Instruction for Authors

Instructions for Invited Authors

All Other Authors: Please submit your 4-page paper using the online abstract submission system. The system is open for paper submission from 13 June, 2011 until 24 June, 2011. See layout requirements below.

Important notice!

Refereeing procedures for the invited papers from the EPS conference changed since 2010. Please read the following instructions carefully and take note of the deadlines!


As in previous years we will be publishing the invited talks in a special issue of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion


In 2011, IOP will once again manage the peer-review of the special issue. This means that:

  • Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, directly to PPCF, rather than to the conference organisers.
  • The manuscript submission deadline will be before the start of the conference, so that papers can be sent out to referees before the conference begins.
  • Authors’ and referees’ main contact throughout the reviewing process will be with the PPCF editorial office, although the conference Scientific Secretary will still be involved in the process.

Due to the new procedures and the date of the conference the reviewing and publication schedule will be very tight this year. If authors do not meet their deadlines then their papers will not be included in the special issue

Initial submission

Instruction to Authors of oral and poster contributions


This section provides information on the submission procedure for abstracts and 4-page papers. It should be done through the electronic submission system.

It is open only during the time windows bellow.


Deadlines for submission:

Size Deadline
Abstracts – 1 page February 16 – February 28, 2011
Paper – up to 4 pages June 13 – June 24, 2011

Submission of Post-deadline abstracts is by e-mail attachment sent to LOC till May 31st.

Submission of the corresponding 4-page papers must be through the electronic system in the time period given above. Papers, sent by e-mail will be not included in the Conference Proceedings.

Only contributions that have actually been presented at the Conference (as oral or poster) will be included in the Conference proceedings. Submitting a 4-page paper therefore does not imply automatic inclusion in the proceedings.

Layout requirements
All these documents must comply with the following requirements.

Item Requirement
Max. number of pages 1 (abstracts), 4 (4-page papers)
Page size A4 (21.0 x 29.7 cm)
Page margins 2.5 cm on all 4 sides, gutter 0.0
Fonts Times, Symbol
Font size 14 pt (title only), 12 pt (all other text)
Line spacing 1.5 lines (21 pt)
Title of paper Centred alignment, bold font 14 pt
List of authors Centred alignment, normal font 12 pt, presenting author underlined
e.g. M. First1, N.N. Second2
Author affiliations Centred alignment, italic font 12 pt
e.g. 1 Institute, City, Country
Body text Justified alignment, normal font 12 pt
References 10-point font, 1.5 lines spacing
Figures captions 10-point font

 

Poster Size
The poster boards dimensions will be 0.9 m (h) x 2.5 m (w)

Templates
The following templates are provided as a courtesy to facilitate document preparation. However, no guarantee is provided as to their correct functionality on all platforms. The author remains responsible for checking compliance with the above format requirements.

  • For WYSIWYG text editor users: template file in RTF format (compatible with many text editors, such as MSWord).
  • For LaTeX users: LaTeX class file, LaTeX sample file, sample PDF format figure. (Note: not all LaTeX versions can handle PDF format figures. Yet the sample file should also be able handle PS or EPS format figures after a minor modification - as indicated in the LaTeX sample file).

Format requirements
Submission of abstracts and 4-page papers are exclusively handled by the electronic submission system. The documents are accepted in PDF file format and must be less than 5MB. Documents that do not comply with these requirements are not accepted by the electronic system.

Instructions for Invited Authors

As in previous years, the invited talks from the 37th EPS Conference on Plasma Physics will be published in a special issue of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion.

IOP Publishing will manage the peer-review of the special issue. This means that:

• Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, directly to PPCF, rather than to the conference organisers.
• The manuscript submission deadline is 24 June 2011. Please note that this is before the start of the conference, so that we can begin processing papers as soon as possible.
• Authors' and referees' main contact throughout the reviewing process will be with the PPCF editorial office, contactable at <ppcf@iop.org>

IMPORTANT: Due to the very tight publication schedule, papers which are submitted after the deadline may not be published in the special issue.


1. SUBMISSION

Articles must be submitted to PPCF by 24 June 2011. If articles are submitted after this date then we cannot guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the special issue. If it is possible for you to submit your article before this date then please do so - this will enable PPCF to begin processing your paper ahead of the main bulk of submissions.

Articles must be submitted electronically. You can submit in the following ways:
• Via our online submission service at http://authors.iop.org/submit
• by email to email to ppcf@iop.org

On submission, please indicate that your paper is for the EPS 2011 special issue

Full details on the submission process can be found at http://www.iop.org/journals/guidelines

 

2. MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION

Page Limits

Maximum page limits are 12 journal pages for plenary invited papers and 8 journal pages for parallel invited papers. PPCF is a B5 format journal, and each page is equivalent to around 600 words. Therefore the approximate word equivalents are;

Plenary papers: 12 journal pages = 7200 words (without figures)
Invited papers: 8 journal pages = 4800 words (without figures)

If you plan to include figures or tables, please note that these occupy the equivalent of 300 words each.


Important note: Papers that exceed these page limits by 1-3 pages may be charged 100 Euros per excess page. Papers that exceed the page limits by more than 3 pages will only be considered for publication at the Publisher's discretion.


Formatting

The requirements for special issue papers are the same as for regular submissions to PPCF (or any IOP journal). For full details of acceptable formats, please refer to the section "File preparation" appended below, or visit http://authors.iop.org

 

3. PEER-REVIEW

Once submitted, your paper will enter PPCF's electronic refereeing system. Articles will be refereed to the journal's usual high standards, and you may be asked to make amendments or revisions to your paper. The final acceptance deadline for all special issue papers is September 2011.

The deadlines for this special issue are extremely tight, so it is very important that you stick to your deadlines if you are asked to amend or revise your paper. As standard PPCF refereeing procedures will be followed, you may be asked to make substantial revisions to your paper.

It is important that we are able to get in contact with you over the summer. Therefore you should tell us on submission if there will be any dates when you will be unavailable, and if possible you should nominate a co-author who we can contact in your absence.


4. PUBLICATION

Any articles which have not been accepted by September deadline may not be ready in time for inclusion in the special issue. In these cases papers may be published in a later issue of PPCF.

Please note that because of the tight schedule, authors will be given very short deadlines during the proof stage, i.e. they are likely to be given just 24 hours to make proof corrections.

SUMMARY OF DEADLINES
Initial Submission: 24 June 2011
Final article to be accepted for publication: September 2011
Publication: December 2011


File preparation
The guidelines below provide the essential information you need to prepare your article in the most useful form.

1. Text formats
TeX and LaTeX: The text of articles may be submitted in any common variant of TeX including plain TeX, LaTeX 2e, REVTeX, AmSTeX and AmSLaTeX.

Guidelines and a class file for preparing articles using LaTeX 2e are available at authors.iop.org. Separate files are available for Windows, Unix and Macintosh. The individual uncompressed files can be found in the directories /pub/journals/latex2e.

We have copies of the common package and class files, and these should not normally need to be sent. If, however, you are using uncommon, customized or personal style files then these should be included along with your submission.

Microsoft Word: We are also able to receive articles prepared using Microsoft Word for Windows or Macintosh.

• Fonts should be restricted to the standard font families (Times, Helvetica, Courier or Symbol).
• If special sybmols are needed (eg. Greek Characters, accented characters or mathematical symbols) these should be typed using the appropriate TrueType font. Do not use the ‘Symbol' facility on the ‘Insert' menu as this often results in font conversion problems.
• Equations must be prepared using Microsoft Word Equation Editor version or the full commercial MathType package.

Full details and a sample article prepared in Word can be found at authors.iop.org.

Please note that figures included in a Word document should also be provided separately in a suitable electronic format (see the section Figure formats below).


2. Figure formats
Our preferred graphics format is vector Encapsulated PostScript (EPS). These files can be used directly to give high quality results and file sizes are small in comparison with most bitmap forms. Most graphics software has the facility to save or export as EPS.

Vector formats: In order to get the best possible results, please note the following important points:

• Fonts used should be restricted to the standard font families (Times, Helvetica, Courier or Symbol).
• If vector EPS files include bitmap information, the bitmap should conform to the specification given in the section on bitmap formats below.
• Certain proprietary vector graphics formats such as Origin, Kaleidagraph, Cricket Graph and Gnu Plot should not be sent in their native format. If you do use these applications to create your illustrations then please export them to EPS.

Bitmap formats: Unlike vector images, which are readily scaleable, bitmap images frequently present quality problems in the production of printed and electronic versions of our journals. Quality is basically dependent on two attributes of a bitmap graphics file: resolution and size (bitmap dimensions in pixels). Low-resolution files do not reproduce well, especially when enlarged. Files with small bitmap dimensions are frequently too small to reproduce well at the resolution required for printing and suffer an unacceptable reduction in quality if enlarged. For these reasons, black and white, greyscale and colour bitmap graphics files should have a resolution of at least 300 dpi (preferably 600 dpi for black and white bitmap graphics files). In addition, the bitmap dimensions should be sufficient to produce an image of adequate size (normally 3 to 6 inches wide, or 900 to 1800 pixels for a 300 dpi image).

Files in most bitmap formats are acceptable, including: TIFF (this is our preferred bitmap format), BMP, GIF and JPEG. Please note that GIF and JPEG graphics files derived from Web sites are not suitable for printing purposes as they are generally specified at only screen resolution (72 dpi).

Note: If you intend to supply your figures as JPEG files, the following points are important:
• The JPEG compression method discards image data and is referred to as 'lossy' compression. When saving directly from an application it is better to choose a loss-less format such as TIFF.
• Although a 'higher quality' compression setting in your software results in less data being discarded, JPEG compression may degrade details in an image-particularly in images that contain type or vector art.
• Do not repeatedly resave a JPEG file because the loss of image data occurs each time you resave the image. Always save JPEG files from the original (non-JPEG) image, not from a previously saved JPEG.

For full details on preparing graphics files, please refer to the graphics guidelines at authors.iop.org.

Content of figures: In addition to the general points about figure files, the following comments need to be borne in mind when preparing figures for submission.
• The figure files submitted should include only what is required for publication. Captions should be included in the text and not in the graphics files.
• Figures should be clear, easy to read and of good quality. Characters should appear as they would be set in the main body of the article. We will normally use figures as submitted; it is therefore your responsibility to ensure that they are legible and technically correct.
• Shading and fill patterns should be avoided wherever possible because diagrams containing them have to be printed in half-tones and undesirable interference patterns may be produced on printing.
• When producing colour illustrations, light colours such as yellow, light green, light blue, light grey etc should be avoided because they generally reproduce poorly during the black-and-white printing process.
• Wherever possible, electronic figures should be tightly cropped to minimize superfluous white space surrounding them. This reduces file sizes and helps the alignment of figures on the printed page.
• Separate parts of figures (e.g. (a), (b), etc.) should have the part designation included at an appropriate place close to or within the area of the figure.


3. Archive and compress your files
Text and graphics files should be archived and then compressed into a single file for ease of handling and to save time and space. IOP supports all common compression formats, including WinZip, PKZip, tar+gzip etc. Please name the resulting file filename.ext where the first four characters of filename are the first four characters of your surname and the last four are the current day and month in MMDD format (e.g. smit0531) and .ext is an extension (maximum three letters) denoting the file type (e.g. .zip for a PKZip file, .sit for a StuffIt file, .uu for a uuencoded file). If you have any difficulty archiving your files, please contact esubs@iop.org for assistance.


Submission instructions for articles to PPCF

Authors are required to provide us with important information about their electronic submission and article. For Web submissions please go to http://authors.iop.org/submit. For email submissions, send the submission information as the main body text of the email. For FTP and disk submissions, create an ASCII text file called readme.txt and include it with your submission. For hardcopy submissions, include a typed sheet with your manuscript.

The following information should be included.

Article submitted by:  
Journal submitted to:  
Article title:  
Authors:  
Article Type:  
Postal address:  
E-mail address:  
Phone number:  
Fax number:  
Status of article:  
Special issue details:  
Article file format:  
Number of figures:  
Additional information:  

 


MULTIMEDIA SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion encourages authors to submit multimedia attachments to enhance the online versions of published research articles. The printed journal remains the archival version and multimedia items are supplements, which enhance a reader's understanding of the paper but are not essential to that understanding.

Video clips and animation
Acceptable formats for video or animation clips are MPEG (we recommend MPEG1), QuickTime (we recommend Cinepak codec for compression, and Quality 75%), Windows AVI or Animated GIF (use only standard GIF functions as some browsers do not support the whole GIF 89 standard).

Your video or animation clips are intended for internet use via our Web server, and we need to consider the needs of users with slow internet connections (e.g. modem-based users) so that your work can be made available to the widest possible readership. Please aim to minimize file sizes and data rates by considering the following points.

• 480 x 360 pixels (width by height) is the recommended maximum frame size.
• A recommended frame speed is 12-15 frames per second (fps). (Many packages output 30fps as standard, but it is possible to specify lower frame speeds).
• Use a 256 colour palette if that is suitable for the presentation of the material.

Please consider the use of lower specifications for all these points if the material can still be represented clearly. Our recommended maximum file size is 3MB. Our recommended data rate is 150 KB per second.

Since the printed journal is the archival copy, a representative frame from your movie or animation should be included in the manuscript as a figure. Include the file size and type of multimedia file in the figure caption.
Multimedia files should be submitted (preferably in compressed form) at the same time as the original article.

Supplementary data
Data files or extra figures can be submitted in any of the usual formats (PDF, Word, TeX, EPS, GIFF, TIFF, etc). We are also happy to consider output files from specialized data processing software and computer program codes. As we will not always be able to check the contents of data files, we request that the authors submit a ‘read-me' file containing brief instructions on how to use the file, and a signed statement confirming that the material is as stated and is pertinent to the article. Supplementary data submitted as figures, TeX or Word will appear in the electronic journal in PDF format; specialized files will be offered in their original form.

If you have any questions regarding the submission of multimedia attachments, please contact: ppcf@iop.org