The IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Letters (L-SMC) publishes shorter papers in short turn times that provides hot and break-through ideas, highly-impact breaking news, significant theoretical findings, and innovative applications in the same scope of SMC towards the next generation of symbiotic human-machine intelligence systems. L-SMC covers the areas of systems science and engineering, human-machine systems, computational social systems, and cybernetics. L-SMC is established to take over all of the shorter papers from SMC transactions for rapid publication.  L-SMC synergizes theories of systems, communication, control, cybernetics, stochastics, and optimization towards the formation of a general theory of systems science. It explores systems engineering technologies encompassing system specification, modeling, simulation, and experimentation methodologies. It studies data, structures, and methods in human factors engineering. It seeks systems design, test, and assessment methods. It covers system engineering applications in biological, ecological, socio-economical, computer informatics, and human-machine systems.

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Open access is provided through the payment of an article processing charge (APC) paid after acceptance. APCs are often financed by an author's institution or the funder supporting their research.

The articles in this journal are peer reviewed in accordance with the requirements set forth in the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual (sections 8.2.1.C & 8.2.2.A). Each published article was reviewed by a minimum of two independent reviewers using a single-blind peer review process, where the identities of the reviewers are not known to the authors, but the reviewers know the identities of the authors. Articles will be screened for plagiarism before acceptance.

Corresponding authors from low-income countries are eligible for waived or reduced APCs.