Archives: Questions

Green open access is the process of archiving a copy of an accepted manuscript* on an institutional or subject repository in parallel to publishing with IOP Publishing. IOP Publishing believes that gold open access is the most sustainable route to open access but provides green open access options to those authors wanting or needing to share their work in this way. 

IOP Publishing allows authors of articles published on a subscription basis to post an accepted manuscript as follows: 

Posting the accepted manuscript
On a personal website	On an institutional / subject repository
Immediate posting allowed	No earlier than 12 months after publication of the final article

 Subscription-based journals must insist on the 12-month embargo because immediate availability of peer-reviewed articles in public repositories removes the means of funding the journal’s costs of operation. For full details on your rights as an author of a subscription-based article, including full details on how and when you can share the accepted manuscript, please refer to our Author Rights Policy (or the relevant partner specific policy, if you have published with one of our society partners). 

Authors publishing an article on a gold open access basis can post the accepted manuscript on a repository immediately if required. 

For UK authors to comply with the requirements of the HEFCE post-2014 REF policy, IOP Publishing allows closed deposits on repositories within certain specified time-frames. To see full information on this, please refer to our Author Rights Policy. 

 If you are publishing the results of research funded by a US government agency, or if you are employed by the US government, then please see our guide to US public access. 

IOP Publishing will deposit papers in PubMed Central automatically in the following cases: 

• Articles funded by the NIH: the accepted manuscript will be deposited after the 12-month embargo period; 
• Gold open access articles funded by Wellcome Trust: the version of record will be deposited upon publication. 

 Authors may be permitted to opt out of an institutional open access policy. Further information on obtaining a waiver from an institutional open access policy can be found here. 

 IOP Publishing supports the sharing of preprints. View our preprint policy. 

 

*The 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’. 

Some universities and institutions  have adopted open access policies, which, in some respects, are incompatible with IOP Publishing’s green open access policy which applies when the article is published on a subscription basis. Please check whether you or any of your co-author(s) are affiliated to a university or institution which has an open access policy which is incompatible with IOP Publishing’s green open access policy. If you are, then we will need you to obtain a waiver for the article from your institution or university. Institutions allow for such waivers in their policies. Institutions with such policies are predominantly in the USA.

For examples of open access policies which are incompatible with IOP Publishing’s green open access policy, see below.

If we receive an article that is not quite right for a journal, our Editors work with you to help find a more suitable home for your research. We will assess your article to see if it is meets the requirements for a different IOP Publishing journal and if it does, we will offer you the chance to transfer your article to the selected journal(s).

Benefits of transferring to another IOP Publishing journal

• For authors – transferring your manuscript can save you time as you do not need to complete a new submission elsewhere. As previous reviews can also be transferred, and the same reviewers used again, the time to acceptance can be shorter for transferred articles.
• For reviewers – transferring reports means that no review is a wasted effort: a decision can be made by the Editors using the existing reviews, removing the need to restart the entire peer review process again.

Our Editors have an expert knowledge of the requirements for each journal we publish. As a result, we only offer a transfer if we know the article has the potential to be published by another IOP Publishing journal. If you do not want to transfer to the selected journal(s), you can simply decline the offer and can then submit your work elsewhere. The choice is entirely yours.

I’ve been offered a transfer: what happens next?

1. You need to decide whether you want to accept the transfer offer. The email we sent you will contain information about the journal(s) we have suggested, and we recommend you visit the ‘About the Journal’ information on our website to help make your decision.
2. If you would like to accept the offer, the article, along with all relevant submission information and reviewer reports (if present), will be transferred to the new journal by the IOP Editor.
3. The Editor on your chosen journal will then do one of two things, which depend on whether we have already received reviewer reports or not. They will either:
   • send it for peer review
   • allow you to revise the manuscript based on the existing reviewer comments
4. Once the reviewer reports or revisions have been received, the Editor makes a final decision on the manuscript.

It’s important to note: a transfer is not a guarantee of acceptance. The Editor on the new journal may decide that the article needs further rounds of review to ensure suitability for the journal.

 

For more information on copyright and open access licensing, refer to our open access rights and licence information page.

Reprints of a journal article can be purchased directly from the article abstract page in IOPscience, via the ‘Buy this article in print’ link within the Article information section (circled in red in the screenshot). For orders in excess of 250 copies, please email pod@ioppublishingpublishing.org.

To create a DOI link, add the DOI of the article (located alongside the citation information) to the following url: https://doi.org/.  For example, an article with the doi 10.1088/1367-2630/1/1/001 could be found at https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/1/1/001.

Yes. 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.

Once you have sent your proof corrections, they will be carried out in accordance with the journal style. The paper will then be published online as quickly as possible, typically around a week after the corrections have been received. For journals that are printed, print publication may not happen for some time depending on the frequency of the journal. You will be informed by email when your paper is published online and invited to provide feedback on the publication process via a survey.

The published article has both HTML and PDF versions. As with the proof, there may be cosmetic differences between the two versions, such as figure position and the font used for mathematics, although the content itself will be the same.

For articles published under a CC BY-NC-SA licence, you—in common with all third parties—may reuse the article for non-commercial purposes only and may post the article to non-commercial repositories and non-commercial websites so long as you include attribution to the authors and the journal citation, indicate if changes were made and distribute the article under the same CC BY-NC-SA licence. For full licence terms and attribution requirements, please refer to the CC BY-NC-SA licence on the Creative Commons website.