all publication decisions. Senior Editors assist in prescreening submitted manuscripts to determine whether they fall within the journal's scope, meet minimum technical substance requirements, and comply with IEEE's submission and peer review policies. Associate Editors manage the review process for individual manuscripts, selecting reviewers with appropriate expertise and synthesizing their recommendations into a decision recommendation for the Editor-in-Chief. The Industry Ad Hoc Committee provides perspective on applied and commercially relevant topics, ensuring that the journal's coverage addresses engineering practice alongside foundational research.

Peer Review Standards

The Proceedings of the IEEE applies a single-anonymous review process in which reviewer identities are withheld from authors. As described in the journal's author guidance for regular paper preparation, the typical regular paper runs between twenty and twenty-five pages formatted to the IEEE transactions template, and the review timeline is longer than for a standard IEEE journal because the journal specifically seeks senior reviewers with broad cross-field experience. The journal maintains a deliberately low acceptance rate to preserve its status as a venue for significant synthesis rather than incremental reports. Manuscripts failing to meet grammar, scope, or technical substance requirements are rejected at prescreening before entering the full review cycle.

Policy and Oversight

The editorial board establishes and updates publication policies covering authorship, disclosure of conflicts of interest, data availability, and the handling of corrections and retractions. These policies align with broader IEEE Author Center guidelines that apply across the IEEE journal portfolio. The board also oversees special issues, which assemble invited papers on a focused theme under a guest editor team that operates within the board's established guidelines.

Applications

The proceedings editorial board model applies across a range of publishing and scholarly communication contexts, including:

• IEEE flagship and society journal editorial governance
• Conference proceedings oversight for major technical societies
• Open-access journal policy development and editorial management
• Cross-disciplinary review coordination for survey and tutorial publications