Archives: Questions

Some of our partners handle author rights queries and permissions requests themselves. This applies to the journals listed below. Please read the instructions below to enquire about your author rights, or to request permission to reuse content from these journals:

If you wish to reuse content from one of the above partner journals, please visit our guide on reusing published content here: https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/reusing-iop-published-content/

Queries can also be sent to permissions@ioppublishing.org. In your email, please provide as much information as possible about the content you wish to reuse (including journal name, volume number, article number, figure numbers (if applicable)), and  information about how you wish to reuse the content (including the type of publication and who the proposed publisher is). Further details can be found in our Service Level Agreement

Our guidelines are applicable to the journals listed below. For guidelines specific to other partner journals, including the American Astronomical Society titles, please consult those journals’ respective homepages. Journal homepages can be accessed from here.

We encourage you to submit supplementary data files with your manuscript. If you are submitting video files, most standard file formats are suitable: animated GIF, AVI, MPG, etc. However, we strongly recommend video files be delivered in the MPEG-4 container, encoded with the H264 codec. Other formats are permitted, but using MPEG-4 will provide the most faithful rendering of your video in the HTML journal article.

Video files should be a maximum of 10 MB file size each. Exceptions can be made in cases where larger files are essential for the science being presented.

The recommended settings are:

• Frame size: 480 x 360 pixels
• Frame rate: 15 frames/s
• Data rate: 150 kB/s.

Some of our journals encourage authors to submit video abstracts. Read more about video abstracts here.

Reviewer of the Year: Dr Jianyu Liang, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, United States

Outstanding Reviewer: Dr Hartmut Wiggers, Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Outstanding Reviewers:

• Dr Christian Greiner, Karlsruhe Institut fuer Technologie, Germany
• Mr Xuejian Wu, University of California, Berkeley, United States

If you are an early career researcher you may find our PDF guides (available in both English and Chinese) helpful.

Please submit all new articles via the ‘Submit an article‘ link for the relevant journal. If you are a new author, you will need to set up an account before submitting your first article. Before submitting your article please read ‘What we look for in your article’.

Please ensure that you enter all the required information about your article. You will first be asked to select an article type for your manuscript, to enter the title and abstract, and then to select some keywords. Please note that, if your article is accepted for publication, we will display these keywords on the published article.

Author information:

You will then be asked to enter your author information. Please include all the authors (if there are less than 10). Please see Author roles and responsibilities for guidelines on who qualifies/should be included as a coauthor. We recommend you use authors’ full names and ORCID identifiers to avoid ambiguity. Please note: we require the submitting author to provide their ORCID. You can check if a co-author already exists in the journal’s database by entering the author’s e-mail address. You should ensure that all author e-mail addresses are correct to the best of your knowledge.

For papers with 20 authors or fewer, please add information for all authors. For papers with more than 20 authors, please add information for at least the first 10 authors. 

The information you provide will be used by the journal to correspond with yourself and your co-authors, to maintain accurate records, and to detect and manage any potential conflicts of interest.  

If your article is accepted, the information you provide will also be used to display the author names and affiliations with the Accepted Manuscripts. Please ensure that author names, email addresses, and affiliations are accurate, with correct spelling and punctuation. 

Follow these steps to add your co-authors in the Author Information page: 

• Check whether your co-author exists in IOP’s ScholarOne database; enter the co-author’s e-mail address and click ‘Search’. If you have authored an IOP article in the recent past, you can also use the ‘Your Recent Co-Authors’ menu at the bottom of the page to add any available authors. 
• If your co-author is found after searching, their information will appear in a pop up window; click ‘Add Author’ to include these details in the author list. 
• If your co-author cannot be found by searching, please add them using the ‘create a new author’ link that appears. The journal team will then create a full account for your co-author, using the information you provide, once your article has been submitted.  

Troubleshooting: 

• If you need to add a co-author with Chinese, Korean, or Japanese characters in their name, please enter the author’s first name in the ‘First (Given) Name’ field, and their family name in the ‘Last (Family) Name’ field. 
• If you cannot find your co-author after searching for them, please consider whether they may have recently changed their email address.  
• If you find a co-author using an old email address or institution, please inform the journal team of their correct details once you have submitted your article. Please do not create a new account for the co-author. The journal email address can be found via this page.

Note that you may not need to search for all your co-authors if the journal you are submitting to offers ‘submission pre-fill’ at the start of the submission process. If this is the case, please click ‘Select’ and then ‘Edit’ to add the required email addresses for each available co-author. 

Recommended & opposed reviewers

You may also propose preferred (and non-preferred) reviewers on submission. The suggested referees should have suitable subject expertise and not have any conflicts of interest (please see the IOP ethical policy for journals for further information on conflict of interest). These suggestions will be considered, but the editorial staff and/or Editorial Board will make the final decision regarding reviewer selection.

Policies & information

Any pertinent information that could affect the way the manuscript is handled may be provided in a cover letter. This may include highlighting anything particularly notable or significant about their research, and information about previous versions of this manuscript submitted to the current journal or to other journal(s).

You will be asked to provide information on all funders associated with your work. It is vital that you enter this information as it helps you to meet your funder requirements as well as to make your research more discoverable. Please search the Open Funder Registry for your funding institutions, and provide grant numbers.

Finally, before submitting your article, you are required to confirm that you have read and understood the IOP ethical policy for journals, and that your submission complies with its terms.

Open Access

If you have submitted to a hybrid open access journal you are then required to choose between publishing under a gold open access licence or on a subscription basis. You may change your decision at a later stage in the review process e.g. when completing Copyright. If you have submitted to a fully open access journal then you must agree to publish under a gold open access licence. You must also state whether or not you have reproduced any previously published material in your submission, and to confirm that you would like your accepted manuscript to be made available online within 24 hours of acceptance.

File uploads

File upload: to make submission as easy as possible for you,when submitting a new article, we only require you to upload a single PDF file (and any relevant supplementary data) for your article. The PDF should contain your complete manuscript, including any embedded figures and tables. You may upload your article from the arXiv directly by entering the arXiv e-print number. Please also submit any permissions that you have already obtained at this stage.

If you experience any problems submitting your article online, please contact the journal for assistance.

Please note, IOP journals do not charge you to submit an article. If there are any publication fees to pay (for open access, colour printing or page charges), these will be made clear to you at the point of submission, and are payable on acceptance for publication.

Reviewer of the Year: Professor Dr Kazumasa Iida, Nagoya University, Japan

A professor at Nagoya University, Japan, Dr Kazumasa lida sees reviewing for Superconductor Science and Technology as an excellent opportunity to learn more about research relating to superconductivity—his field of study.

When reviewing papers, Dr Iida looks forward to uncovering ‘fascinating results’ that are new to him, and an article by Weiss et al stands out to him for this very reason: Demonstration of an iron-pnictide bulk superconducting magnet capable of trapping over 1 T. There are many articles published in Superconductor Science and Technology that have interested him, but the research set out in this paper has, and will, stimulate further investigations by the bulk superconductor community.

Putting himself in authors’ shoes, Dr Iida understands that they will be wondering whether the referee finds their paper interesting—and how long it will take the reviewer get back to them. He believes that reviews should take no longer than two weeks and that researchers should always agree to act as a reviewer, unless the paper falls outside of their sphere of expertise.

Dr Iida advises first-time reviewers to reflect on the main points within the article and to think about how best to present them. It is important that they not only identify data or scientific interpretations that are unsound, but also offer suggestions on how to improve the quality of the manuscript.

In spite of his obvious dedication to the peer review process, Dr Iida is astonished that he has been identified as Reviewer of the Year.

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Reviewer of the Year: Dr Jochen Moll, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

Dr Jochen Moll believes that peer review is essential for a functioning scientific community, and therefore feels it his duty to contribute to the scientific quality assurance of publications.

Before recommending a paper, Dr Moll likes to see a detailed literature review that discusses the latest, most relevant articles. Taking the time to compile one automatically leads to a statement of novelty, he says. Similarly, articles that have a theoretical or numerical focus should include an experimental validation.

Reviewing for Smart Materials and Structures provides Dr Moll with the opportunity to be at the forefront of new developments in his field, and therefore broadens the range of his knowledge. For example, he recently enjoyed reading Guided wave based structural health monitoring: a review, which investigates many of the important elements of materials and structures research, such as modelling, experimental analysis and applications in real-life structures.

In addition, Dr Moll appreciates the social aspects of refereeing, understanding that authors will have taken months, perhaps years, to prepare their paper. For him, peer review is a balancing act between a robust critique and an encouraging evaluation. Certainly, Dr Moll is gratified when authors take on board his suggestions and is delighted to have been recognized for his efforts by the Reviewer of the Year award.