Archives: Questions

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.

Overview of the publication procedure

The following notes provide a summary of the IOP Conference Series publishing process.

1. Submit a quote request online, or contact us directly with details of the conference.
2. The IOP Conference Series team will review the details of your conference and write to confirm if we can offer a proceedings publishing contract.
3. Conferences must register to use our proceedings management platform to handle the peer review process. Each conference will have its own account and dedicated area on the platform.
4. The organizers must inform authors of the IOP Proceedings Licence.
5. Authors prepare their papers in accordance to our guidelines and templates.
6. Authors submit their papers to the conference organizers via the proceedings management platform and conference organisers act as editors managing the peer review process. Once review of the papers is completed the conference organizers submit the final papers to IOP Conference Series with a single click. Papers submitted to IOP Publishing must be in PDF format and in their final version ready for publication. IOP Publishing does not edit or proofread papers after they are submitted. Please ensure that any changes have been approved by authors prior to the PDFs being submitted to IOP Publishing.
7. Submitted papers will be assessed by the IOP Conference Series team to ensure they meet the standards of quality required by IOP Publishing. We check for adherence to our publisher policies, the fit of papers to our journal scope and the general quality of a paper. Any papers that do not meet these standards will be communicated to the organiser.
8. Production and publication. We will process the PDFs into a format suitable for publication and upload them to our pre-publication servers. The communicating editor will be sent a username and password to access that server to make a final check of the proceedings before final publication. Please note the following important points:
   • Once a paper has been published online, changes will only be permitted in cases of serious scientific error. In those cases, an erratum or corrigendum will be published according to the standard practices of professional scientific publishing.
   • Change requests relating to stylistic issues cannot be made to proceedings once they are published, so it is important that authors and organizers ensure papers have been adequately checked and proofread prior to submission.
9. Upon publication we will write to authors (who have supplied an e-mail address) informing them of publication and providing them with a link to their paper.
10. Printed copies (if required) are provided by Curran Associates.

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

Can you write your report by the deadline in the invitation email (between 7 and 28 days, depending on the journal and type of article you are reviewing)? Some reports take longer than others, depending on how complex the work is. The authors will want a decision quickly, so you should let the journal know as soon as possible if you can or cannot report.

You can ask for more time if you need it, but give the journal a realistic timeframe for preparing your report. You can decline a request if you are already working on several referee tasks. In that case, it is very helpful if you can suggest alternative referees.

If you are unavailable for a period of time (months), or would like to avoid receiving any more review requests, please send this information with your decline response. We will update your contact record as appropriate.

Published titles must be the authors’ own work. Plagiarism constitutes unethical scientific behaviour and is never acceptable. Plagiarism ranges from the unreferenced use of others’ ideas to presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement.

The following information is intended to provide an overview of how to cite articles published in the IOP Conference Series titles. Please note that the full publication record for all IOP journals and proceedings can be found in IOPscience.

• All proceedings in IOP Conference Series are published as a single volume of the relevant title. Typically, each volume has just a single issue but very large volumes may be split into two or more issues for ease of reading and navigation.
• Papers published in IOP Conference Series titles use an article numbering system that means that papers should be cited by using the six-digit article number in place of a page number (see examples below).
• Every article has its own unique identifier called a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
• Articles can be linked via the Crossref system.
• The pages in the PDF file of each article are numbered from 1. These page numbers should not normally be included in a reference. However, if it is desirable to indicate the length of an article, this can be done by including the number of pages, in parentheses, after the article number.

Examples of citations to conference proceedings

References to conference papers should include:

• Author(s)
• Year of publication
• Title of conference (in italics, initial letter of each significant word should be capital)

Example:

• Mahanta N K and Abramson A R 2012 Thermal conductivity of graphene and graphene oxide nanoplatelets 13th Intersociety Conf. on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems

Examples of citations to conference series

• Barry R Holstein 2009 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 173 012019
• V V Kramarenko et al 2016 IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 43 012029
• S Adarsh et al 2016 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 149 012141

IOP Publishing endeavours to publish every open access article on the terms agreed with the authors and without delay. If you or your institution are unhappy with any aspect of the open access publishing service, you should contact the journal or the dedicated open access support team. Every effort will be made to respond to any deficiencies in service without delay. Where service fails to meet our high standards, you may be offered, on request and at the publisher’s discretion, a refund of part of the APC or a credit towards future publications.

Do you know the field well enough to be able to assess the scientific rigour, novelty, quality and importance of the research?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, then you should decline the task and tell the journal that this is not your area of expertise (in which case, if you know of another expert in the field, then please suggest them to us when you decline). If you are an expert in only part of the paper, you can still write a report and send it to the journal. However, you must make it clear which parts you are not able to assess.

The peer review of papers published in the IOP Conference Series titles is managed by the organizers and proceedings editors.

The detailed procedures will vary from event to event according to the custom and practice of each community. Our publishing agreements require peer review to be undertaken in accordance with the principles outlined below. 

All organizers/editors must complete a form describing how the papers were peer reviewed. This information will be published as part of the proceedings.  

Peer review must be conducted through our platform unless another method is agreed with the journal team. IOP Publishing reserves the right to request peer review reports at any time. 

All conferences are requested to adhere to the following minimum standards:

• Unbiased consideration is given to all papers. Papers are considered regardless of the race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship or political philosophy of the authors
• No terminology will be used that, in the opinion of IOP Publishing, is offensive or might be perceived to be offensive to others
• Authors and Editors agree to comply with our ethical policy
• IOP Publishing has the right to investigate any suspicions and/or allegations of misconduct
• Submission and peer review must be conducted in English.
• Reviewers shall give a clear statement of recommendation for each paper. Comments must be included to support their recommendation. These comments should be suitable for transmission to the author 
• Editors and Organisers shall only accept papers where there is clear support from the reviewers

Conference papers must meet all the usual standards of quality for an IOP Publishing publication. However, reviewers will take into account the nature of conference papers. Review papers are also welcomed and accepted. Reviewers will consider background papers more favourably than would be normal for a regular paper. These allowances shall not go so far as to approve papers of low scientific standard. Papers that have been published in written form elsewhere should not be considered.  

Reviewers should consider the following key points related to scientific content, quality and presentation of the papers:

Technical Criteria

• Scientific merit: notably scientific rigour, accuracy and correctness
• Clarity of expression; communication of ideas; readability and discussion of concepts
• Sufficient discussion of the context of the work, and suitable referencing

Quality Criteria

• Originality: Is the work relevant and novel?
• Motivation: Does the problem considered have a sound motivation? All papers should clearly demonstrate the scientific interest of the results
• Repetition: Have significant parts of the manuscript already been published?
• Length: Is the content of the work of sufficient scientific interest to justify its length?

Presentation Criteria

• Title: Is it adequate and appropriate for the content of the article?
• Abstract: Does it contain the essential information of the article? Is it complete? Is it suitable for inclusion by itself in an abstracting service?
• Diagrams, figures, tables and captions: Are they essential and clear?
• Text and mathematics: Are they brief but still clear? If you recommend shortening, please suggest what should be removed
• Conclusion: Does the paper contain a clear conclusion. The conclusion should summarise what has been learned and why it is interesting and useful? 

To help you preparing your manuscript for submission, our Author Handbook provides full guidance to assist you, including artwork and video preparation, copyright and permissions, file formats and manuscript structure, and much more. The Handbook is intended to help you more easily prepare a manuscript that will be as close as possible to a standard format so that we can achieve the most effective use of resources when your ebook enters production. Some essential points concerning manuscript preparation are:

• Do not focus on the look and feel of your manuscript. There is no need to try and make the material look like a book page, or introduce excessive formatting. As we have our own set house style all this will be removed during production, creating extra work for the production editors in removing the unnecessary extra effort you have spent on the material. For more details on our house style, see our Style guide for ebooks.
• We accept manuscripts written using MS Word or LaTeX. If you are intending on using different software please discuss this with your commissioning editor.
• If you are writing in LaTeX you can use the generic book class, or our template (zip file) and for authors using Word simply type into a plain new document.
• Include an abstract of up to 150 words for each chapter.
• Figures can be embedded in the manuscript if you find that helps, but alternatively place the caption in the text. We will take care of their exact placement in the finished publication.
• Even if you embed figures in the manuscript, please also submit separate electronic files for each one, using a naming convention that refers to the figure number. Do take note of the minimum resolutions for figures and animations listed in the Handbook.
• Tables can be included in the appropriate place in the text, or collected at the end of each chapter.
• Remember to include a ‘call out’ to each figure and table in the text; i.e. ensure they are referred to in the body text by number, e.g. ‘… figure 2.3 shows the relationship between …’ not ‘…as you can see in the following figure …’.
• Please include references at the chapter level, not at the end of the book
• Ensure the Permission Clearance Form and all permissions are included with your manuscript, and all credits for material from third parties are included.
• If your book references or makes use of MATLAB®, Simulink®, and other MathWorks® products you are encouraged to sign up to MathWorks® Book Programme which offers a range of services and promotional tools for authors.