2021 Annual Meeting

Dear 2021 Paper Reviewers for the Transportation Research Board (TRB) ACP20 Freeway Operations Committee:

Happy and Safe New Year!

I wish to thank you all on behalf of the TRB Freeway Operations Committee (ACP20) for reviewing papers for the 2021 TRB Annual Meeting and the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board (TRR). With your help, we were able to create a good technical program in a short time. Meanwhile, the TRR Editorial Board is in the process of selecting the best possible papers for publication out of the Annual Meeting papers submitted to this committee for review. The committee’s TRB paper review process is almost complete for this year, but final publications decisions are determined by the TRR Editorial Board, and for some papers this is still in-progress.

I wanted to share with you the results of this committee paper review process. The total number of papers that we reviewed this year by this committee alone was 36. The initial number that was assigned to this committee for review was actually much higher than this number. However, through careful negotiations with TRB staff and other TRB committees, several papers were switched to other committees for review because they fit better.

The TRB online paper review system (Editorial Manager or EM for short) introduced additional and beneficial changes this year. They have added a publication rating score for the reviewers to enter, which proved to be very useful in developing our publication criteria by this committee, and deciding which papers should be forwarded to the Editorial Board for further assessment and possible publication in TRR. TRB and TRR Editorial Board staff were very cooperative and helpful throughout this entire process. They are copied on this email.

Although we had plenty of reviewers, some of our committee members and experienced friends were not available to conduct reviews this year due to personal reasons. In addition, many of the reviewers were shared with other TRB committees (who took the liberty to load reviewers with more papers to review). As such, reviewers could not review the entire load of papers assigned to them by this committee. Of course, these papers had to be re-assigned to other qualified reviewers, and the search for these continued throughout the relatively short review period. This proved to be a meticulous and particularly challenging task. However, the EM system was very helpful, powerful, and well suited for the volume of papers received within and outside of the TRB annual meeting. Despite these and other challenges, I am glad to report that the majority of papers reviewed by this committee received more than the minimum required number of reviews.

In order to provide some feedback and let you know how your fellow reviewers rated the papers, I have followed our historical tradition and attached an improved summary table reflecting the new changes and improvements in the TRB EM review system this year by including the various presentation and publication ratings and their calculated average and median scores, and the presentation/publication recommendations. To protect authors' privacy, and to make the results easily known to the reviewers of only the paper(s) they reviewed, I had to block the last digit of the paper number for the papers that were accepted for presentation since these are accessible to all attendees of the TRB annual meeting. There was no need to do this for the rejected papers (papers that were rejected for both presentation and publication) since no one had access to them except for their own reviewers. This improved summary table does not provide much more detail but it does let you see how your ratings compare to your peers. In addition, when notifying the authors of the results of their paper reviews, the improved online TRB review web site sent a blind copy of the review results to all reviewers for each paper they have reviewed.

Criteria for Presentation (developed in agreement with this committee's chair and TRB’s senior staff, and also shared with the TRR managing editors who are all copied on this email):

To be accepted for presentation the paper must have:

1. An Overall Average or Median score for all 9 Questions of 5 (out of 10) or higher (scores are obtained from the rating card of each paper as shown in the EM review system), AND

2. An Average or Median presentation rating score of 5 (out of 10) or higher as calculated from the reviewers’ ratings in the EM review system.
   
   Please note the following:

• There is a thick dividing line in the attached table separating the recommended papers for presentation and the rest of the papers.

• Please note that we used the same phrase as in previous years “Average or Median Score.” This way it is fairer to the authors..

• The overall average score threshold of 5 out of 10 is comparable to last year.

Criteria for Publication (developed in agreement with this committee's chair and TRB’s senior staff, and also shared with the TRR managing editors who are all copied on this email):

The following criteria were used to determine whether (or not) a paper can be forwarded to the TRR Editorial Board for possible publication. A paper can be forwarded to the TRR Editorial Board for publication assessment only if the paper can meet the following criteria:

1. The paper must be recommended for presentation, AND

2. The paper must have Overall Average or Median score for all 9 Questions of 5 (out of 10), AND

3. The paper must have a publication median or average score of 5 (out of 10) or higher as calculated from the reviewers’ ratings, AND

4. The paper should not have been submitted for “presentation ONLY” (by the authors).
   
   Please note the following:

• If the paper failed to meet one or more of the above criteria items then it cannot be considered for publication evaluation.

• As in previous years, we used the phrase “Average or Median Score.” This way it is fair to the authors.

• The overall average score threshold of 5 out of 10 is comparable to last year.

Based on the above publication criteria, the number of papers that was forwarded to the TRR Editorial Board for re-review and possible publication was 9. The status of each of these 9 papers listed in the attached table in descending order of their questions’ average scores is indicated in the rightmost column of the table. Please note that “in-progress” status means one of the following:

1. the authors may have not responded to the reviewers’ comments at the time of writing this email, or

2. the authors responded to the reviewers’ comments but the Editorial Board staff (who have hundreds of papers to process from all committees) did not have the time yet to process these revised papers and assign them to the Associate Editor for this committee (that is me), or

3. the authors responded to the reviewers’ comments but the editor decided that they need to provide more detailed response and has returned the paper(s) back to the authors to address this issue, or

4. the paper needs a second cycle of revision to make sure the reviewers are satisfied with the responses.

A total of 5 papers fell into these in-progress categories. The rest of 4 papers met all of the publication requirements, and the Editorial Board decided to publish them. Authors of these 4 papers will be (or have been already) notified by the TRR Editorial Board staff to prepare their final version and submit it online by a certain deadline.

The Editorial Board invited me to serve as Associate Editor (AE) for TRR in summer of 2019. In addition, the TRR Editorial Board also invited me to serve as Technical Editor of TRR at large in January 2020. I accepted both invitations, so I am Technical Editor (TE) and Associate Editor (AE) of TRR. The AE can also volunteer to be the Handling Editor (HE) for papers reviewed by the committee and forwarded to the Editorial Board for further publication evaluation. This role means the HE oversees the publication review process for papers forwarded to the Editorial Board. To make the process smooth and similar to previous years, and to build on our committee’s great paper review effort and rigorous criteria each year, I volunteered to be the HE for this committee’s papers that are forwarded to the Editorial Board for publication assessment. Due to the very high paper review standards that our committee adopted over the past two decades, the TRR Editorial Board was in favor of this approach.

In summary, the end results of the paper review process were as follows: We accepted 22 papers for presentation out of the 36 papers submitted to us. Out of these 22 papers, we recommended to forward 9 papers to the TRR Editorial Board for further assessment and possible publication in TRR. We have recommended 4 out of the 9 papers for publication while the rest of 5 papers are still in-progress. If the paper needs a second cycle of review, then revised papers are normally assigned to the same reviewers of the initial manuscripts to get their feedback on the revised papers and response letters. If any of the revised papers were sent to you for re-review please submit your re-review as soon as possible (if you have not done so already).

We have one poster session in this committee as shown below -- (Please check the online annual program and the agenda that Dr. Beverly Kuhn, chair of this committee, sent to all of us on December 29, 2020):

Poster Session 1071, titled “Freeway Operations 2021”, which contains the 22 accepted papers for presentation, and is scheduled from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM on Monday January 25, 2021 (EST).

Special thanks go to TRB and TRR staff for their prompt response to the continuous challenges with their online paper review system. Richard Cunard, Patti Lockhart and John Dodson (TRR Managing Editors), and their staff were extremely responsive and worked very hard around the clock including nights and weekends to eliminate any technical difficulties that the reviewers have faced with the EM system. I tried to forward any feedback that you provided me on the electronic review process to them and their staff's help and/or response. In addition, special thanks go to the chair of this committee, Dr. Beverly Kuhn, who is amazingly efficient, very productive, and very supportive of this review process by always providing timely response.

I would like to encourage other committee members and highly experienced friends in the field to volunteer for this important task of paper reviews. This is not just for the TRB Annual Meeting but also for the TRR paper review process around the year now. TRR receives papers that fall into the area of freeway operations, that is in addition to the TRB annual meeting review process. Please contact me at: Haitham.Al-Deek@ucf.edu if you are interested in reviewing papers (and only if you have not contacted me before with your areas of interest, number of papers you can review for this committee (and/or TRR) per year, and expertise topics of which you can review papers). Your updated CV will help me in assigning proper papers to you based on your background, interest, and most importantly your demonstrated and proven experience in these topics. Note that you do not need to provide me this information if you have already provided it to me in the past, or if you have already been reviewing papers for this committee for the past two or more years. You are welcome to make comments and suggestions to improve this review process any time during the year.

Finally, thank you again for working hard on a voluntary basis to provide a quality, thorough, and fair review of papers assigned to you this year. I also appreciate your renewed commitment to this committee and to the TRR review process in future years.

See you soon at the virtual TRB meeting next week. Meanwhile, please stay safe and healthy!

Sincerely,

Haitham Al-Deek

Paper Review Coordinator for TRB (ACP20) Freeway Operations Committee, and

Technical Editor (TE) and Associate Editor (AE) of the Transportation Research Board: Journal of the Transportation Research Record (TRR)