Archives: Questions

Authors are permitted to share the Author’s Original/Preprint of their article anywhere at any time. Please refer to our Preprint Policy for further information.

Please refer to our preprint policy.

After your article has been reviewed, you will receive an email with a first decision on the article. IOP has a range of different decisions you could receive and these are outlined below. You will see what each decision type is and what it means for you and your article.

Provisional accept

Following peer review, your article has been provisionally accepted for publication. However, before we can pass your article to our production department, our editorial team needs to check we have everything required to publish your article. They will be in touch with you if anything is missing.

Formal accept

Our editorial team has made all the necessary checks and has everything required to publish your article. Your accepted article will now be passed to our production department.

Minor revision

Your article has a very good chance of being accepted for publication, but the reviewers have requested minor amendments to be made. These changes can usually be made quite quickly and it is unlikely we will need to send your revised article back to the reviewers.

We usually allow between one and two weeks for you to send your revised article back to us, but this may vary by journal.

Moderate revision

Your article has a good chance of being accepted, but requires additional changes to be made to satisfy our reviewers. These changes usually require more time and it is likely we will need to send the revised article back to at least one of the reviewers.

We usually allow between two and four weeks for you to send your revised article back to us, but this may vary by journal.

Major revision

Your article has a chance of being accepted, but the reviewers have requested substantial changes to be made. These changes are expected to take significantly longer and we will allow a longer deadline for you to submit. The revised article will be sent back to the reviewers.

We usually allow between four and eight weeks for you to send your revised article back to us, but this may vary by journal.

Rejected but may resubmit

Your article has been rejected as it stands. The reviewers have requested very substantial changes that are too significant to warrant a revision of the article in its current form. However, the reviewers see potential in your article and we will allow you to resubmit it if you substantially rewrite it, as explained in the referee reports. It will then be treated as a new submission, with a new article ID, though it will usually be reviewed by at least one of the original reviewers.

Reject: not in scope

Your article has been rejected. Unfortunately, the content of your article is not within the scope of the journal. If you would like to see a copy of the journal scope, please visit the relevant journal homepage.

Reject: overlap

Your article has been rejected since we have found that your article contains text which appears to have been replicated from previously published article(s). All manuscripts considered for publication in IOP journals should report new research and contain substantial new results, and should not contain text directly copied from previously published work. If you would like more information about our ethical policy it is available here.

Reject: unscientific

Your article has been rejected. The quality and presentation of any research published in our journals must be of a high standard. Submissions should clearly demonstrate scientific rigour, extensive literature research and a careful assessment of the validity of any conclusions presented in the manuscript. Your manuscript has been assessed and found not to meet all of these key publication criteria and so we are unable to consider it further.

Reject: poor English

Your article has been rejected. Your manuscript cannot be considered in its current form. All manuscripts submitted to us must be written in clear English so that readers (and reviewers) are able to understand the meaning of the article. We strongly advise you to ask a native-English-speaking colleague to check your manuscript before submission. IOP also offers several English-language editing services which you may want to use to help you improve the language of your submission, including help with translation. You can find more details here.

If you decide to rewrite your manuscript to make its meaning clear to the reviewers (many of whom do not speak English as their first language), we will be happy to reconsider it.

Straight reject

Your article has been rejected. Articles must be of high quality and high scientific interest, and be recognized as an important contribution to the literature. Following review, it has been found that your article does not meet all of these criteria and should not be published in the journal. A revised submission of this paper will not be considered.

Please note, we will not normally reconsider an article for our primary research journals if it has already been rejected in the same or a substantially similar form, without the option to resubmit, by this or any other IOP Publishing journal. If a submission has previously been rejected by one of our journals, please state this in your covering letter and clearly detail the revisions you have made. Before rejecting we will always consider whether the work would be better suited to another IOP journal, therefore if you have not been offered a transfer, we do not believe your article is suitable for publication in any of our other journals.

Reject and transfer

Your article has been rejected as the content is not appropriate for the journal to which it has been submitted. However, we have found an alternative IOP journal we think it is suitable for, and we will give you up to ten days to either approve or decline the transfer to this journal. If we do not hear from you after ten days, we will assume you do not agree to the transfer and we will automatically reject the transfer.

The processing times on our journals are consistently among the fastest in the communities we serve. For more information, you can visit our journal-specific homepages for median decision times along with a list of decision types on our journals.

If a reviewer proves unable to report, we will try to find an alternative referee as quickly as possible. However, if a referee requests a short extension to their deadline for providing a report, we will usually grant this if it is reasonable. We try to strike a balance between the needs of authors (who will often ask for as fast a review as possible) and those of referees (who will often prefer to have more time to thoroughly study the paper and compose their report).

In those rare cases where an article’s review process has been delayed due to unexpected difficulties in obtaining reports, we make use of our Editorial Board members’ expertise to conclude the process swiftly.

Authors can monitor the progress of their article using the Track My Article feature. If you still have any queries after checking the articles status you can contact the journal team quoting the Manuscript ID.

Pre-review stage

Upon receiving a new manuscript, the editorial office conducts initial pre-review checks to ensure the article is legible, complete, correctly formatted, original, within the scope of the journal in question, in the style of a scientific article, and written in clear English. Any article that has problems with any of the above criteria may be rejected at this stage.

Some of our journals also conduct a pre-review quality assessment which may be carried out by a member of the journal’s Editorial Board. If an article receives a preliminary assessment by a member of the Editorial Board, the authors may receive a report from them as part of the journal’s decision.

If the journal has a particular requirement for articles to be of exceptionally high interest or urgency (for example, if the article is being submitted as a Fast Track Communication or a Letter), then submissions that do not appear to meet these criteria may be rejected at the pre-review stage.

Review stage

Articles passing successfully through the pre-review stage then begin formal peer review.

Research papers and reviews submitted for publication in the majority of IOP journals are sent to two independent reviewers who are asked to report on the quality, scientific rigour, novelty, significance to the field, and presentation. (Non-paper article types, such as notes, may differ.)

Reviewers are selected from our reviewer database and we try to find the best combination of scientific expertise and reviewer experience for each paper.

Authors are welcome to suggest reviewers for their paper on submission, but this is not required. In the interests of impartiality, if an author-suggested reviewer is used then we will complement this with a review from a second reviewer chosen by the journal from the general reviewer pool.

IOP is committed to publishing high-quality material in its journals and most journals have quite high rejection rates, typically above 50%. Papers that reviewers deem to be technically sound, but of limited interest, are usually rejected. (Exceptions to this are Journal of Physics Communications and our Express journals—Materials Research Express and Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express—where papers are reviewed only to confirm they are original and technically sound.) Decisions are based not only on the content of the written reports, but also taking into consideration the quality assessment scores returned by each reviewer. The editorial office reserves the right to send any papers to journal Editorial Board members where they believe a paper’s quality might not meet the journal’s threshold for publication.

Use of an adjudicator

If the reviewers’ reports are not in agreement, the paper and the reports are sent to an independent adjudicator (often a member of the journal’s Editorial Board) who is first asked to form their own opinion of the paper and then to read the reviewers’ reports and adjudicate between them. A decision is then made based on the adjudicator’s recommendation. If a reviewer is overruled by an adjudicator, we will normally notify the reviewer of this.

Withdrawing articles

In exceptional cases, some of our journals reserve the right to withdraw manuscripts from consideration when we are unable to find sufficient reviewers.

A Chinese language version of this checklist is also available.

We have created a Word template for double-anonymous submissions. This is not compulsory, but may help you ensure your work is fully anonymised.

Please check the peer review model of a journal via the “About the Journal” section of our journal homepages.

View Journals

Double-anonymous peer review

How does it work?

Authors and reviewers are anonymous to each other.

What should I do if I want my work to be reviewed using double-anonymous peer review?

• Check the journal you are submitting to supports double-anonymous peer review.
• Authors are responsible for anonymising their manuscript before submitting their paper. Click here for more information on how to do this, including a checklist(also available in Chinese).
• You can still share your research results via preprint servers such as arXiv and other early sharing platforms. This does mean that author identities may be easier to find online if reviewers try to find them. We ask our reviewers to undertake an objective review of an article and when agreeing to a double-anonymous review we trust that they will not go out of their way to undermine author anonymity, however this can never be guaranteed.
• Read our double-anonymous FAQs

Single anonymous peer review

How does it work?

Reviewers are anonymous to authors. Author identities are visible to reviewers.

What should I do if I want my work to be reviewed using single-anonymous peer review?

• Check the journal you are submitting to supports single-anonymous peer review.
• Your manuscript should contain a complete listing of all authors, including affiliations.

Transparent peer review

How does it work?

• The reviewer’s comments, author responses and editorial decision letters are published alongside the final published article, in citable form. The article may have been single or double anonymously peer reviewed before publication. We hope that this greater transparency will improve the quality of the review process, give more recognition to the work of reviewers and help with the teaching of best practice in peer review.

What should I do if I want to opt-in to transparent peer review?

• Check the journal you are submitting to supports transparent peer review (it is available on all of IOP’s fully Open Access journals).
• Both authors and reviewers can opt-out of transparent peer review should they wish to do so. The peer review history will only appear for articles where the author and (all) reviewers opt in. Reviewers who do opt-in can still choose to remain anonymous.

What does transparent peer review look like?

The peer review history is available only for articles displaying a Publons badge (above) at the top of the article (next to the title). Click on the badge to view further information. All peer review content displayed will be covered by a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license.

Some example articles published with transparent peer review content are available here:

• ERL: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab5f96; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab763f
• JNE: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/ab5e08; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/ab6cba
• JPMat: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7639/ab749c

Post publication review

While we do not have any functionality on our site for post-publication review, we welcome comments on published work. This could be via social media (many of our journals have their own Twitter accounts, for example), or via an external website such as PubPeer. Some of our journals publish comments on previously published work. Check your journal instructions for more information.

IOP journals are international in authorship and readership. Referees are carefully selected from the worldwide research community. Unbiased consideration is given to all manuscripts offered for publication regardless of whether or not the authors request publication on an open access basis and regardless of the race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, political philosophy, sexual orientation, age or reputation of the authors.

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: