Archives: Questions

• 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

During 2026 IOP Publishing is piloting an expanded programme of APC discounts and waivers for authors based in low and middle income countries.

Authors may be eligible for these discounts and waivers if a pre-existing arrangement is not already in place between IOP Publishing and an institution to cover the costs of open access publication on their behalf.

Discounts and waivers will be applied automatically if all authors on an article are based in the eligible country. Discounts and waivers will be granted upon request at submission if the article’s corresponding author and the majority of co-authors are based in eligible countries.

Discounts and waivers apply equally to APCs in IOP Publishing’s fully open access journals and hybrid open access journals. Journals published on behalf of partner organisations may have a different policy so please consult individual journal webpages to confirm if different terms apply.

Please refer to the table below to determine which category of discount may apply.

*Please note: APCs are currently fully waived for corresponding authors based in Ukraine. See our Statement on Ukraine – IOP Publishing for more details.

Authors based in India and Indonesia may also be eligible for APC discounts in IOP Publishing’s fully open access journals. Please consult individual journal pricing information pages for details.

Applications for discretionary APC waivers or discounts for authors from other countries who are unable to pay a charge will be considered on a case-by-case basis. All applications for a discretionary waiver or discount 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

Read our ethical policies for reviewers.

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