Choosing your publisher and publication

Selecting the publisher, and the publication, on behalf of your colleagues and your community is an important decision based on many factors such as cost, tradition, services and reputation of the publisher, journal or proceedings series. We hope that the information and services available on this portal demonstrate IOP Publishing´s continued investment and commitment to delivering a world-class proceedings service and that you will consider using IOP Conference Series for your next proceedings.

The following is a list of the key features and advantages of publishing your next proceedings with IOP Conference Series. You can get an immediate, real-time quote for your proceedings using our online quotation system.

• Open access: All articles are free to download in perpetuity. Online publication includes:
  • creation of online versions of the abstracts contained in each paper
  • creation of hyperlinked references and tracking of future citations
  • unlimited number of pages in each article
  • unlimited use of colour online
  • unlimited extra multimedia items (e.g. simulations)
• Visibility: Papers are widely indexed and IOP Conference Series receives more than 2.3 million article downloads per year. Read more
• IOP Proceedings Licence: Authors retain copyright. No forms for organizers to administer, substantially reducing your workload. Read More
• Fast publication: proceedings are published within 4 to 6 weeks of IOP Publishing receiving accepted articles.
• Prepublication approval: Organizers log into our prepublication servers to check and approve their proceedings prior to online publication
• Conference promotion: For selected events we can provide highly targeted promotion of your conference, at no cost.

Who does the peer review of your proceedings?

We ask for the peer review of papers published in the 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. For full details please read our Peer Review Policy. Note that all published proceedings will contain a clear Statement of Peer Review confirming that the editors have conducted the review process in accordance with our published guidelines. We believe that this is a very valuable way to communicate the work done by the editors and to confirm to readers and researchers that the work has been reviewed.

An overview of the publication procedure

The following notes provide a summary of the IOP Conference Series publishing process. Please be assured that using the online quotation system does not, at any stage, create an obligation to publish your proceedings with IOP Publishing.

1. Create a quote online (or request a custom quote). You can save the quote online to receive an e-mail with further guidelines, a quote reference number and a link to download a PDF of your quote.
2. If the prices and services meet your requirements submit the quote as an application for publication together with further information about your conference. Full instructions are contained in the e-mail sent out when you save your quote online.
3. The IOP Conference Series team will review the details of your conference and write to confirm if we can offer a proceedings publishing contract. After any further discussions we will send you a draft publishing agreement which will contain all the details and terms of publication.
4. The organizers should advise their community that full copyright is retained by authors due to the IOP Proceedings Licence. Because there are no forms for authors to sign or submit it is extremely important to inform authors of publication in the IOP Conference Series via your conference web site and any Calls for Papers. This should be done as soon as possible and an HTML template can be downloaded from the guidelines/downloads tab.
5. IOP Conference Series does not place any page length restrictions on articles: authors are free to write as much as the editors are willing to review. If the proceedings editors wish to impose restrictions on the number of pages per article, this should also be advised on the conference web site together with the details of how and where to submit the papers.
6. Authors submit their papers to the conference organizers who manage the peer review. Once review of the papers is completed the conference organizers submit the final papers to IOP Conference Series in one batch. We ask that papers submitted to us must be PDFs and must be in their final form ready for publication (as we do not edit or proofread papers after they are submitted to us). Please ensure that all changes have been approved by authors prior to the PDFs being submitted to IOP Publishing.
7. Papers should be submitted to us via FTP (ftp.iop.org) using the account details recorded in the publishing agreement.
8. On submission of the manuscripts organizers should also return a completed questionnaire. The interactive questionnaire can be downloaded here.
9. 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 they go live. Please note the following important points.
• At the proceedings approval stage a substantial amount of production work has already been performed to prepare the XML data required to load the papers into IOPscience. It is far from trivial to make major changes to the publication at this stage so the purpose of the approval process is to make minor adjustments or edits. The username and password supplied to the communicating editor must not be circulated to any other party and it will be time limited.
• 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 practices of professional scientific publishing. Making changes to published papers, including proceedings, is to be avoided wherever possible. We regret that changes resulting from 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 proofed prior to submission.
10. Upon publication we will write to authors (who have supplied an e-mail) informing them of publication and provide them with the URL of their paper.
11. Printed copies and CDs (if applicable) will be prepared and shipped shortly after the online publication of the articles. The communicating editor will be supplied with PDF proofs of the cover or CD label.

Useful downloadable items

Below are some items that conference organizers may find useful:

HTML Proceedings Announcement – please feel free to download and use this HTML file for the proceedings announcement on your conference website. The following details just need to be added:

• the name of your conference
• the IOP Conference Series journal in which it will appear (i.e. JPCS, MSE or EES)
• submission deadline for authors
• email address for author submissions

Submission Guidelines for Organizers – please read these guidelines once you are ready to submit the papers to us. Essentially, on submission, we need:

• Each paper as an individual PDF, named numerically, according to the order in which you would like them to appear
• A table of contents (giving the order of papers and sections)
• An Editorial (this can include any information you like – e.g. conference overview, committee lists, acknowledgements etc)

Template for Shipping Addresses – if you have ordered hard copies please use this template to list the addresses to which your print/CD copies should be shipped. If possible, please supply this when you submit the papers to us.

Questionnaire for Organizers – we would be extremely grateful if you would spare the time to complete this questionnaire and return to us on submission of the papers (the PDF is interactive so can be filled, saved, and then returned to us electronically).