Conference-to-Journal Submission Policy

Authors must declare in their cover letter if a shortened version of their manuscript has appeared in a conference proceeding, and provide a pointer to the conference proceeding in their cover letter. The cover letter should provide the reasons for why the submitted manuscript also merits publication in Operations Research. For example, the reasons could be that the conference version was written for a different community (e.g., computer science, economics, etc.) and the journal version aims to shed better light on how OR tools and methodologies contributed to the solution, entailing non-trivial differences, or that the journal version contains significant generalizations compared to the conference version that are of interest to the OR community. Area Editors have the responsibility to judge the argument for publication in Operations Research in light of the earlier conference proceeding, and may consult with their Associate Editors in making that judgement.

The manuscript must provide sufficient incremental contributions to allow Operations Research copyright on the manuscript should the paper be accepted. Sufficient incremental contributions may include detailed proofs, illuminating numerics, generalization of results, and/or more significant work. To respect the double-blind submission policy, the manuscript should cite the shortened version of the manuscript as “anonymous” (which will be replaced with the authors’ identity if the manuscript is accepted) and any additional materials should be published using an anonymous github repository.

The above rules do NOT apply to papers published in conferences with an extended abstract option, and in which the authors chose the extended abstract option instead of publishing a full conference paper.

There are some conferences (for example, NeurIPS) that allow for public review feedback. When reviewing a submission with an open review history, the Associate Editor and Reviewers have the responsibility to form their own independent evaluation of the paper, and must not rely on public review feedback to form their opinions. The goal is to ensure a fair and objective assessment, aligned with the standards of Operations Research, regardless of past review history.