Archives: Questions

To see if your institution is covered by a transformative agreement, or to check compliance with funder requirements, you can use the IOPP Journal Finder tool.

Go to IOPP Journal Finder

Alternatively, visit ‘Transformative and institutional open access agreements’ and select the relevant country to find the agreement you may be covered by. Each agreement page lists all of the member institutions and eligible journals.

When you are ready to start your submission, follow steps 1-4 on our submission system; ScholarOne.
Note: a small number of eligible journals do not use the ScholarOne submission system.

 

At step 4, as the corresponding author, your name, institution and OrcidID will be populated by the information held in your author account in ScholarOne. Any changes to your contact information can be made in your author account.

You can also edit your institution on the submission form by selecting Actions and Edit. Choosing from the list of matching institutions will help us to identify your paper for transformative agreement funding.

The corresponding author is the person listed as Corresponding Author at the time of submission, and is the person responsible for communicating with the journal during the peer review and publication process.

 

 

At step 5 you have an option to indicate your preferred and non-preferred reviewers.

At step 6 you will see your options for publishing your article open access. The open access options will vary depending on whether you are submitting to a hybrid or fully open access journal, and if there are waivers that may be available to you.

Before making your open access choice we recommend that you check whether your institution and journal are covered by a transformative agreement, using the IOPP Journal Finder Tool.

Typical hybrid journal open access options are seen below. If you discover that you may be eligible for TA Funding, you can select: Yes: Standard rate.

 

Typical fully open access options are seen below.

Important: If you are publishing in a hybrid journal and your article is not eligible for TA funding, or if funding is declined by your institution, your article will be published under a subscription license.
If you are publishing in a fully open access journal and your article is not eligible for TA funding, or if funding is declined by your institution, you will be charged the APC.

Please be assured that whichever option you choose, we will always investigate whether you are eligible for transformative agreement funding.

 

During the initial assessment of your article, we will check eligibility for transformative agreement funding and let you know if you are eligible via email. The subject line will be: ‘Open access options for your article: [article ID]’

Some transformative agreements require IOPP to gain funding approval from your institution. In this case, you will receive a slightly different e-mail, letting you know that funding is subject to approval from your institution

This is the e-mail you will receive if your article does not require library validation:

This is what you will receive if your article does require library validation:

When you choose open access, you will be asked to sign an open access copyright form to publish under a CC BY licence.

For most transformative agreements where no validation is required your article will be published open access under the terms of the agreement, and there will be no APC to pay.

If your institution needs to approve funding, there will be a ‘validation’ step before your article will be published open access under the terms of the agreement. If your funding is declined, your article will be published and available via a journal subscription.

A small number of our partner journals do not use ScholarOne. For these, the submission process will differ but articles that may be eligible will still be identified for funding and you will receive one of the above e-mails.

 

Signing your copyright form to publish under a transformative agreement
Watch our short video to find out what the CC BY licence covers, why it’s important, and how to sign it.

Prefer to watch the author guide in video format?
See the stages in the ScholarOne submission system

How do I request permission to reuse content published by IOP?

Please see “Reusing IOP Published Content” for details on the permissions request process

Do I need permission to reuse IOP material for which I was the original author/co-author?

All IOP authors who publish on a subscription basis may include original figure(s) and text from articles they have written, within the quota outlined in the STM Guidelines, in new works created or co-created by them, provided that they notify IOP of their intended use. Where there are co-authors, you should inform them. Use which is not covered by the STM Permissions Guidelines, or which exceeds the STM Permissions Guidelines quotas, will require IOP’s permission (See “Reusing IOP Published content“). You must always cite the publication from which the figure(s)/text was taken.

If your article was published on an open access basis, you can use it without permission provided the relevant CC licence terms are adhered to.

Can I use my subscription article as part of my thesis/dissertation after it has been published with IOP?

When you transfer the copyright in your article to IOP, we grant back to you certain rights, including the right to include all or part of the Final Published Version of the article within any thesis or dissertation. Please note you may need to obtain separate permission for any third party content you include within your article. Please include citation details, “© IOP Publishing. Reproduced with permission.  All rights reserved”. The only restriction is that if, at a later date, you want to share your thesis/dissertation online, permission to include the Final Published Version of the article within the online version of your thesis/dissertation will need to be sought from IOP. Alternatively, you may choose to replace the article in the online version of your thesis/dissertation with either a Preprint or the Accepted Manuscript version (if the embargo period has passed), provided you comply with our Preprint Policy or Author Rights: Accepted Manuscript policy, as relevant.

What are the different versions of my article and how can I use them?

• Author’s Original/Preprint is the version of the article before peer review or editing, as submitted by an author to the journal.
• Accepted Manuscript is the version of the article accepted for publication, including all changes made as a result of the peer review process, and which may also include the addition to the article by IOP Publishing of a header, an article ID, a cover sheet and/or an ‘Accepted Manuscript’ watermark, but excluding any other editing, typesetting or other changes made by IOP Publishing and/or its licensors’.
• Final Published Version is ‘the peer reviewed, edited, formatted and typeset version of the article, including any tagging, indexing and other enhancements published by IOP Publishing and/or its licensors’.
• Version of Record is ‘the Final Published Version, including any post publication corrections or enhancements and any other changes made by IOP Publishing and/or its licensors’.

For information on permitted reuse for each of these versions, please refer to our Author Rights Policy

May I reuse supplementary material forming part of the article?

Authors retain copyright in any supplementary material, granting IOP a non-exclusive licence to reproduce it. You may reuse supplementary material to which you own the rights. This includes reuse of a video abstract, although you may need to obtain separate permission from the copyright owner for any third party content you included within it. The video abstract should reference the article, and, wherever possible, should provide a link back to the Version of Record of the article to which it relates.

Can I use IOP published content for lecture and classroom purposes?

If your institution is an IOP subscriber, use of this kind may be included in your licence; please check with your librarian. Non-subscribers may be permitted to do this under the terms of a licence from a local reproduction rights organisation (RRO). In the UK, this will be the CLA and in the US, the CCC. Pay-per-use permission for photocopying and electronic use is available via the CCC.

Do I need permission to adapt an IOP figure?

Generally, adapted figures require the permission of the copyright owner of the original figure. You do not require permission if the figure you have created is so different from the original that it is no longer recognisable. This is judged on a qualitative not a quantitative basis. Therefore, even if you have only used one small part of the original figure, you will probably still require permission. Changing the font, colour or size of the figure, or only using part of it, still requires permission.

How do I gain permission to use content from IOP conference series?

The content in IOP Publishing’s Conference Series journals are all published on a gold open access basis. From around Dec 2012, all of our conference series articles are published under a CC BY Licence. For further information on this, please see CC Licences. Older conference series articles 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.

Can I reuse IOP Published content in a new work to be published by IOP?

If you are submitting an article to be published by IOP, you may include original figure(s) from articles published in a journal owned by IOP or in a partner journal for which IOP handles permissions in new works created or co-created by you. You must always ensure that you have cited the prior publication from which the figures were taken. However, if IOP does not accept the article, and you wish to submit the article to another journal not published by IOP, you must obtain express permission from IOP to reuse any figures. If you wish to use figures published under the subscription model by one of our partner journals who handle their own permissions, you must contact the partner to request permission.

What are Green/Gold Open Access articles and where can I reuse them?

Please see our Guide to open access for more information.

What are the STM Permissions guidelines and do they affect permissions?

Please see our guide page on STM Guidelines for more information.

IOP Publishing (IOP) has a transformative agreement with a number of Swiss institutions through the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries to enable a transition towards open access publishing.

Who can benefit?
All corresponding authors that are current staff members, researchers (permanent, temporary and visiting), or students at one of the institutions below at the point of submission, can publish open access at no cost to themselves. The corresponding author is the person listed as Corresponding Author at the time of submission, and is the person responsible for communicating with the journal during the peer review and publication process.

What’s included?
• Articles accepted will be eligible for transformative agreement funding to enable authors to publish open access with no cost to themselves
• Research paper, special issue, letter and review article types
• Included journals are those in lists A, B, C and D. Click here for a full title list of eligible journals.

Please note
Funding is subject to librarian funding approval at acceptance stage. If for any reason funding is declined, the author(s) will have the opportunity to revert to subscription publication type at zero cost to themselves or the member institution.

You may find our author guide for submitting under a transformative agreement helpful located in our Transformative Agreement hub.

Discover high impact papers published through this agreement in our celebratory collection.

Eligible institutions

Basel University
Bern University
Fribourg University
Geneva University
Library for the Research Institutes within the ETH Domain: Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL:

• Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
• Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology
• Paul Scherrer Institute
• Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research

Lucerne University of Applied Sciences
OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPF)
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH)
University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI)
University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW)
University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO)
Zurich University
Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)

Is your institution not listed here? Recommend open access funding to your library.

The following information is available to help you with our copyright and permissions policies.

• Copyright
• Reusing IOP Published content
• Reusing third party material in new IOP content
• Creative Commons Licences
• CCC Republication service
• STM Permissions guidelines
• Permissions FAQs

 

 

IOP Publishing expects complete and accurate reporting of research to enable readers to fully understand and evaluate the work. We encourage authors to include information about their research design to further enhance the reproducibility of their research.

Many fields of research have established common reporting guidelines. IOP Publishing encourages the use of whichever guidelines are most appropriate to the study, and we encourage peer reviewers to consider and comment on whether the most appropriate guidelines have been followed.

Some reporting guidelines that authors may find relevant include:

1. ARRIVE: Reporting any area of bioscience research using laboratory animals
2. CONSIDER: Reporting of health research involving Indigenous peoples
3. CONSORT: Parallel group randomised trials
4. PRISMA: Systematic reviews and meta-analyses
5. SAGER: Reporting of sex and gender information in study design, data analyses, results and interpretation of findings

The EQUATOR Network provides a useful database of a variety of reporting guidelines and tools.

Some IOP Publishing journals may mandate the use of a specific set of reporting guidelines, for example, authors writing for Physical Measurement must follow the SAGER guidelines. For more information, please check the journal instructions.

Outstanding Reviewers

Shakeel Ahmad Khan, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Ratiram Gomaji Chaudhary, Seth Kesarimal Porwal College, India

Manickam Dakshinamoorthi Balakumaran, DG Vaishnav College, India

Majid Darroudi, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Iran

Yangqing He, Xi’an University of Technology, China

Suvardhan Kanchi, Durban University of Technology, South Africa

Lalthazuala Kasinathan, University of South Africa UNISA, South Africa

Rajesh Kumar, Indian Institute of Technology, India

Suresh Kumar Kailasa, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology Chemistry, India

Mansour Mashreghi, University of Mashhad, Iran

Adnan Mohammed Hussein, Northern Technical University, Iraq

Mu Naushad, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

Abdul  Rahman Mohamed, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia

P Rajiv, Karpagam Academy of Higher Education, India

Lalthazuala Rokhum, National Institute of Technology Chemistry, India

Masoud Salavati-Niasari, University of Kashan, Iran

Mina Sarani, Zabol University of Medical Sciences, Iran

Muthupandian Saravanan, Mekelle University, Ethiopia

Meryam Sardar, Jamia Millia Islamia, India

On this page you can find an overview of how to critique a scientific manuscript and what to look for when acting as a peer reviewer. However, IOP Publishing also offers a free, comprehensive online training course leading to IOP Trusted Reviewer certification.

Our Peer Review Excellence course takes around 90 minutes to complete. You can register for free here: Peer Review Excellence.

When you review a manuscript for any IOP Publishing journal you are eligible for IOP Trusted Reviewer certification.

Our editors rate all of the reviewer reports we receive on a scale of 1-5, with 5 representing a report of outstanding quality. Any reviewer who submits a report rated 5 will achieve IOP Trusted Reviewer status and become eligible for our Reviewer Awards. For reviewers who have completed our Peer Review Excellence training, the threshold for IOP Trusted Reviewer status is a report rated 4 or above.

Please note that in cases where the manuscript editor rescinds a reviewer report due to excessive self-citation, citation manipulation, or any other form of reviewer misconduct, the re-submitted report will receive a maximum rating of 2.

This document shows how we rate reviewer reports.

These documents contain examples of outstanding reviews in the fields of:

• Smart Materials
• Laser-Induced Fluorescence
• Plasmas
• Medical Imaging
• Quantum Computing
• Cosmology
• Medical Physics
• Piezoelectric Energy

This document contains examples of reports rated 1, 3, and 5.

Yes. If you published your article on a subscription basis within an IOP owned journal, our Author Rights Policy grants you back the right to reuse, without permission, your figures, tables, and text extracts of up to 400 words, in future published works. This also applies to the Partner owned journals we publish that share our Author Rights Policy, and also to some that have their own policy. For more information on the author rights policy applicable to each journal, please see our Quick Check Guide.

When reusing content in this way, you must display adequate citation information and IOP’s and/or our Partner’s copyright notice. This information is necessary in order to show where any reuse requests should be directed and to avoid any suggestion of self-plagiarism.

If you published your article on a Gold Open Access basis under a CC BY licence, you—in common with all third parties—may deal with the article in any way you wish (such as reusing figures, tables, and text extracts, in new works), so long as you include attribution to the authors, the journal citation and notice of the CC BY licence. For full licence terms and attribution requirements, please refer to the CC BY licence on the Creative Commons website.

IOP Publishing recognises that people change their name for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to gender identity, marriage, divorce, or a change in religion), and we support our authors’ rights to update their previously published work accordingly.

What kind of changes are covered by this policy?

Changes covered by this policy include names, pronouns, author photographs and email addresses (where the address reflects the name of the person). This policy does not cover changes to correct spelling errors or job/affiliation details.

This policy applies to all content published by IOP Publishing, including journal articles, conference proceedings and eBooks.

IOP Publishing will only consider requests from the author named in the change request. Requests to change the name of another individual without their consent will be considered ethical misconduct (see our ethical policy).

How will changes be displayed?

We respect authors’ right to privacy, and as such we offer authors the option to have their name changed with or without a public notice. The requesting author will have sole autonomy of any public notice. Co-authors will not be notified of any change unless the author explicitly chooses to include a public notice alongside the name change request.

The article DOI will remain the same. The PDF and the HTML of the article will be changed.

IOP Publishing will send updated metadata to indexers and third parties, however we cannot guarantee changes on other platforms or databases. We are unable to update citations to articles in which a name change has occurred.

How to request a change

Authors who wish to change their name on any work previously published with IOP Publishing are requested to fill out this form.

Authors who wish to change their name on work published in the American Astronomical Society (AAS) journals must contact namechange@aasjournals.org. For more information, please visit https://journals.aas.org/aas-name-change-policy/.

Authors will not be required to disclose the reasons for the request, nor will they be asked to provide proof that any name change has taken place. Authors are assured of full confidentiality and sensitivity in relation to any request or related discussion.

Authors are encouraged to update their name and contact information on the IOP Publishing submission and peer review system (more information at https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/scholar-one-help/). Name changes requested through this process will only update names as they appear on published articles. If you would like your personal details changed on other internal IOP Publishing systems, please contact gdpr@ioplegal.org. Any authors that are also members of the Institute of Physics are advised they can update their own details via IOPConnect.

Questions related to the policy should be directed to mikka.pers@ioppublishing.org. You will receive a response within five working days.

IOP Publishing considers any attempt to impersonate another person as a serious breach of ethics. IOP Publishing has the right to request proof of identity in cases where identity fraud or impersonation is alleged or suspected.

Authors should not share their log in details to any journal’s submission system, nor should they ask or allow anyone to submit on their behalf. This practice is considered to be a serious breach of this policy.

Only the author assigned the role of submitting author should submit their work themselves for consideration. IOP Publishing reserves the right to immediately reject a manuscript that has been found to have been submitted on an author’s behalf.