Information for conference organisers

The peer review of papers published in the IOP Conference Series titles is managed by the organizers and proceedings editors.

The detailed procedures will vary from event to event according to the custom and practice of each community. Our publishing agreements require peer review to be undertaken in accordance with the principles outlined below. 

All organizers/editors must complete a form describing how the papers were peer reviewed. This information will be published as part of the proceedings.  

Peer review must be conducted through our platform unless another method is agreed with the journal team. IOP Publishing reserves the right to request peer review reports at any time. 

All conferences are requested to adhere to the following minimum standards:

• Unbiased consideration is given to all papers. Papers are considered regardless of the race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship or political philosophy of the authors
• No terminology will be used that, in the opinion of IOP Publishing, is offensive or might be perceived to be offensive to others
• Authors and Editors agree to comply with our ethical policy
• IOP Publishing has the right to investigate any suspicions and/or allegations of misconduct
• Submission and peer review must be conducted in English.
• Reviewers shall give a clear statement of recommendation for each paper. Comments must be included to support their recommendation. These comments should be suitable for transmission to the author 
• Editors and Organisers shall only accept papers where there is clear support from the reviewers

Conference papers must meet all the usual standards of quality for an IOP Publishing publication. However, reviewers will take into account the nature of conference papers. Review papers are also welcomed and accepted. Reviewers will consider background papers more favourably than would be normal for a regular paper. These allowances shall not go so far as to approve papers of low scientific standard. Papers that have been published in written form elsewhere should not be considered.  

Reviewers should consider the following key points related to scientific content, quality and presentation of the papers:

Technical Criteria

• Scientific merit: notably scientific rigour, accuracy and correctness
• Clarity of expression; communication of ideas; readability and discussion of concepts
• Sufficient discussion of the context of the work, and suitable referencing

Quality Criteria

• Originality: Is the work relevant and novel?
• Motivation: Does the problem considered have a sound motivation? All papers should clearly demonstrate the scientific interest of the results
• Repetition: Have significant parts of the manuscript already been published?
• Length: Is the content of the work of sufficient scientific interest to justify its length?

Presentation Criteria

• Title: Is it adequate and appropriate for the content of the article?
• Abstract: Does it contain the essential information of the article? Is it complete? Is it suitable for inclusion by itself in an abstracting service?
• Diagrams, figures, tables and captions: Are they essential and clear?
• Text and mathematics: Are they brief but still clear? If you recommend shortening, please suggest what should be removed
• Conclusion: Does the paper contain a clear conclusion. The conclusion should summarise what has been learned and why it is interesting and useful? 

Overview of the publication procedure

The following notes provide a summary of the IOP Conference Series publishing process.

1. Submit a quote request online, or contact us directly with details of the conference.
2. The IOP Conference Series team will review the details of your conference and write to confirm if we can offer a proceedings publishing contract.
3. Conferences must register to use our proceedings management platform to handle the peer review process. Each conference will have its own account and dedicated area on the platform.
4. The organizers must inform authors of the IOP Proceedings Licence.
5. Authors prepare their papers in accordance to our guidelines and templates.
6. Authors submit their papers to the conference organizers via the proceedings management platform and conference organisers act as editors managing the peer review process. Once review of the papers is completed the conference organizers submit the final papers to IOP Conference Series with a single click. Papers submitted to IOP Publishing must be in PDF format and in their final version ready for publication. IOP Publishing does not edit or proofread papers after they are submitted. Please ensure that any changes have been approved by authors prior to the PDFs being submitted to IOP Publishing.
7. Submitted papers will be assessed by the IOP Conference Series team to ensure they meet the standards of quality required by IOP Publishing. We check for adherence to our publisher policies, the fit of papers to our journal scope and the general quality of a paper. Any papers that do not meet these standards will be communicated to the organiser.
8. Production and publication. We will process the PDFs into a format suitable for publication and upload them to our pre-publication servers. The communicating editor will be sent a username and password to access that server to make a final check of the proceedings before final publication. Please note the following important points:
   • Once a paper has been published online, changes will only be permitted in cases of serious scientific error. In those cases, an erratum or corrigendum will be published according to the standard practices of professional scientific publishing.
   • Change requests relating to stylistic issues cannot be made to proceedings once they are published, so it is important that authors and organizers ensure papers have been adequately checked and proofread prior to submission.
9. Upon publication we will write to authors (who have supplied an e-mail address) informing them of publication and providing them with a link to their paper.
10. Printed copies (if required) are provided by Curran Associates.

IOP Conference Series uses author-supplied PDFs for all online and print publication. Authors must prepare their papers using Microsoft Word or LaTeX, according to the guidelines and templates, and then convert these files to PDF.

It is important to ensure that when you submit your paper, it is in its final form ready for publication, and has been thoroughly proofread. IOP do not copy edit or reformat papers and will not send out author proofs prior to publication. Post-publication changes are not permitted, so please ensure that your paper has been checked for errors.

As a general rule we would advise that an author does not submit more than two articles to a conference. This includes papers that they have co-authored.
Our guidance on what constitutes authorship is available here: https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/questions/ethics-of-authorship/

By submitting a paper an author and all co-authors are assumed to agree with the terms of the IOP Proceedings Licence.

Do not submit your papers directly to IOP Publishing; please contact your conference organizer for submission instructions.

Paper format

• The paper size is European A4.
• Margins are 4cm (top), 2.5cm (left and right) and 2.7cm (bottom).
• There are no page numbers, headers or footers within the paper.
• Text is single spaced, not double spaced.
• All fonts are embedded.
• All pages are portrait (landscape pages should be rotated).
• The abstract text should be indented 25mm from the left margin and there should be 10mm space after the abstract before you begin the main text of your article, starting on the same page as the abstract.

Paper content

• The paper includes the author name(s) and affiliation(s) (full address including country).
• All articles must contain an abstract.
• Papers must use inclusive language. At IOPP we follow these industry-wide Guidelines on Inclusive Language and Images in Scholarly Communication.
• All figures and tables should be numbered in numerical order. Please ensure that figure/table numbers are not duplicated or missed.
• Figures are legible and placed within the text, not collected at the end of the document.
• If section headings are numbered, ensure that they are numbered numerically, and no numbers are duplicated or missing.
• Displayed equations should follow a naming convention in numerical order, i.e. (1), (2), (3) etc or by section, i.e. (1.1), (1.2) etc. Ensure every displayed equation has its own number and none are duplicated or missing.
• Reference lists are checked for accuracy. References can only be linked via CrossRef if they are correct and complete. Check the templates and guidance page for further reference styling information.
• If numbering references (Harvard system) ensure that references are numbered numerically, every reference has its own number and no numbers are duplicated or missing.
• Ensure that all references are cited in the text and that all citations have a corresponding reference.
• Finally, please ensure that the paper is thoroughly proofread to check the standard of English and ensure wording is clear and concise.

Conversion to PDF

• The PDF file is editable and not password protected.
• The PDF is free of formatting errors (e.g. corrupt equations, missing or poor-resolution figures), since conversion from Word to PDF can introduce formatting errors.
• There are no blank pages.

The content in IOP Publishing’s Conference Series journals are all published on a gold open access basis.

All of our conference series articles are currently published under a CC BY licence. For further information on what the CC BY licence allows, please refer to this page.

Older conference series articles (published from around prior to November 2012), were not published under a CC BY licence.

You should check the licence on the article itself prior to use. If the article was not published under a CC BY licence or the article does not state what licence the article was published under, please contact permissions@ioppublishing.org to request permission if you wish to reuse any content from the article.

For papers published in our gold open access proceedings titles IOP no longer requires authors to sign and submit copyright forms. Our other journals are unaffected by this change. Authors who wish to publish a paper in the following titles:

• Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS)
• IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (MSE)
• IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (EES)

are asked to submit a paper only if all authors of the paper agree in full to the terms of the licence. All papers submitted to us for publication in the above titles will be published according to the following terms and conditions.

Licence terms and conditions

By submitting the paper to the conference organizer, you, as copyright owner and author/representative of all the authors, grant a worldwide perpetual royalty free exclusive licence to IOP Publishing Limited (IOP) to use the copyright in the paper for the full term of copyright in all ways otherwise restricted by copyright, including, but not limited to, the right to reproduce, distribute and communicate the article to the public under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 or any newer version of the licence) and to make any other use which IOP may choose world-wide, by all means, media and formats, whether known or unknown at the date of submission, to the conference organizer.

This licence does not transfer the copyright in the paper as submitted which therefore remains with the authors or their employer, as appropriate. Authors may not offer the paper to another publisher unless the article is withdrawn by the author(s) or rejected by IOP.

Once published, the paper may be reused in accordance with the terms of the applicable Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, including appropriate citation information (for electronic use best efforts must be made to include a link to the online abstract of the paper on IOPscience), a link to the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, and indicating if any changes have been made to the original paper.

By granting this licence, the author warrants that the paper they are submitting is their original work, has not been published previously (other than in a research thesis or dissertation which fact has been notified to the conference organizer in writing), all named authors participated sufficiently in the conception and writing of the paper, have received a final version of the paper, agree to its submission and take responsibility for it, have read and understood IOP Publishing’s ethical policy (https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/ethical-policy-journals/) and agree that the submission complies with its terms, and the submission has been approved as necessary by the authorities at the establishment where the research was carried out.

By granting this licence, the author also warrants that they act on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, all authors of the paper, that the paper does not infringe any third party rights, it contains nothing libellous, all factual statements are, to the best of the authors’ knowledge and belief, true or based on valid research conducted according to accepted norms and our ethical policy (https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/ethical-policyjournals/), and all required permissions have been obtained.

The IOP Proceedings Licence Notice

The IOP Proceedings Licence Notice should be displayed as:

‘Published under licence in Journal Title by IOP Publishing Ltd.
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.’

Where Journal Title is one of:

• Journal of Physics: Conference Series
• IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
• IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science

Under current policy, Clarivate (the owners of ISI Web of Science) do not calculate Impact Factors for ANY proceedings titles. Therefore, proceedings journals are not issued with Impact Factors.

The ISI Web of Science platform itself is split into two components: SCI (the Science Citation Index) and CPCI (Conference Proceedings Citation Index). Proceedings journals appear within the CPCI. In order to access both, users need to have a full subscription to ISI Web of Science. However, those subscribing only to the SCI component will not have access to proceedings papers.

However, it is at the discretion of Clarivate as to how quickly they process and upload new content. Unfortunately, we have no control over how long it takes for each volume to be indexed. It can often take some time for papers to appear.

If you need to contact us about Conferences please send us an email

• IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science: ees@ioppublishing.org
• IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering: mse@ioppublishing.org
• Journal of Physics: Conference Series: jpcs@ioppublishing.org