Archives: Questions

IOP Publishing (IOP) has a transformative agreement with Jisc Collections in the UK to enable a transition to 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 in the title list of eligible journals.

Please note
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 the Jisc agreement in our celebratory collection.

Eligible insitutions 

Aberystwyth University
Aston University
Bangor University
Brunel University
Cardiff University
Cranfield University
De Montfort University
Durham University
Heriot-Watt University
Imperial College London
Keele University
King’s College London
Lancaster University
Liverpool John Moores University
Loughborough University
National Oceanography Centre
Newcastle University
Northumbria University
Nottingham Trent University
Open University
Queen Mary University of London
Queen’s University Belfast
Sheffield Hallam University
STFC
Swansea University
UK Atomic Energy Authority
UK Health Security Agency
Ulster University
University College London
University of Aberdeen
University of Bath
University of Birmingham
University of Bristol
University of Cambridge
University of Central Lancashire
University of Chester
University of East Anglia
University of Edinburgh
University of Exeter
University of Glasgow
University of Hertfordshire
University of Hull
University of Kent
University of Leeds
University of Liverpool
University of Manchester
University of Nottingham
University of Oxford
University of Plymouth
University of Portsmouth
University of Reading
University of Sheffield
University of Southampton
University of St Andrews
University of Strathclyde
University of Sussex
University of Warwick
University of West of Scotland
University of York

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

We are committed to inclusivity within peer review and as such we periodically measure and report on the demographic profile of our author and reviewer groups. So that we can identify potential inequality and equity of opportunity, we are asking authors and reviewers to tell us more about themselves. You can choose not to tell us by selecting “Prefer not to say”, in which case your response will not be included in any reports we prepare. Data collected will only be reported at an aggregate level. We appreciate the terms used to describe gender identity can be problematic, and we have tried to be sensitive in our choice of language. We welcome feedback from the community on this and all our other initiatives to relating to inclusivity, so please do contact us with your comments.

Personal data regarding gender is not considered in any way when considering manuscripts for publication.  For more information on how we use your personal data, please see our Privacy Policy

Read more about our work on inclusivity and diversity within physical science publishing.

Named Authors’ Rights (ECS hybrid journals) – Version dated 19 March 2021

1         ECS and IOP grant the Named Authors the rights specified in paragraphs 2 and 4 which must be exercised solely for non- commercial purposes. ECS and IOP also grant the Named Authors the right contained in paragraph 5, which is the right to reuse their original figures in subsequent publications. Where possible, any use in accordance with the rights specified in paragraphs 2, 4 and 5 must display citation information and ECS’ copyright notice, and, for electronic use, best efforts must be made to include a link to the online abstract in the journal.

Exercise of the rights in this paragraph 2 may use the peer reviewed, edited, formatted and typeset version of the Article including any tagging, indexing and other enhancements published by ECS and IOP (“Final Published Version”).

2        The rights are to:

• make copies of the Final Published Version (all or part) for teaching purposes;
• include the Final Published Version (all or part) in a research thesis or dissertation provided it is not then published commercially; and
• make oral presentation of the Final Published Version (all or part) and include a summary and/or highlights of it in papers distributed at such presentations or in conference proceedings.

The Named Authors retain all proprietary rights in the Article other than copyright.

3        Exercise of the rights referred to in paragraph 4 must not use the Final Published Version and extend only to 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 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 ECS and IOP (the “Accepted Manuscript”) and must be accompanied by the following statement of provenance:

‘This is the Accepted Manuscript version of an article accepted for publication in [NAME OF JOURNAL].  The Electrochemical Society and IOP Publishing Ltd are not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it.  The Version of Record is available online at [insert DOI].

4        Additional rights of the Named Authors are to:

4.1     Use the Accepted Manuscript (all or part) without modification in personal compilations of the Named Authors’ own works (provided not created by a third party publisher); and

4.2     Include the Accepted Manuscript (all or part) on the Named Authors’ own Personal Website(s), institutional website(s), repositories, Scientific Social Networks and third party websites provided that this is fully in accordance with the Author Rights set out at the following url legal.ioppublishing.org/author-rights on the date of submission of the agreement.

5        In addition to the rights granted in paragraphs 2 and 4 above, ECS and IOP also grant the Named Authors the right to reuse, without further permission, their original figures, tables, and text extracts of no more than 400 words, in future published works of which they are an author. When reusing content in this way, the Named Authors must display adequate citation information and ECS’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.

the basis upon which you are granting the right to publish the copyright in the Article (section C):

where the Article is published on a subscription basis, a standard transfer of copyright will apply (please select this box unless one of the other scenarios below applies), or

where the Article is published on a Gold Open Access basis, a licence to publish will be granted to IOP; or

under Crown copyright – the Article is fully protected by Crown copyright under section 163 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or any subsequent amendment to that Act, or

under the laws relating to the US Government, or

Other – this should only be selected if you cannot agree to the terms of the agreement.  By selecting this, we will still require you to either re-sign the agreement or another agreement before we can accept the Article.

The Submitting Author should also sign and date the bottom of the agreement.

If you still need help, please email permissions@ioppublishing.org.

All Named Authors who are affiliated to a university/institution, and who are publishing an Article on a subscription basis (i.e. not on a gold open access basis), must each obtain an open access policy waiver for the Article from their institution or university’s open access policy if it is incompatible with IOP green open access policy.  Institutions/universities allow for such waivers in their policies.  Each Named Author affiliated to a university/institution is responsible for checking whether their university or institution’s open access policy is incompatible with IOP green open access policy.

If there are several Named Authors, one author (the Submitting Author) should submit the agreement on behalf of the others in a representative capacity.

The Submitting Author must ensure that they have the authority of all Named Authors to enter into the agreement on their behalf.

If all the Named Authors are employees of the US Government:

• they, and the authorised signatory of the US Government (“US Government Signatory”) represent and warrant to IOP and its licensors that the submitted article (the “Article”) was prepared as part of their official duties. In such circumstances, none of the original content within the Article is subject to copyright protection within the USA as it is in the public domain within the USA.  However, in signing the copyright form, the US Government Signatory grants IOP and its licensors a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide freely-transferrable perpetual licence for the full term of copyright (including any extensions or renewals) for all media and formats, whether known or unknown, to do in relation to the Article (which expression includes but is not limited to the text, abstract, tables, figures and graphs, related corrigenda or “comments” and multimedia content but excludes any other item referred to as supplementary material and/or any video abstract) all acts restricted by copyright worldwide including the right of action, to the extent that such rights exist outside of the USA.

If one or more of the Named Authors are employees of the US Government (“US Government Authors”) and one or more of them are not employees of the US Government:

• the US Government Authors and the US Government Signatory represent and warrant to IOP and its licensors that their contributions to the Article were prepared as part of their official duties. In such circumstances, none of the original content in the US Government Authors’ contribution is subject to copyright protection within the USA as it is in the public domain. However, the original content in the other remaining Named Authors’ contributions is subject to copyright protection. In signing the copyright form, the US Government Signatory grants IOP and its licensors a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide freely-transferrable perpetual licence for the full term of copyright (including any extensions or renewals) for all media and formats, whether known or unknown, to do in relation to the Article (which expression includes but is not limited to the text, abstract, tables, figures and graphs, related corrigenda or “comments” and multimedia content but excludes any other item referred to as supplementary material and/or any video abstract) all acts restricted by copyright worldwide including the right of action, to the extent that such rights exist outside of the USA; and
• one of the Named Authors who is not a US Government Author grants IOP and its licensors a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide freely-transferrable perpetual licence for the full term of copyright (including any extensions or renewals) for all media and formats, whether known or unknown, to do in relation to the Article (which expression includes but is not limited to the text, abstract, tables, figures and graphs, related corrigenda or “comments” and multimedia content but excludes any other item referred to as supplementary material and/or any video abstract) all acts restricted by copyright worldwide including the right of action, to the extent that such rights exist outside of the USA.

In addition, the US Government Signatory on behalf of the US Government grants IOP and its licensors a royalty-free non-exclusive freely transferrable licence for the full term of copyright (including any extensions or renewals thereof) to the extent that such rights exist outside of the USA to do in relation to any supplementary material not deemed to be part of the Article and/or any video abstract all acts restricted by copyright worldwide.  This shall include, but not be limited to, making the material available under any licence that IOP and its licensors deem appropriate for purposes including the maximisation of visibility and the long term preservation of the content.

Version: October 2019

This information can be used to help you style your manuscript to IOP Publishing guidelines. It is not mandatory, and we will apply appropriate styling as part of the production process, where required. Mathematics may be formatted to be consistent with the style of the journal.

Note that some of our journals do not follow these guidelines; in these cases, the correct style will be applied.

Acronyms

• Define acronyms at their first occurrence in the abstract and main text. After this, use the acronym only.
• Do not use an acronym if the definition or phrase is used only once.
• The definition should be lower case, unless it contains proper nouns, e.g., electron energy distribution function (EEDF).
• Acronyms that are very familiar to readers of a particular journal do not need to be expanded.

Mathematics

• Punctuate equations (inline and displayed) as part of the sentence.
• Make the following notation roman: differential ‘d’, exponential ‘e’, complex ‘i’, sin, cos, tan, etc.
• Use italic for subscripts and superscripts that are variables and roman for those that are labels.
• Use a full space between numbers and units, e.g., 1 m s⁻¹. Apply the same rule for numbers with mathematical operators, e.g., 1 = x.
• Write units in index notation, e.g., m s⁻¹.
• Do not use hyphens between a number and its unit; use, e.g., 5 m thick barrier (not ‘5-m thick barrier’, or ‘5-m-thick barrier’).
• In numbers, include a thin space every three digits from the decimal, e.g., 15 000.

Footnotes

Number footnotes sequentially throughout the article. If numbers have been used for affiliations, run on subsequent footnotes in the text (rather than starting again at 1).

Denote table footnotes with lower case superscript roman letters, e.g. ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, etc, and the list the footnotes underneath the table. Write each new footnote on a separate line.

Miscellaneous

• Use single quotation marks for quotations and double quotation marks for quotations within quotations.
• Use lower case ‘x’ in ‘x-ray’, except at the beginning of a sentence.
• Use a single space after a full stop.
• En dashes (–) can denote a range or relationship between two nouns. Em dashes (—) can be used in place of commas or brackets. Do not use spaces between em dashes or en dashes.
• We encourage authors to use inclusive language (e.g. “they” instead of “he” or “she”) wherever possible. For more support please use the Guidelines on Inclusive Language and Images in Scholarly Communication from C4DISC.

Figures and tables

Place figures and graphics at the top of the page where possible and do not embed within the text.  Size and position figures to achieve consistent font size and information display.

Figures and tables will be placed as close as possible to their first citation within the text (ideally on the same page) when your article is typeset; however, sometimes the number or size of figures does not allow for this.

Number all figures and tables in numerical order. If this is not the case they will be renumbered as part of the production process.

Use labels, e.g., ‘(a)’, ‘(b)’, etc where a figure has several parts. Explain all parts in the caption.

If the figure has been previously published elsewhere, obtain permission from the original publisher and include the appropriate permissions wording in your figure caption, even if it is your own work.

The style in the text for referring to tables and figures is, for example, ‘table 1’ and ‘figure 1’ (or ‘Table 1’ and ‘Figure 1’ if at the beginning of a sentence), respectively. Contractions (e.g. ‘tab. 2’, ‘fig. 1’) are not allowed.

References

We encourage the use of the Harvard or Vancouver reference systems. However, you can use any reference system providing it is sensible and consistent throughout the paper. We will ensure your references adhere to house style during the production process, whatever format you submit them in.

A reference should give your reader enough information to locate the article and include a permanent identifier (such as a DOI) if available.

Listed below are the most common reference types. We have included details of how they should be styled and the mandatory elements they should include.

Journal articles

References to journal works should include:

• Author(s): surname(s) and initial(s)
• Year
• [Title of article (optional, but see below)]
• Standard abbreviated journal title, including part letter if appropriate (in italics)
• Volume number (in bold)
• Page number, page range or article number
• DOI, if available

Examples:

• Chapman S, Trancoso R, Syktus J, Eccles R and Toombs N 2025 Impacts on compound drought heatwave events in Australia per global warming level Environ. Res. Lett. 20 054070 (doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/adc8bd)
• Lee T, Kwon H-S, Li X, Yu Z, Kimura T, Tadokoro Y, and Iizuka H 2025 Surface acoustic wave direction sensing enabled by resonant mode interference in a single micropillar resonator Phys. Rev. B 111 174101 (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.111.174101)

Note that the article title is not mandatory, except for Journal of Neural Engineering (J. Neural Eng.), Measurement Science and Technology (Meas. Sci. Technol.), Physical Biology (Phys. Biol.), Physiological Measurement (Physiol. Meas.) and Physics in Medicine and Biology (Phys. Med. Biol.).

If no individual is named as the author, the reference may be by a collaborative group of authors or by a corporate body, e.g.:

• The ASDEX Upgrade Team 2002 Theory-based modelling of ASDEX Upgrade discharges with ECH modulation Nucl. Fus. 42 L11 (doi: 10.1088/0029-5515/42/7/101)

If a collaboration is appended to one or more authors, the name of the collaboration must come before the year, e.g.:

• Nakamura K (Particle Data Group) 2010 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 37 075021 (doi: 10.1088/0954-3899/37/7A/075021)

Books

References to a book should include:

• Author(s): surname(s) and initial(s)
• Year
• Full title (in italics, the initial letter of each significant word should be upper case; note that if a word is hyphenated then both parts should have an initial capital letter; for example, Non-Classical Mechanics)
• Publisher
• DOI, if available

Example:

• Whelan C T 2018 Atomic Structure (IOP Publishing) (doi: 10.1088/978-1-6817-4880-1)

References to a book may include (optional):

• Chapter title (lower case roman; caps only for first word and proper nouns)
• Edition (e.g. 1st edn) (if any)
• Volume number (if any, given after the contraction ‘vol’)
• Editor(s) (if any, initials before the surname(s) and preceded by the contraction ‘ed’ [no full point] even if more than one editor)
• Chapter and/or page number(s) (if appropriate)

Example:

• Leung C-W and Ng C-K 2018 Spectra of commutative non-unital Banach rings Advances in Ultrametric Analysis (Contemporary Mathematics vol 704) ed A Escassut et al (American Mathematical Society) p 91

Conference proceedings

References to conference papers should include:

• Author(s): surname(s) and initial(s)
• Year of publication
• Title of conference (in italics, initial letter of each significant word should be upper case)
• DOI, if available

Example:

• Mahanta N K and Abramson A R 2012 13th Intersociety Conf. on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems

References to a conference proceedings may include (optional):

• Paper title
• Place and date (month and/or year) of conference (in italics and within parentheses, separated by commas)
• Volume number
• Editors
• Publisher
• Page numbers/other paper designations

SPIE Proceedings, AIP Conference Proceedings and IEEE Transactions

These should be treated as journals:

• Levin A D and Shmytkova E A 2015 Proc. SPIE 9526 95260P
• Smith M 2004 AIP Conf Proc. 94 340–9
• Stoffels E et al 2008 IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. 36 1441–57

Conference series

Conference series should include the title of the conference and the title of the series but not the publisher.

The exceptions are Journal of Physics: Conference Series (J. Phys.: Conf. Ser.), IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci.) and IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng.), which should be set as journal references, e.g.:

• Barry R Holstein 2009 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 173 012019
• V V Kramarenko et al 2016 IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 43 012029
• S Adarsh et al 2016 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 149 012141

Web links

Only permanent or persistent web links should be used in reference lists. Examples of acceptable links include:

• Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
• PubMed identifier (PMID)
• PubMed Central reference number (PMCID)
• SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Bibliographic Code
• arXiv e-print number

Unpublished

Pre-prints

References to pre-prints should include:

• Author(s)
• Year of publication
• Pre-print number

Example:

• Jones R and Brown A 2011 arXiv:0912.1470

Theses

References to theses should include:

• Author surname and initials
• Year
• Type of thesis
• Institution

Examples:

• Roberts P 1970 MSc Thesis University of Manchester
• Dobson C T J 1968 Magnetic transport in reaction–diffusion phenomena PhD Thesis Brunel University, London

The title is optional.

Lecture Notes

References to theses should include:

• Author surname and initials
• Year
• Lecture title
• Institution

Example:

• Chandrasekhar J R 2003 Modelling aspects of model based dynamic qos management by the performability manager Lecture Notes Institute of Technology Delhi, India

Accepted or submitted

References to articles that are accepted or submitted should include:

• Author(s)
• Year of publication
• Article title
• Standard abbreviated journal title (in italics)
• Either ‘accepted’ or ‘submitted’

Example:

• Evangelakos V, Paspalakis E and Stefanatos D 2025 Quantum Sci. Technol. accepted (doi: 10.1088/2058-9565/add207)

In preparation

References to articles that are in preparation should include:

• Author(s)
• Year of preparation
• Article title
• ‘In preparation’ (within parentheses)

Example:

• Jones R and Brown A 2011 Class. Quantum Grav. in preparation

Non-bibliographic text

References that do not contain bibliographic information (i.e. they do not refer to other pieces of work) should be set as a footnote within the text and cited at the appropriate location.

Citations

Ensure that all references are cited in the text and that all citations have a corresponding reference.

Journal of Geophysics and Engineering is no longer published by IOP. As of 2019 this journal is now published by Oxford University Press.

Please visit the OUP website for current and archive content.

Please contact the OUP Rights and Permissions Team to make a request.