Are IOP Conference Series peer reviewed?

Yes they are. However, we ask for the peer review of papers published in IOP Conference Series titles to be undertaken through processes administered by the organizers and proceedings editors. The detailed procedures will vary from event to event according to the custom and practice of each community. In recognition of the work done by the editors, and for the awareness of researchers using our proceedings, every volume published in IOP Conference Series contains a clear statement of peer review, which has been agreed by the editors of each proceedings. A typical statement of peer review is as follows:

"All papers published in this volume of Journal of Physics: Conference Series have been peer reviewed through processes administered by the proceedings Editors. Reviews were conducted by expert referees to the professional and scientific standards expected of a proceedings journal published by IOP Publishing".

For full details please read our Peer Review Policy.

Preparing your proceedings paper

IOP Conference Series uses author-supplied PDFs for all online and print publication. Authors are asked to prepare their papers using Microsoft Word or LaTeX, according to the journal guidelines and templates, and then convert these files to PDF.

It is important to ensure that when you submit your paper, it is in its final form ready for publication, and has been thoroughly proofread. IOP do not copyedit papers and will not send out author proofs prior to publication. Post-publication changes are not permitted, so please ensure your paper has been checked for errors.

You need to provide the PDF file of your paper, plus any accompanying material (multimedia etc). When preparing your paper please ensure that you:

• Use European A4 sized paper with at least a 25mm margin
• Ensure that the paper includes an abstract
• Do not add any page numbers, headers or footers to article

Templates for proceedings papers

• Please follow these essential guidelines when preparing your paper:
  Guidelines for Authors
• We highly recommend that authors 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
• If you would like to submit multimedia to accompany your paper, you might find these guidelines useful:
  Multimedia Guidelines

Why it is important to check your paper

In common with most proceedings publications, IOP Conference Series requires articles to be submitted as ready-to-publish and fully checked PDF files. Unlike regular journals, proceedings papers are published as submitted (by the editors): there is no author-proofing or copyediting stage. Proceedings have to operate on a very streamlined production and publication model to ensure that the cost is viable for conference budgets. Consequently, it is extremely important that authors check their work carefully because post-publication changes are not permitted, unless the circumstances are exceptional. The following paragraphs provide some background explanation.

• A guiding principle in all forms of professional scientific publishing should be preserving the records of science. A consequence of this principle is that once an article is published it should remain on the record of science and not be altered or removed unless there are extremely important and compelling reasons to do so.
• IOP Conference Series titles are part of the record of science and must adhere to the principles outlined in the document above. Publication of a paper in IOP Conference Series is very different to placing articles on a personal or departmental web page. The articles are processed and delivered through a full journals platform with extensive data feeds to various database systems worldwide.
• Making post-publication changes to published articles, whether in a regular journal or a conference proceedings, is not a trivial request for the reasons outlined above. We receive a number of post-publication change requests from authors who would like us to simply replace or update their proceedings paper. We understand the reasons for these requests and are able to accommodate a very small number of them but most have to be declined.
• In summary, please check the PDF of your conference paper as carefully as possible because post-publication changes cannot be made, unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Overview of publishing in the IOP Conference Series

The following steps summarize the publication workflow.

1. Papers are submitted direct to the conference organizers (or proceedings editor(s)) via procedures advertised on the conference web site. The organizers and editors will conduct peer review and notify you of their decisions during the review process. Please note the following points.
• Because IOP Publishing does not conduct the peer review of proceedings papers we usually do not have any records of the current status of each paper, and most likely will be unable to answer any questions related to status of peer review. Please send your enquiry to the contact listed on your conference website.
• For the peer review process, the conference organizers or editors may ask authors to submit their papers in Word or LaTeX. For publication purposes, IOP Conference Series requires only a PDF file of the final accepted paper.
2. Once the peer review process has been completed, the proceedings editors submit the conference papers to IOP Publishing in a single batch.
3. On receipt of the papers, they are passed to our production department who will perform technical checks on the PDFs and then generate XML data from the PDFs for uploading into our journals system, IOPScience.
4. When all the papers have been loaded, the proceedings editors are provided with access to the proceedings and asked to check them.
5. After the editors have checked the proceedings and given their approval the papers are published online. The average time between receipt of a proceedings and online publication is about 4 weeks but can vary due to size of the conference, availability of editors for checking the proceedings and any unforeseen problems with individual articles, such as copyright issues.
6. Shortly after publication an e-mail is sent to all authors who provided an e-mail address on their paper. The e-mail contains a link to the author's paper so it is a good idea to include at least one e-mail adddress on each paper so that you receive notification of publication.
7. Shortly after online publication has been completed, printed copies or CDs will be produced if these have been requested by the conference organizers.

Do papers in the IOP Conference Series get cited?

Yes they do, and many volumes are heavily cited including citations from many world-class journals. If you browse through published volumes, looking at the the table of contents, you can see a "cited by" link, which shows the citations we have been able to detect and link to. Indeed, papers published as early as 2004 are attracting new citations: here is an example of that. By way of another example, here is an established volume where nearly every paper is cited.