Archives: Questions

For most researchers there is no reason to opt out of this process. However, researchers planning promotional activity, like a press release, either with us or their institution, may wish to opt out to maintain the traditional embargo period for journalists. Also, researchers currently engaging in IP or patent applications may wish to opt out of accepted manuscripts. Authors who wish to opt out can select ‘No’ when answering the following question in the submission form:

Accepted Manuscripts

Author manuscripts are made available on IOPscience within 24 hours of acceptance. At this point, the manuscript will be made available on the journal’s website with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and will be fully citable. For more information about our accepted manuscript policy please refer to our accepted manuscripts FAQs.

Would you like your accepted manuscript to be made available online within 24 hours of acceptance?

Before the article is accepted, authors can contact the journal to change their selection. However, as soon as the article is accepted the process will be automatic, so whichever option has been selected up to that point will be immediately applied and cannot be changed.

Once the acceptance decision has been made and we have received a signed copyright form, the accepted version of the manuscript will be made available online within 24 hours of acceptance. This version of the manuscript will not be language-edited or typeset and will be provided as a flat PDF. We will continue to work with authors on the production of their article, and the final version of record will replace the accepted manuscript version once this has been completed.

The accepted manuscript will be available as a PDF on the journal website. It will be the same as the version accepted for publication, with the original figures and formatting. We will then continue to work with the authors to improve the paper for the final version of record. In order to make the accepted manuscript available as efficiently as possible, we are only able to make a watermarked PDF version of the original source file available online. Any supplementary content will be made available when the final version of record is published.

The IOP Ethical Policy for Journals applies to all the titles listed below. Other journals we publish with partner organisations not listed operate using the partners’ ethical policies.

IOP Publishing is a member of the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) and adheres to COPE’s Guidelines regarding misconduct and retractions, including the processes set out in COPE’s flowcharts. We take ethical allegations very seriously and believe it is our responsibility to maintain the integrity of the scientific record as far as possible. 

Our relationship with our authors is based on trust, and we publish submitted material in good faith. However, if a possible breach of ethics is brought to our attention, we will refer the case to our Research Integrity Team for investigation. We follow the COPE guidelines on responding to whistle-blowers, which includes protecting your anonymity. 

The team will seek the support of relevant individuals across the business, and may obtain advice from the journal’s Editorial Board. In some instances, the team may need to escalate an investigation to author’s institution(s) for further support or information. The team will ensure to take a balanced and objective approach, as well as reach out to the accused individuals in every instance, to provide them with the opportunity to comment on the matter before committing to a particular course of action.  

The team will decide the most appropriate approach to take according to industry guidelines and advise on any corrections (including retractions) that may be required to the published record, following the STM Guideline for the Preservation of the Objective Record of Science (2006). All relevant parties will be informed of the outcome of the case. 

Please note:

• Misconduct investigations are sensitive and can take time. The Research Integrity team would appreciate patience while they investigate, by allowing them the time and space to review the matter in full.  
• Due to the nature of investigations, we are unable to provide a timeline for when a particular case will be resolved by. 
• IOP Publishing has the right to contact an individual’s institution regarding allegations of misconduct, according to the COPE Guidelines.
• IOP Publishing has the right to share manuscripts and related information with other Publishers and Editors during the course of an investigation, according to the COPE Guidelines.
• IOP Publishing has the right to request proof of identity in cases where identity theft is alleged or suspected. 
• IOP Publishing has the right to request access to the raw data related to any manuscript, either under consideration or published, at any time.
• IOP Publishing reserves the right to issue an expression of concern to a paper which is the subject of an ongoing investigation, such as when we are unable to resolve a case swiftly or when a third party is involved. 
• Subject to a full investigation, IOP Publishing reserves the right to retract an accepted or published article that is found to have breached our licence to publish and/or meets the COPE criteria for retractions.
• In instances where a breach of ethics is suspected with an unpublished work (a submitted manuscript or accepted manuscript that has not yet been made available on IOPscience), IOP Publishing reserves the right to reject or rescind the acceptance of the paper.
• IOP Publishing reserves the right not to work with anyone who is abusive to our staff, authors, reviewers or editors. Please see our respect for others policy for more information. 

To report any concerns relating to potential misconduct, please contact the editorial office for the relevant journal. You can find contact information for all IOP journals here. Alternatively, you can contact the Research Integrity Team directly.  

IOP Publishing is a member of the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) and we follow their guidelines when investigating all allegations of misconduct.

IOP journals are international in authorship and in readership and referees are carefully selected from the worldwide research community. Referees’ names are kept confidential and may only be disclosed to journal Editorial Board members, who are also instructed to maintain confidentiality. Unbiased consideration is given to all manuscripts offered for publication regardless of the race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, political philosophy, sexual orientation, age or reputation of the authors.

Information and ideas obtained whilst acting as a referee must be kept confidential and not used for competitive advantage. Referees should disclose any conflicts of interest as described here. Referees should inform the journal if they are unable to review a paper or can do so only with some delay. They should not delay the peer review process unnecessarily, either deliberately or inadvertently.

Referees should judge objectively the quality of the research reported, give fair, frank and constructive criticism and refrain from personal criticism of the authors. Comments made by referees may be seen by the authors. Therefore referees’ judgements should be explained and supported so that authors can understand the basis of the comments and judgements.

Referees are expected to point out relevant work that has not been cited, and use citations to explain where elements of the work have been previously reported. If they believe that the work is substantially similar to a manuscript or any paper published or submitted to another journal, they should report this to the journal staff for further investigation.

We request that referees do not contact authors directly. Many IOP journals consult two referees and the opinion of one reviewer may not reflect the journal’s final decision on an article. Receiving partial advice from one referee can give authors a misleading impression of the peer review process. If there is a particularly urgent reason for contacting the author then this should be done via the journal office.

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Authors

All authors and co-authors are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest when submitting their article. Any conflicts of interest should be included in an acknowledgements section.

Examples of financial interests that should be disclosed:

Any direct sources of funds (employment, grants, patents, stock ownership, sponsorships etc.) or indirect sources of funds (consulting fees, honoraria, equipment supplies etc.) where the funding organisation stands to gain/lose from the publication of the article or could be seen to have influenced the submitted work.

Examples of personal relationships/academic competitions that should be disclosed:

Any unpaid roles that the authors have that could influence the publication process. These would include unpaid advisory affiliations and memberships of professional organisations.

Any personal relationships/beliefs that could be seen as a conflict should also be disclosed. This would include having a relative who works for an organisation funding the work.

Declaring conflicts of Interest:

Any potential conflicts of interest should be declared in the acknowledgements section.

If you are submitting to a double-anonymous review journal, the full disclosure should be included in your cover letter.

Reviewers

To uphold impartiality, reviewers should consider any potential conflict of interest before agreeing to review and should decline in the following instances:

• You are in direct competition with the authors
• You are a co-worker or collaborator or have a personal relationship with one of the authors
• You are affiliated with the same institution as one of the authors
• You are in a position to exploit the authors’ work (commercially or otherwise)
• You are in a position which prevents you from giving an objective opinion of the work.

Reviewers are expected to act within the spirit of the Nolan principles of public life.

If you are unable to act as a reviewer due to a conflict of interest, we will select an alternative reviewer.

If you have been asked to review an article for one of our double-anonymous journals, please notify the journal staff if you suspect a potential conflict of interest.

Editors, Board Members and Editorial Staff

Editors and Editorial Board Members are welcome to submit papers to the journal. Submissions from Editors and Board Members are subject to the same standards and review process as all other submissions, and Editor or Board Member status has no bearing on editorial decision making. If an Editor or Editorial Board Member is on the author list, they will not be eligible for reviewing or overseeing the peer review process on that paper. Our peer review system will also prevent them from having any additional information about their paper, for example, the name of the reviewers or the confidential comments to the Editor.

Editors, Board Members and editorial staff are expected to declare any conflict of interest relating to a particular manuscript, notifying the journal staff and requesting they be recused from any involvement in the peer review or processing of that manuscript.

IOP Publishing is a member of the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE), and apply the principles of publication ethics outlined in the COPE Core Practices.

Referencing

Authors have a responsibility to fully acknowledge the work of others (be it published or unpublished) that is used in their research and to cite publications that have influenced the direction and course of their study. Information obtained in private correspondence or conversation should only be used with the explicit permission of the individuals involved. Information obtained whilst providing confidential services, such as refereeing research articles or grant applications, should not be used without permission of the original author.

All sources for the article must be clearly disclosed and permissions obtained from the original authors (and original publishers if they hold the copyright) for any figures or significant extracts that are to be reproduced or quoted. Collection of such permissions is the responsibility of the authors.

References should be helpful to the reader and advance the article, so authors should ensure they are relevant, recent and easy to find.

Citation manipulation

Authors should ensure that citations add value and are not unfairly bias towards an individual, group or organisation. Only sources drawn upon in the work should be referenced, and citations should support the points which they reference.

The practice of including superfluous references to the authors own work, or the works of others, merely to promote and inflate citation scores is unethical. IOP Publishing regularly screens submissions for this practice. Any authors under pressure to include irrelevant citations should report this to ResearchIntegrity@ioppublishing.org.

Plagiarism

Submitted articles must be the authors’ own work, expressed in their own words. Plagiarism constitutes unethical scientific behaviour and is never acceptable. Plagiarism ranges from the unreferenced use of others’ ideas, to replication (without sufficient attribution or use of quotation marks) of sections of text from other sources, to submission of a complete paper under ‘new’ authorship. IOP Publishing routinely screens submissions for originality via iThenticate, industry standard plagiarism detection software.

Duplicate publication

Duplicate publication is the production of multiple papers with the same, or essentially the same, content by the same authors and is viewed as unacceptable. Submitted research articles must be novel and original.

In the case of articles that expand upon previously published conference proceedings, or conference write-ups that discuss work already published in an earlier paper, some limited exceptions to this rule may apply. However, in these cases authors should consult with the journal staff before submission. In all instances, articles must clearly cite their sources and present some new contribution to the published literature otherwise such articles will be rejected.

Multiple publications arising from a single research project should be clearly identified as such and the primary publication should be referenced. Translations and adaptations for different audiences should be clearly identified as such, should acknowledge the original source, and should respect relevant copyright conventions and permission requirements. If in doubt, authors should seek permission from the original publisher before republishing any work.

Text recycling

Text recycling occurs when authors publish sections of the same text in more than one of their own publications. Authors should always be clear and cite any re-used text in the manuscript, respecting relevant copyright conventions and permission requirements. Authors should state in their cover letter if there are sections of the article that have already been published elsewhere. We acknowledge there are some instances where text recycling may be acceptable, and others where it is unacceptable. All text recycling will be investigated and considered on an individual basis by our Editors.

Parallel submission

It is also unethical to submit the same, or essentially the same, article to a second primary research journal whilst it remains under active consideration by another.

To aid us in detecting any submissions that do not meet the above requirements, we regularly use plagiarism-detection software to screen articles.

IOP Publishing follows the authorship criteria set out by the International Council of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Within this, for someone to be considered an author of a work, they must meet all 4 of the following criteria: 

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND 
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND 
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND 
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. 

All named authors should be able to identify which co-authors worked on specific parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors. Authorship should never be bought, sold, or otherwise traded. We reserve the right to request evidence supporting authorship contribution, and reserve the right to reject any work which is suspected to have been bought, sold or otherwise traded.

It’s important all authors agree prior to submission the authorship of their paper, the order in which author names are presented, and ensure all those, and only those, who meet this criteria are included as authors. Acquisition of funding, collection of data or general supervision of the research group does not constitute authorship. 

Other individuals who have contributed to the study in a lesser capacity should be acknowledged, subject to their consent to be named (we may not ask you to provide evidence of this, but please keep a copy for your records), but not cited as authors. Please ensure you declare in the acknowledgments if an individual or organisation has supported with any portions of the work that have been outsourced (such as for translation work, support with experiments etc). Please note, the acknowledgements should not be used to misleadingly imply a contribution or endorsement by individuals who have not, in fact, been involved with the work or given an endorsement.  

We strongly encourage authors to make specific attributions of contribution and responsibility in the acknowledgements of the article. Authors may wish to use a taxonomy such as CRediT to describe the contributions of each author. 

We understand some research fields follow long standing prescribed authorship practices for recognised ‘big science’ collaborations, which may differ from the above. Corresponding authors of relevant articles will be asked to confirm upon submission if their paper follows these established practices, and this will be assessed at the journal level according to the accepted practices within that field of study.

If an unresolvable authorship dispute arises, the institution(s) where the work was undertaken should be asked to investigate. IOP Publishing will not arbitrate in cases where there is disagreement over authorship. IOP Publishing has the right to remove your article from the review process until a resolution can be agreed, or issue an expression of concern to the work whilst the investigation is ongoing. 

Responsibility of the submitting author 

It is the submitting author’s responsibility to ensure that all named authors have consented to submission to the journal, approved the submitted version of the article, and all further revisions.  

It is the submitting author’s responsibility to ensure the paper is not under consideration by any other journal at the time of submission.  

It is the submitting author’s responsibility to ensure the contact details for all co-authors are correctly entered into the submission system, and are correct at the time of submission. 

Responsibility of the corresponding author 

The contact details of the corresponding author are displayed on the final published manuscript, and the corresponding author handles all post-acceptance enquiries, including reader and media requests. Communications during the submission, peer review and production process will be directed to this author.

Changes in authorship 

Any changes to authorship during the peer review process must be approved by all authors of the paper, and all authors must confirm to the journal that they give their consent and made a genuine intellectual contribution to the paper.

In addition, you must explain to the journal the reasons behind the change in authorship based on the guidelines above. If additional authors are being added to the manuscript, you will need to provide evidence of their significant contribution to the work.

Proof of contribution includes but is not limited to:

• Earlier drafts of the manuscript with the requested author’s edits
• Laboratory reports with requested author’s name
• Email exchanges directly related to the manuscript or relevant experiments
• WhatsApp Chats directly related to the manuscript or relevant experiments
• Logbooks
• Research notes

It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that evidence proving their contributions to the manuscript is kept during the submission process and can be provided at request.

IOP Publishing reserves the right to refuse requests if there is reason to doubt the legitimacy of the request.

Changes to authorship are not permitted after publication. For the avoidance of doubt, publication includes the accepted version of the manuscript going online.

Changing a corresponding author

IOP Publishing’s policy is that the corresponding author cannot be changed once they have been initially nominated at submission. 

The only exception to this policy is where the corresponding author’s circumstances have materially changed so they are clearly no longer available to fulfill the role at publication. Examples of when the corresponding author is no longer available to fulfill the role at publication include:

• corresponding author has gone on parental leave; 
• corresponding author has retired; 
• corresponding author has left academia; 
• corresponding author has gone on sabbatical; 
• corresponding author is on long-term sick leave; or 
• corresponding author has died 

This must be confirmed in writing by the relevant institutions (for outgoing and incoming corresponding authors) at the time of request. 

For clarity, the corresponding author can never be changed in order to gain funding or discounts/waivers, or to comply with sanctions or mandates for funding already received. It is expected that the author group will discuss and agree author roles, taking into account any funding requirements before submitting a manuscript to IOP Publishing. 

This policy applies to all manuscripts in all journals either partly or wholly owned by IOPP Publishing, see full list. The following partner journals also apply this policy on their titles:

• European Journal of Physics (European Physical Society)
• Europhysics Letters (European Physical Society)
• Journal of Radiological Protection (Society for Radiological Protection)
• New Journal of Physics (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft)
• Nonlinearity (London Mathematical Society)
• Physics in Medicine & Biology (Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine)
• Physiological Measurement (Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine)

Deceased authors 

In cases where an author has sadly passed away before a paper has been submitted, or during peer review, we require consent from a familial or legal proxy of the deceased for the paper to be reviewed for potential publication. Deceased authors are still eligible for co-authorship if they made a significant intellectual contribution to the article (see above).

Authors must not fabricate, falsify or misrepresent data or results. They should strive to be objective, unbiased and truthful in all aspects of their work.

Authors must be honest in making claims for the results and conclusions of their research. Making inflated claims for a project interferes with the objective evaluation of its results and applications, and can lead to an unfair and wasteful distribution of resources.

Authors should strive to avoid mistakes in research and exercise due diligence in presenting high quality work for publication. They should critically assess the likelihood of experimental, methodological and human errors and avoid self-deception and bias. Where possible they should conduct an internal review to assess the validity of their work before publication.

If an error occurs

It is, of course, recognised that errors will occur from time to time. When an error is discovered in published or submitted work, the mistake should be admitted and a corrigendum, erratum or retraction should be published. Corrections should be approved by all authors of the original article unless there is a particular reason why this is not possible. In these cases any dissent among the authors should be noted in the published correction.

Source materials

IOP Publishing does not require the raw data from an experiment to be submitted for publication, although some of our journals do offer the option to supply this data as supplementary information. However, we expect that all authors follow established best scientific practice and record (and retain) source material of experiments and research results, in an auditable manner that allows for scrutiny and verification by other scientists. Exceptions may be appropriate to preserve privacy or patent protection. There may also be specific instructions from your funding agency or university.