Archives: Questions

When reviewing for an IOP journal, you will typically be asked to score the article on a number of different aspects. Individual journal guidelines may vary, so do check the journal-specific guidance here for more information. You will usually be asked to give a rating ranging from ‘Very Low’ to ‘Very High’. The aspects you may be asked to comment on include:

Hybrid open access refers to a publishing model in which subscription-based journals allow authors to make individual articles gold open access immediately on payment of an article publication charge.

Green open access refers to the self-archiving of an article in a publicly-accessible institutional or subject repository (usually after an embargo period). Further information on IOP Publishing’s green open access policy.

We all have implicit biases based on our background and experiences. They can cause us to take shortcuts in decision making which can serve us well and save us time, but often they are wrong and end in unfair assessments.

During the peer review process the following biases can influence how you assess a paper and what conclusion you come to:

• Gender bias
• Bias for or against authors from a geographical area
• Language bias, if a paper is translated poorly
• Bias for or against authors from specific institutions
• Bias against researchers at the beginning of their research career

We can all address our implicit biases through self-awareness. You can minimise the influence of your implicit biases during the peer review process:

• Be aware that you have implicit biases that may affect your decision making
• Treat the paper as if you did not know the authors’ names and institutions
• Focus on facts rather than feelings
• Slow down your decision making
• Consider and reconsider the reasons for your conclusions.

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:

[Author list] [Year] [Journal name] [Volume] [Article/Page number]

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

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.

Group A 100% discount	Group B 70% discount	Group C 30% discount
Afghanistan Burkina Faso Burundi Central African Republic Chad Congo, Dem. Rep Eritrea Ethiopia Gambia, The Guinea-Bissau Korea, Dem. People’s Rep. Liberia Madagascar Malawi Mali Mozambique Niger Rwanda Sierra Leone Somalia South Sudan Sudan Syrian Arab Republic Togo Uganda Yemen, Rep.	Angola Bangladesh Benin Bhutan Bolivia Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Comoros Congo, Rep. Côte d’Ivoire Djibouti Egypt, Arab Rep. Eswatini Gaza Ghana Guinea Haiti Honduras Jordan Kenya Kiribati Kyrgyz Republic Lao PDR Lebanon Lesotho Mauritania Micronesia, Fed. Sts. Morocco Myanmar Nepal Nicaragua Nigeria Pakistan Papua New Guinea Philippines Samoa São Tomé and Principe Senegal Solomon Islands Sri Lanka Tanzania Tajikistan Timor-Leste Tunisia Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vietnam West Bank Zambia Zimbabwe	Albania Algeria Argentina Armenia Azerbaijan Belize Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Colombia Costa Rica Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Fiji Gabon Georgia Grenada Guatemala Iraq Jamaica Kazakhstan Libya Malaysia Maldives Marshall Islands Mauritius Moldova Mongolia Montenegro Namibia North Macedonia Paraguay Peru Serbia South Africa St. Lucia St. Vincent and the Grenadines Suriname Thailand Tonga Turkmenistan Tuvalu Ukraine*

*Please note: APCs are currently fully waived for corresponding authors based in Ukraine.

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 manuscript reviewed.

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.