Archives: Questions

Scientific rigour

• Is this paper understandable?
• Is the paper scientifically correct and robust?
• Are the mathematics or statistics correct?
• Has the author made reference to the most recent and most appropriate work?
• Are the scientific arguments and interpretation accurate and consistent with the results presented?

Significance

• What impact do you think this paper will have on the field and surrounding areas?
• How timely is this paper?
• Why should this work be published?

Originality

• Is the work relevant and novel?
• Have any parts of the manuscript been published before?
• Does it add significantly to results that are already published?
• Is this paper likely to be cited in future?

Ethics

Some articles will be required to include an ethical statement if their research involved human or animal subjects. In journals that operate double-anonymous peer review, ethical statements are not revealed to reviewers as they may gives clues to the author’s identity. Our editorial team check all ethical statements are appropriate for the study being reported. If a reviewer feels they need to see an ethical statement, they are advised to contact the journal to discuss.

Please contact us if you suspect any ethical wrongdoing related to the paper, including but not limited to:

• Plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Parallel submission
• Fabrication of results
• Undeclared conflict of interest
• Inaccurate authorship declarations
• Unnecessary self-citations.

We follow the COPE guidelines on responding to whistleblowers, which includes protecting your anonymity.

Presentation

• Is the title adequate and appropriate?
• Is the paper well written and the work clearly communicated? Please note we will edit upon acceptance and correct any grammatical or typographical errors.
• Does the abstract contain the essential information about the paper? Is it complete by itself and suitable for direct inclusion in an abstracting service?
• Can the paper be shortened without detriment to the content? Are the text and mathematics brief but still clear? If you recommend shortening, please suggest what could be omitted.
• Are diagrams and tables clear and essential, and captions informative?
• Does the paper contain a carefully written conclusion, summarizing what has been learned and why it is interesting and useful?

What you do not need to check for

Reviewers are not expected to correct spelling, grammar or use-of-English mistakes, as most journals have copy editors who can correct minor problems with the language. However, if the paper is written so poorly that you cannot clearly understand what the authors mean, or there are so many errors that reading the paper becomes very difficult, then that should be reported back to the journal.

Introduction

You will be informed by email when your paper is published online. Publication should be the start of the next important phase in communicating your research: promoting your paper. The true value and impact of your paper can be greatly enhanced by promotion. The more people who read, cite and benefit from your research, the more valuable your paper becomes and the greater your esteem as an author. This is more important than ever given that the impact of research papers is increasingly being scrutinized by funders and institutions. As a learned-society publisher, we are committed to working closely with you to ensure that your article reaches as wide an audience as possible.

What we do to help increase the impact of your work

IOP Publishing undertakes a number of initiatives to promote papers and make them widely available. We:

1. Publicize selected papers as part of (print and online) subject collections and annual journal highlights collections
2. Highlight particularly interesting work using social media (e.g. Twitter and Facebook)
3. Give journalistic coverage to selected papers on our science news/community websites
4. Press release particularly newsworthy papers
5. Publish and promote authors’ video abstracts
6. Display the number of downloads and citations each article receives, and also altmetrics such as number of tweets and blog entries, on the journal website (on IOPscience)

Although we try to promote as many articles as possible as widely as we can, you as the author are often the best placed to ensure your article is seen by the most relevant audience.

What you can do to promote your article

Remember to update any citations to your article on pre-print servers or in documents/presentations where you have referred to this work. The IOP Publishing citation style is:

For example:

Cantillano C, Mukherjee S, Morales-Inostroza L, Real B, Cáceres-Aravena G, Hermann-Avigliano C, Thomson R R and Vicencio R A 2018 Observation of localized ground and excited orbitals in graphene photonic ribbons New J. Phys. 20 033028

Every author should have a network of colleagues and key people in their field who they would like to read their work. This is what we recommend that you do to help your paper to be found, read and cited by your peers:

1. Email people you have referenced in your paper, and other key colleagues in your field, with a link to your paper
2. Use social media to tell people about your work through blogging or through other outlets such as Twitter or Facebook
3. Update your profile on professional and academic networking sites (such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate and Mendeley) with a link to your published article (please do not post the actual published article)
4. Update your institutional/departmental homepage and research group website with a link to your paper
5. Contact your institution’s press office with a summary of your paper and ask for advice about promoting it to the media
6. Write a lay summary of your paper (with a link to the full version) and send to blogs in your subject area
7. Produce a video abstract giving an accessible introduction to your article (this can help to encourage people to read your paper)
8. Use a service like Kudos to help more people find and understand your work
9. Mention your publication at conferences when giving presentations, and have copies to hand out to colleagues
10. Check major abstracting and indexing services (e.g. Web of Science and Scopus) to make sure that your published paper is listed with correct details
11. Upload your Accepted Manuscript (not the final published version for non-open access articles) to institutional or subject-based repositories, in line with institutional/funder requirements and the publisher embargo period (usually 12 months).

Upon submission of an article, authors are requested to complete a copyright form, which transfers (or for some journals, licenses) copyright in all original material in the article to IOP or its relevant publishing partner if the article is accepted.

IOP requires a copyright form to be signed, whether or not the article will be published under the subscription model or under the gold open access model. The copyright form must be filled in correctly, signed, dated and submitted to IOP (for most of our journals this is done via the Author Centre) before an article can be accepted.

For further information on completing the copyright form, please see the Copyright FAQs page.

Video abstracts are an accompanying feature for IOP ebooks. Their aim, through video media, is to enable authors to go beyond the constraints of their written material to personally explain the importance of their work to the book’s global audience.  It is envisaged that video abstracts will provide an engaging and creatively presented overview of the book to potential readers and enhance a reader’s understanding and appreciation of a work. To maximize engagement and visibility, authors are encouraged to combine footage of themselves with other relevant material of interest—such as imagery, animations, footage of an experiment running or a lab tour.

In a video abstract you can demonstrate your experiments physically, illustrate complex theoretical phenomena through practical demonstrations, introduce viewers to the equipment and tools used in the field and engage with your audience in a more informal manner. If you have visual data such as simulations or animations, video abstracts are a good place to showcase them and explain their implications in real time. As such, your video should be engaging and interesting and offer viewers more than you could write in an abstract. The key is to be creative and make full use of the audio-visual medium. Full details on preparing a video abstract is provided in our ebooks video abstract guide.

If you did not create some of the content included in the video abstract or you have used previously published content, please ensure that you obtain permission from the copyright owner for IOP Publishing to publish the content. If you are using this content in the video abstract, as well as the ebook, please ensure you obtain permission for both types of use.

Unfortunately, we cannot allow any music to be used in our video abstracts or ebooks.

• General information
• Transformative and institutional open access agreements
• Waivers and discounts
• Reviewer rewards
• Membership discounts

General information

To find out more about charges and costs associated with open access publication please visit our Article Publication Charges information page. 

Open access article publication charges (APCs) should not be a barrier to publishing your work openly and we strive to assist as many authors as possible to do so. 

Increasingly, funders and universities (often through the library) will cover the costs of open access publication. Many research grants allow funds to be used for APCs and funders may operate dedicated publishing funds. Departmental funds or central institutional funds administered by your research office or library may be available. We encourage you to consult your funder and institutional library to find out what support is available but please contact the journal team if you require any support. 

APCs can be paid using our simple online charging service, or we accept payment against invoice or a prepayment account for institutions and funders. 

Transformative and institutional open access agreements

IOP has established agreements to enable authors from a variety of institutions to publish on an open access basis at no cost to themselves. Further details about these agreements can be found on our transformative agreement hub.

Use IOPP Journal Finder to see if you might be covered by a transformative agreement.

Go to IOPP Journal Finder

Visit our transformative agreement hub for more information and support on transformative agreements.

Waivers and discounts

APC waivers for authors based in low-income countries

Authors based in low-income countries (as defined by the World Bank as of July 2023 and listed in ‘Group A’ below) receive a full APC waiver (100% discount) in any IOP-owned journal if certain criteria are met:

• If all authors are from a Group A country then a full APC waiver will be applied automatically and there will be no charge;
• If the corresponding author plus the majority of co-authors are from a Group A country then a full APC waiver will be granted on request. Requests must be made when the article is submitted and will not be considered at a later stage.

When publishing work in one of IOP’s hybrid journals, authors have the option to opt out of open access publication if preferred.

Reduced APCs for authors based in lower-middle income countries

Corresponding authors based in lower middle-income countries (as defined by the World Bank as of July 2022 and listed in ‘Group B’ below) are eligible for a reduced APC in any IOP-owned journal if a pre-existing arrangement is not already in place to cover the costs of open access publication. These agreements are listed here. Authors must select the reduced fee at the point of submission.

Please see the publication charges information for any journal published by IOP Publishing to confirm if it offers these waivers and discounts.

Applications for discretionary APC waivers for authors from other countries who are unable to pay an article publication charge will be considered on a case-by-case basis. All applications for a discretionary waiver must be made by email to the journal office at the point of submission. Applications made once a paper has entered peer review or has been accepted will not be considered.

Reviewer rewards

In recognition of the contribution made by our reviewers, IOP has introduced a reviewer reward scheme. Reviewers who review articles for selected journals from our portfolio receive a 10% credit. Credit can be used towards the cost of publishing an article a reviewer has contributed to, on a gold open access basis. A reviewer reward credit will be given for every review completed.

Membership discounts

Authors of articles in fully gold open access journals who are members of the Institute of Physics and certain affiliated societies are entitled to discounted APCs. For details, see the individual journal web pages.

Copyright protection applies automatically to any original work as soon as it is written down or put into permanent or fixed form; for example, pictures, photos, figures, text, graphs, videos. There does not need to be a © symbol next to the work for it to be protected by copyright.

Copyright generally lasts for 70 years after the death of the author of the work (or the last remaining co-author’s death). Therefore, just because the work is old, does not mean that it is not protected by copyright.

When you click on the ‘Agree’ link in the original invitation email you will automatically receive another email. This will contain a direct link to view online the full PDF of the manuscript and the referee report form, with a deadline for submitting your report. You can also view the PDF and report form by logging in to the journal’s ScholarOne site and going to your Referee Centre. Please remember, any information you are sent about the article is confidential, and should not be shared or discussed with others.

If you click one of the ‘Decline’ links in the invitation email, this response will be sent to the editorial team and we will not contact you again about this paper. If you are unable to review, we would be grateful if you would suggest an alternative referee.

For papers published in our gold open access proceedings titles IOP no longer requires authors to sign and submit copyright forms. Our other journals are unaffected by this change. Authors who wish to publish a paper in the following titles:

• Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS)
• IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (MSE)
• IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (EES)

are asked to submit a paper only if all authors of the paper agree in full to the terms of the licence. All papers submitted to us for publication in the above titles will be published according to the following terms and conditions.

Licence terms and conditions

By submitting the paper to the conference organizer, you, as copyright owner and author/representative of all the authors, grant a worldwide perpetual royalty free exclusive licence to IOP Publishing Limited (IOP) to use the copyright in the paper for the full term of copyright in all ways otherwise restricted by copyright, including, but not limited to, the right to reproduce, distribute and communicate the article to the public under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 or any newer version of the licence) and to make any other use which IOP may choose world-wide, by all means, media and formats, whether known or unknown at the date of submission, to the conference organizer.

This licence does not transfer the copyright in the paper as submitted which therefore remains with the authors or their employer, as appropriate. Authors may not offer the paper to another publisher unless the article is withdrawn by the author(s) or rejected by IOP.

Once published, the paper may be reused in accordance with the terms of the applicable Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, including appropriate citation information (for electronic use best efforts must be made to include a link to the online abstract of the paper on IOPscience), a link to the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, and indicating if any changes have been made to the original paper.

By granting this licence, the author warrants that the paper they are submitting is their original work, has not been published previously (other than in a research thesis or dissertation which fact has been notified to the conference organizer in writing), all named authors participated sufficiently in the conception and writing of the paper, have received a final version of the paper, agree to its submission and take responsibility for it, have read and understood IOP Publishing’s ethical policy (https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/ethical-policy-journals/) and agree that the submission complies with its terms, and the submission has been approved as necessary by the authorities at the establishment where the research was carried out.

By granting this licence, the author also warrants that they act on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, all authors of the paper, that the paper does not infringe any third party rights, it contains nothing libellous, all factual statements are, to the best of the authors’ knowledge and belief, true or based on valid research conducted according to accepted norms and our ethical policy (https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/ethical-policyjournals/), and all required permissions have been obtained.

The IOP Proceedings Licence Notice

The IOP Proceedings Licence Notice should be displayed as:

‘Published under licence in Journal Title by IOP Publishing Ltd.
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.’

Where Journal Title is one of:

• Journal of Physics: Conference Series
• IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
• IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science

Reviewers are expected to perform the review of the work themselves, unless they are participating in co-review. Submitting a review in the name of another person (real or fictional) is misconduct and will not be tolerated. IOP Publishing has the right to request proof of identity in cases where identity fraud or impersonation is alleged or suspected.

Conflicts of interest

To uphold impartiality, you should consider any potential conflict of interest before agreeing to review and should contact the editorial office in the following instances:

• You are in direct competition with the authors
• You are a co-worker or collaborator with one of the authors
• You are in a position to exploit the authors’ work (commercially or otherwise)
• You may be legally prohibited due to national sanctions
• You are in a position which prevents you from giving an objective opinion of the work.

Minor conflicts do not disqualify you from reporting on an article, but will be taken into account when considering the reviewers’ recommendations. Major conflicts of interest (especially relating to a financial commercial interest >£5000/year) do disqualify you. You should 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 the journal is double-anonymous you may not be sure if you have a conflict of interest. If you suspect there may be a reason you should not act as a reviewer, please contact the editorial office who will be able to investigate and advise.

Anonymity and confidentiality

Reviewer names are kept strictly confidential. Reviewer identities may only be disclosed to journal Editorial Board members, who are also instructed to maintain confidentiality. You should not disclose your identity to the authors, including sending reports directly to the authors.

Information and ideas obtained whilst acting as a reviewer must be kept confidential and not used for competitive advantage.

We also ask that you do not discuss the papers you have reviewed with colleagues unless they have been published.

Objectivity

Reviewers should judge objectively the quality of the research reported, give fair, frank and constructive criticism and refrain from personal criticism of the authors. Reviewers’ judgements should be explained and supported so that authors can understand the basis of the comments and judgements.

Timeliness

Reviewers should inform the journal if they are unable to review a paper or can only do so with some delay. Reviewers should not delay the peer review process unnecessarily, either deliberately or inadvertently.

Citations

Reviewers 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. When writing a report, reviewers should justify any literature references suggested for inclusion in the work.

Citations should add value, and should not be unfairly biased towards an individual, group or organisation. Please note that the Editor reserves the right to challenge excessive citation suggestions, especially to the reviewer’s own work. The practice of including superfluous references, including to the reviewer’s own work, to promote and inflate citation scores is unethical. The Editor reserves the right to exclude citation suggestions from reports if these are considered to be potential acts of citation manipulation, and/or to protect reviewers’ anonymity.

Generative AI (including ChatGPT)

IOP Publishing does not accept or condone the use of generative AI, including large language models and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, to write peer review reports, either fully or partially. By accepting a review invitation, a reviewer agrees to adhere to the ethical standards of IOP Publishing, including reporting any conflicts of interest, ensuring the manuscript under review remains confidential, and retaining their anonymity as a reviewer. Generative AI models are not subject experts as they lack the ability or comprehension to assume responsibility for work they have helped create and are therefore unable to adhere to the ethical standards set out by IOP Publishing. Furthermore, generative AI models do not have the legal personality to sign publishing agreements or licences. Please note that uploading any part of a submitted manuscript to a generative AI model may breach the authors’ rights to confidentiality. If a manuscript contains personally identifiable information, it may also breach data protection rights.

Suspected author misconduct

Reviewers should report any suspicions of misconduct to the journal staff for investigation. This includes, but is not limited to, suspicions of:

• Plagiarism
• Duplicate publication
• Parallel submission
• Data fabrication / falsification
• Image manipulation
• Incorrect authorship
• Author conflict of interest
• Unethical research practices
• Content that could be considered offensive

We follow the COPE guidelines on responding to whistleblowers, which includes protecting your anonymity.

If you wish to include material in your typescript where the copyright is held by others, you must seek permission to do so from the copyright owner. This includes text, illustrations, images, charts, tables, photographs, videos, or other material owned by somebody else. This can also include your own previously published content if you transferred copyright to your previous publisher.

It is the author’s responsibility to obtain written permission to reproduce any copyright material which is not owned by the author and to pay any permissions fees.

For handy tips on when permission is needed, please refer to this permissions FAQ.

If a figure is adapted from a previously published source or from a figure owned by somebody else, it is likely that you will still need to obtain permission for its use, and in any case it is only courteous to do so.

If in any doubt about the necessity to obtain permission, always do so.

IOP is a signatory to the STM Permissions Guidelines. The STM Permissions Guidelines are an agreement between STM Signatory Publishers allowing reuse of small numbers of figures and small amounts of text of one signatory publisher in a journal article or ebook, published by another STM Signatory Publisher, free of charge. For more information on how the Guidelines apply and why this is useful for authors wishing to use figures or small amounts of text from other STM Signatory Publishers, please refer to this further information on the STM Guidelines.

The Author Handbook provides much additional information regarding copyright and permissions and should be read in full. Obtaining permissions is often a simple process.

We ask all authors to supply a Permissions Clearance Form with copies of all permissions at submission stage. Any correspondence relating to the granting of permission should be submitted with the typescript.

Permission to reproduce any copyright materials owned by a third party must be obtained before the book can be produced (this is because copyright holders often request specific wordings as acknowledgement). It is therefore in your own interest to obtain all permissions at an early stage.

Difficulties

If the copyright owner cannot be located, does not answer or does not grant permission you will need to replace the figure. Please contact your editor in such situations. If you have any questions or difficulties in securing permissions please promptly speak to your editor.

If you have any queries please visit our FAQ or contact us directly at permissions@ioppublishing.org