How to deal when submitting an extender paper to a journal from another editorial?

Question

My situation is pretty simple, years ago I submitted a research article to an IEEE workshop and it got accepted. Actually I have made an extended paper of it and I am considering to submit it for a non-IEEE journal. I have read the information for authors of the journal which I plan to submit, and it does not say anything about extended papers. So I was wondering if I:

• Should I ask first if they accept extended papers before submitting my article to this journal?
• Should I just submit it and also include the original article from the workshop and point to them that is an extended article? This just in case that the submission site has an Observations or Aditional Sections part where I can explain this. Or maybe should I put a small presentation letter stating that I am submitting the original article from the workshop and the extended paper?

Which would be the best course of action?

Answer 1

That depends on what you mean by "extended". If it just extends the results of the conference presentation, all you have to do is to state this in the introduction and cite the previous paper. If "extended" means longer than the page limit of the journal, it is very probable that it will be rejected outhand or only accepted for further consideration if you cut it down to size. You might try to ask for leniency from the editor, but only after doing a serious effort to make it fit (perhaps by dividing into several?) and have good reasons why it can't be shorter.