Archives: Questions

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.

Sponsored open access journals allow immediate access to the content of the journal without the payment of a subscription fee or licence. Authors pay no article publication charge and all the costs of publishing the journal are met by one or more sponsoring organizations.

IOP publishes the following sponsored open access journals on behalf of partners:

• China Academy of Engineering Physics: International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing
• Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory: Materials Futures

IOP Publishing works with all major abstracting and indexing (A&I) services to facilitate the ongoing discoverability of all published content. However please be aware that each A&I service applies its own editorial policy to content supplied for indexing. While IOP Publishing will make every reasonable effort to comply with the requirements of our A&I partners, we are unable to guarantee content will be indexed in any particular database, neither are we able to guarantee indexing in a particular time frame.

The content in IOP Publishing’s Conference Series journals are all published on a gold open access basis.

All of our conference series articles are currently published under a CC BY licence. For further information on what the CC BY licence allows, please refer to this page.

Older conference series articles (published from around prior to November 2012), were not published under a CC BY licence.

You should check the licence on the article itself prior to use. If the article was not published under a CC BY licence or the article does not state what licence the article was published under, please contact permissions@ioppublishing.org to request permission if you wish to reuse any content from the article.

Under current policy, Clarivate (the owners of ISI Web of Science) do not calculate Impact Factors for ANY proceedings titles. Therefore, proceedings journals are not issued with Impact Factors.

The ISI Web of Science platform itself is split into two components: SCI (the Science Citation Index) and CPCI (Conference Proceedings Citation Index). Proceedings journals appear within the CPCI. In order to access both, users need to have a full subscription to ISI Web of Science. However, those subscribing only to the SCI component will not have access to proceedings papers.

However, it is at the discretion of Clarivate as to how quickly they process and upload new content. Unfortunately, we have no control over how long it takes for each volume to be indexed. It can often take some time for papers to appear.

After your book is approved for publication by our Publications Board, you will be contacted immediately by our editorial team. The agreement will be supplied via our electronic signing software. You are encouraged to read the agreement carefully and contact us with any questions or concerns you may have. It is important to us that you are comfortable and secure with our publishing terms and process, and the contracted date for final manuscript submission.

Co-authors and co-editors

If you have co-authors or co-editors who will be receiving credit as author or editor on the cover of the book, they will also be required to sign the agreement. The agreement will define the previously agrees distribution of payments.

Contributing authors for edited books

If you are publishing an edited book with contributing chapter authors, each contributing author will also be asked to sign a separate contributor agreement form for their corresponding chapter(s). Please note the contributor agreements can be signed after the Editor agreement, but contributor agreement forms must be completed, signed, and delivered before or during submission of the final manuscript.

These are our templates and guidelines for proceedings papers, they are there to to help you prepare your work.

Essential guidelines

Please follow these essential guidelines when preparing your paper:

• Basic guidelines for preparing a paper
• Style guide for conference organisers and authors

Templates

Authors must prepare their papers using our Microsoft Word or LaTeX2e templates, and then convert these to PDF format for submission:

• Microsoft Word templates
• LaTeX2e class file

Multimedia

If you would like to submit multimedia to accompany your paper, you might find these guidelines useful:

• Multimedia guidelines

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

It may be tempting to begin writing a paper before giving much thought to where it might be published. However, choosing a journal to target before you begin to prepare your paper will enable you to tailor your writing to the journal’s audience. It will also enable you to format your paper according to any specific guidelines, which you may find on the journal’s website. This may save you a lot of time and effort in the long run. Some of the key factors to consider when trying to choose the right journal for your work are:

Peer review service

Peer review is considered a stamp of quality from the research community. It is important to consider whether a journal is published by a reputable and trustworthy publisher who provides a rigorous peer review service (as IOP Publishing does for all its journals). If fast publication is important to you, you may also wish to check with the publisher the publication times for the journal you are considering.

Relevance/audience

You should browse published articles in the journal to establish whether the journal publishes similar papers to the one you are preparing. Check whether your peers publish in the journal. It may also help to review the make-up of the Editorial Board to see if it contains senior researchers in your field.

Scope

The scope may be found on the journal homepage. It is important to consider whether your work fits within the scientific scope of the journal and the topics covered. Also consider whether the journal is broad in its scope or a specialist journal read mainly by a particular community, as this will affect the way that you write your paper. Another consideration is the article types the journal publishes. For example, some work is best suited to the shorter ‘Letter’ format, while other work may suit the longer ‘Paper’ format.

Reputation/quality level

You should consider the reputation of the journal in its field and whether it is considered to be of high quality. Also, you should think about whether it is widely read by your peers. Reputation is often based on impact factor, which is a measure of the average citations of papers published in the journal. High impact factor journals may have high rejection rates, so in choosing a suitable journal you should consider just how novel/significant your research findings are.

Indexing

You should check whether the journal is indexed in the major online databases such as Web of Science or Scopus (this is generally the case for all IOP journals). Indexing increases the visibility and discoverability of the work, and may indicate a trusted journal. For our journals, this information can be found under ‘Abstracted in’ on the journal homepages.

Language requirements

Most international journals publish papers written in English. You should consider the language requirements of the journal, and whether you will need to have your paper checked by a native English speaker to ensure that it is understandable. IOP journals offer authors a language editing service.

Cost

The journal website should inform you of any fees that you may be charged, and you should consider whether your institution or funder will be able to cover the charge if there is one. For example, charges may apply for colour figures or for publishing your paper on a (gold) open access basis.

Publishing model: open access or subscription?

The cost of publishing a paper can be paid for in a number of ways. Traditionally, libraries and other institutions pay a subscription fee to receive individual journals or collections of titles for their researchers. This is known as the subscription model and, as an author, you usually do not have to pay a fee to publish a paper in a subscription journal. You may however incur a page charge for some journals or be charged for colour figures.

The (gold) open access publishing model allows published papers to be freely available for anyone to read. This means that authors, research institutions or funding organizations may fund the costs of publishing. In return, authors ensure that everyone can access their work. If you wish to submit for (gold) open access publication (most journals published by IOP Publishing offer this option) always check with your institution to ensure that there are funds available to cover the article publication charges.

It is important to understand which version of an article you are reading and what rights you have when you access our content. Is it the un-edited manuscript, the peer-reviewed manuscript, the final version or one that has been corrected post-publication? The following are our current definitions of the different versions of an article and apply to both subscription and gold open access articles.

Author’s Original/Preprint is ‘the version of the article before peer review or editing, as submitted by an author to the journal’.

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 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 and/or its licensors’.

Final Published Version is ‘the peer reviewed, edited, formatted and typeset version of the article, including any tagging, indexing and other enhancements published by IOP and/or its licensors’.

Version of Record is ‘the Final Published Version, including any post publication corrections or enhancements and any other changes made by IOP and/or its licensors’.