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期刊名称：PLASMA SOURCES SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY ISSN： 0963-0252 出版频率： Bi-monthly 出版社： IOP PUBLISHING LTD, TEMPLE CIRCUS, TEMPLE WAY, BRISTOL, ENGLAND, BS1 6BE   出版社网址： http://iopscience.iop.org/ 期刊网址： http://iopscience.iop.org/0963-0252 影响因子： 3.584 主题范畴： PHYSICS, FLUIDS & PLASMAS 期刊简介(About the journal)    投稿须知(Instructions to Authors)    编辑部信息(Editorial Board)    About the journal   Plasma Sources Science and Technology   Plasma Sources Science and Technology reports on non-fusion plasma sources which operate at all ranges of pressure and density including neutral and non-neutral plasma sources; positive and negative ion sources; free radical sources; microwave, RF, direct current, laser and electron beam excited sources; resonant sources; plasmas for etching, deposition, polymerization, sintering; plasma sources for accelerators; lighting applications; plasma sources for medical physics; plasma sources for lasers; other applications, e.g. spacecraft thrusters, industrial arc melting; plasmas as sources of UV and x-ray radiation; plasma source design, monitoring and control; source stability and reproducibility. Low-pressure plasma sources: distribution functions; excitation-radiation equilibria; vibrational excitation; mass, momentum and energy transport; ion implantation. Low-to-medium pressure plasma sources: plasma surface interactions; high pressure sources, thermal plasmas; plasma diagnostic techniques; plasma and plasma source modelling. Research papers. Reports of original research work; not normally more than 8500 words (14 journal pages). Brief communications. Not normally more than 1800 words (2 journal pages). Topical Reviews. Review articles commissioned by the Editorial Board.    Abstracted in INSPEC® Information Services; ISI (SciSearch®, ISI Alerting Services, Current Contents®/Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences); Chemical Abstracts; PASCAL Database; Article@INIST; Engineering Index/Ei Compendex®; Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (Environmental Engineering Abstracts, Bioengineering Abstracts); VINITI Abstracts Journal.   Instructions to Authors Submitting to Plasma Sources Science and Technology for the first time? For information on the type of articles accepted and for length limits of contributions please see the journal scope. You may be interested in what we ask our referees to look for in submissions to Plasma Sources Science and Technology. Your submission to Plasma Sources Science and Technology must be the original work of the author(s) and it must not be published elsewhere or be under consideration for another publication in its submitted or a substantially similar form in any language. Publication must have been approved by all co-authors (if any) as well as by the responsible authorities at the institution(s) where the work was carried out. How to prepare your article for submission If you submit your manuscript electronically you do not need to send hard copies. Comprehensive information on how to prepare your article for electronic submission can be found in our Information for authors. You are required to provide us with important information about your submission and article. Before sending us your article, please make sure you have included your submission information. Please include your signed Assignment of copyright. How to submit your article to Plasma Sources Science and Technology Please read the comprehensive information on the options for submitting your article in our Information for authors. Here are brief details of your options: Web Use our online submissions form and upload your article's single compressed archive file, or enter your arXiv.org e-print number. E-mail Send your article's single compressed archive file as an attachment to an e-mail to psst@iop.org stating electronic submission in the subject line. FTP Send your article's single compressed archive file by anonymous FTP to ftp.iop.org Please log on with username anonymous and use your e-mail address as the password. Change to the /incoming directory. Change to the psst directory. Upload your compressed file using the appropriate commands for your FTP software. Make sure that ASCII files are sent as text only while other files are sent as binary. Disk Send your article's single compressed archive file on a 3.5 inch floppy disk or a Zip disk. Send your disk to: Publishing Administrator Plasma Sources Science and Technology Institute of Physics Publishing Dirac House, Temple Back Bristol BS1 6BE, UK Hard copy You should send four copies of the typescript, at least one of which must be single-sided and contain original figures and tables, to either the appropriate Regional Editor or the Editor-in-Chief: Editor-in Chief Professor N Hershkowitz Department of Engineering Physics University of Wisconsin 1500 Engineering Drive Madison USA Tel: +1 608 263 2926 Fax: +1 608 265 2364 E-Mail: hershkowitz@engr.wisc.edu   Western Europe Professor D C Schram Department of Physics Eindhoven University of Technology PO Box 513 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands Tel: +31 40 474369 Fax: +31 40 456442   Russia Professor Yuri P Raizer The Institute for Problems in Mechanics Russian Academy of Sciences Vernadsci Str. 101 117526 Moscow Russia Fax: +7 095 9382048 What we look for in your article We consider for publication in Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) journals articles which: must contain original work must not have been published previously must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or book available through a library or by purchase. Articles based on theses for higher degrees may be submitted, as may articles presented at conferences, provided these articles do not appear in substantially the same form in a published conference proceedings. Reports that are not available to the general public are not regarded by IOPP as prior publications. Authors of articles are not restricted to being members of any particular institute, society or association. All articles offered for publication are given unbiased consideration, each being judged on its merits without regard to the race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship or political philosophy of the author(s). We treat all articles as confidential until they are published. How to prepare your article Please read these guidelines carefully and if possible familiarize yourself with the journal to which you are submitting by examining the online version and taking a look at the Featured Articles. If you have any queries please contact us. Length of submissions Most journals have guidelines for the maximum recommended length of each different category of article, as detailed in the scope available from the journal's home page. It is important that you follow these guidelines when preparing your submission. The length of an article can be calculated by allowing 600 words per page in a B5-sized journal or 900 words per page in an A4-sized journal. Diagrams and tables usually occupy the equivalent of 200-300 words each, and you should allow for this in your total. Your article should normally consist of the following: a title page with title of article, name(s) of author(s) and address(es) of establishment(s) where the work was carried out; an abstract; the text; a list of references; a list of captions for illustrations; and a set of copies of illustrations with lettering added. More details on each of these are given in the following sections. Title page Title of article This should be concise but informative. Authors and addresses For multiple-authored articles list the names of all the authors first, followed by the full postal addresses, using identifiers to link an author with an address, where necessary. If an author's present address is different from the address at which the work was carried out, this should be given as a footnote to the page. You can also include e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and fax numbers on the title page. Short title This is used at the top of odd-numbered pages in the printed journal and should not exceed 80 characters. You do not need to provide short titles for Letters to the Editor or Topical Reviews. Classification numbers Many of our journals use the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS, published by the American Institute of Physics) to help with the refereeing process. We therefore ask you to supply a list of appropriate classification numbers. An electronic version of PACS is available by ftp by opening the AIP server at 'pinet.aip.org' or via the World Wide Web (http://www.aip.org/pubservs/pacs.html). You do not need to supply classification numbers when submitting to journals of a general nature, e.g. Physics Education or Public Understanding of Science. When submitting to Nonlinearity you should include suitable classification numbers from either the Physics and Astronomy scheme or the American Mathematical Society's Mathematics Subject Classification (http://www.ams.org/msc/). You should include a list of Keywords when submitting to Measurement Science and Technology and Physiological Measurement. Abstract Your abstract should give readers concise information about the content of your article. It should be informative and not only indicate the general scope of the article but also state the main results obtained and conclusions drawn. As the abstract is not part of the text it should be complete in itself; no table numbers, figure numbers, references or displayed mathematical expressions should be included. It should be suitable for direct inclusion in abstracting services and should not normally exceed 200 words. If the article is not in English, an English version of the abstract must also be supplied. Since contemporary information-retrieval systems rely heavily on the content of titles and abstracts to identify relevant articles in literature searches, great care should be taken in constructing both. Text Research papers and review articles should be divided into numbered sections, subsections and, if necessary, subsubsections. You should use tables only to improve conciseness or where the information cannot be given satisfactorily in other ways such as by histograms or graphs. Tables should be numbered serially and referred to in the text by number (table 1, etc). Each table should have an explanatory caption which should be as concise as possible. If your paper consists of a very large amount of tabular material such as long lists of crystallographic results, computer programs and spectrographic results we would not normally publish these in full. Instead these may be published online as supplementary data files. In terms of general style, conciseness in writing helps the reader, but clarity is most important. Short sentences and paragraphs make reading easier. You should aim for consistency within your paper in matters such as hyphenation and spelling. All acronyms and abbreviations should be clearly explained when they first appear in the text, and all units used should be consistent throughout the article. If English is not your first language, you should ask an English speaking colleague to read through your paper or at least apply a UK English spellchecker to your paper. Mathematics You should take care when writing mathematical articles especially regarding subscripts and superscripts and differentiation between the letter 'l' and the figure one, C and c, S and s, k, K and and other similar groups of letters. If your article contains superscripts or subscripts to superscripts or subscripts, take special care to ensure that the positioning of the characters is unambiguous. Exponential expressions, especially those containing subscripts or superscripts, are clearer if you use the notation exp(. . . ) except in the simplest examples. Please use the superscript -1 for reciprocals. It is important to distinguish between ln (= loge) and lg (= log10). Multiplication signs should be used in numbers expressed as powers of ten: e.g. 5x103 not 5.103. References Alphabetical system (Harvard) In the Harvard alphabetical system the name of the author appears in the text together with the year of publication, e.g. (Smith 2001) or Smith (2001) (as appropriate). Where there are only two authors both names should be given in the text (Smith and Jones 2001) or Smith and Jones (2001); however, if there are more than two authors only the first name should appear followed by et al, (Smith et al 2001) or Smith et al (2001). If you refer to different works by one author or group of authors in the same year they should be differentiated by including a, b, etc after the date (e.g. 1992a). If you refer to different pages of the same article, the page number may be given in the text, e.g. Kitchen (1992, p 39). The reference list at the end of your article using this system should be in alphabetical order. Numerical system (Vancouver) In the numerical system you should number your references sequentially through the text. The numbers should be given in square brackets and one number can be used to refer to several instances of the same reference. The reference list at the end of the paper lists the references in numerical order, not alphabetically. Reference lists A complete reference should provide your reader with enough information to locate the article concerned and should consist of: name(s) and initials, date published, title of journal or book, volume number, editors (if any) and, for books, town of publication and publisher (in parentheses), and finally the page numbers. It can be helpful to include first and last page numbers, particularly for review articles and for journals such as Reports on Progress in Physics; final page numbers are a requirement for submissions to Physics in Medicine and Biology and Physiological Measurement. You should take particular care to ensure that the information is correct so that IOPP's HyperCite?/FONT> facility can link abstracts electronically. Footnotes should not be included in the reference list which should contain only references to bibliographic data. Before submitting your article, please ensure you have done a literature search to check for any relevant references you may have missed. Inverse Problems, Measurement Science and Technology, Network: Computation in Neural Systems, Physics in Medicine and Biology and Physiological Measurement require titles of articles in journals in their reference lists. Figures You may illustrate your text by line diagrams and photographs. The 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 correct. Please note the following important points: Shading and fill patterns should be avoided wherever possible because diagrams containing them have to be printed as 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. Figure captions You should provide a list of captions describing each figure and identifying the symbols used on a separate page at the end of the typescript. Your figures should be numbered in the order in which they are referred to in the text. If there is more than one part to a figure, the parts should be identified by a lower-case letter in parentheses close to or within the area of the figure (e.g. figure 1(a)). Captions should be included in the text and not in the graphics files. You may identify curves by letters (upper case Roman), by the symbols used for the data points (e.g.*, ) or by the type of line (e.g. ——, full curve; ???, broken curve; ?∙ ?∙ ? chain curve). Micrographs should include a scale bar of appropriate size, e.g. 1 m. Colour illustrations The use of colour in illustrations can enhance the effective presentation of results, and we are pleased to offer free reproduction of colour illustrations in the electronic versions of our journals available via our Web server. However, because conventional full-colour printing remains an expensive process, we must ask you (or your institution) to pay the additional costs incurred (i.e. the costs over and above the cost of normal black-on-white reproduction) if you also require colour in the printed version of your article. An estimate of the charges for your paper can be obtained from the Publishing Administrator of the journal. There are no charges for colour reproduction of illustrations in the printed versions of Nanotechnology and Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering, when the use of colour is clearly required to further understanding and communication. There is no additional charge for offprints of articles containing colour illustrations, but authors are reminded that these must be ordered by the time proofs are returned; reprints produced after publication are very expensive. Authors requiring further information or guidance should contact the journal. Multimedia All of our journals encourage authors to submit multimedia attachments to enhance the online versions of published research articles. Multimedia enhancements typically consist of video clips, animations or supplementary data such as data files, tables of extra information or extra figures. They can add to the reader's understanding and present results in attractive ways that go beyond what can be presented in the print version of the journal. 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. As New Journal of Physics and Journal of Turbulence are purely electronic journals, multimedia attachments may be used to convey essential information. What files to submit We encourage you to send us your article in electronic form so it can be refereed without postal delays and be published more quickly. The guidelines below provide the essential information you need to prepare your article in the most useful form. Article text TeX and LaTeX The text of articles may be submitted in any common variant of TeX including LaTeX 2e, LaTeX 2.09, REVTeX, AmSTeX, AmSLaTeX and plain TeX. Guidelines and a class file for preparing articles using LaTeX 2e are available. The files are also available by anonymous ftp (please use your e-mail address as the password) from ftp.iop.org. After logging on, change to the pub/journals directory (cd pub/journals). 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 files then these should be included along with your submission. Microsoft Word We are able to receive articles prepared using Microsoft Word for Windows or Macintosh. Fonts used should be restricted to the standard font families (Times, Helvetica, Courier or Symbol) unless the fonts can be embedded within the file without infringing the font licensing agreement. Use 'TrueType' fonts only. TrueType fonts are denoted by the symbol TT on the font list. Always embed your TrueType fonts. This is done by selecting 'File', 'Save As', 'Options and then clicking the 'Embed TrueType fonts' box. If special symbols are needed (e.g. 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 Equation Editor, version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 or MathType. Adobe Acrobat PDF The Adobe Acrobat PDF format is only suitable for the refereeing process. If you are able to supply a PDF file for your article at this stage it will speed up the assessment of your article. Fonts used should be restricted to the standard font families (Times, Helvetica, Courier or Symbol) unless the fonts can be embedded within the file without infringing the font licensing agreement. Acrobat PDF is not suitable for the production process. You will be asked to send the text of your article in its original source form (TeX or Word) as it reaches the production stage. Figures 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 as 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) unless the fonts can be embedded within the file without infringing the font licensing agreement. If vector EPS files include bitmap information, the bitmap should conform to the specification given in the section on bitmap formats. 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, please export them as 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 all 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. But please note that if your GIF and JPEG graphics files have been derived from Web sites they may not suitable for printing purposes as they are generally specified at only screen resolution. Multimedia Video clips and animation Acceptable formats for video or animation clips are MPEG, QuickTime, Windows AVI or Animated GIF. 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: 480x360 pixels is the recommended maximum frame size. A recommended frame rate is 12-15 frames per second (fps). (Many packages output 30 fps as standard, but you can specify a lower frame rate.) 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 maximum data rate is 150 KB/s. The various formats have different characteristics that you should consider when choosing the format for your material: MPEG Suitable for photo-realistic material. Requires users to have a third party viewer. We recommend MPEG 1. The MPEG standard is specified in terms of millions of colours and at least 24 fps, so you cannot choose lower specifications for these settings. QuickTime and Windows AVI Suitable for computer-generated material. Require users to have a third party viewer. We recommend the Cinepak codec for compression. This provides good compression and, importantly, it is widely supported. You can often consider the use of a 256 colour palette for computer-generated material. As a general rule, we recommend using Quality 75%. Animated GIF Suitable for computer-generated material. Animations may be rendered directly in a Web browser without the need for a third party viewer. Please use only standard GIF functions as some browsers don't support the whole GIF 89 standard. Because GIF compression is not good, consider small frame sizes and low frame rates. 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 the multimedia file in the figure caption. Supplementary data Data files or extra figures can be submitted in any of the usual formats (PDF, Word, TeX, EPS, GIF, TIFF, etc). In addition, we are 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 authors also 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. How to submit We encourage you to send us your article in electronic form (guidelines in What files to submit) so that it can be refereed without postal delays and be published more quickly. There is no need to supply hard copies of the manuscript, provided that it has been prepared according to these guidelines. Please submit all the components necessary to generate a complete printed version of your article together with any multimedia enhancements. For all submissions, please use the following procedure: 1. Prepare your submission information You are required to provide us with important information about your submission and article to allow us to process it correctly. For Web submissions use the Online Submission form. For e-mail submissions send the submission information as the main body text of the e-mail. For FTP and disk submissions create an ASCII text file called readme.txt and include it with your submission. For hard copy submissions include a typed sheet with your manuscript. The following information should be included: Article submitted by: your full name Journal submitted to: the name of the journal to which you are submitting the article Article title: the full title of your article Authors: full list of authors Article type: Letter to the Editor, Paper, etc Status of article: new, revised or accepted Reference number: if revised or accepted Postal address: postal address where we can contact you E-mail address: e-mail address where we can contact you Phone number: phone number where we can contact you Fax number: fax number where we can contact you Article file format: the file format of your article text file, e.g. Word, TeX, LaTeX, REVTeX Number of figures: the number of separate figure files Number of multimedia files: the number of separate multimedia files Potential referees (optional): the names and addresses of potential referees who could provide an independent assessment of your article 2. Archive and compress your files for electronic submission Combine all your files (article text, graphics files and, if applicable, the readme.txt file) into a single compressed archive file for ease of handling and to save time and space. The following compression or archiving programs may be used: WinZip, PKZip, tar + gzip, arj, lha, uc2, uuencode, compress, Stuffit or Zipit. 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 us for assistance (esub@iop.org). Revised versions: If you are submitting a revised version of your article, please remember to include a list of changes and, if applicable, replies to the referees. 3. Send us your article There are a number of alternative methods of submission, which are described below. If you have any queries, questions or suggestions for electronic submission, then please contact the Electronic Services Specialist by e-mail: esub@iop.org Web This is our preferred method of submission and it enables us to handle your article with speed and efficiency. Users of Netscape (version 2 or higher) or Internet Explorer (version 4 or higher) can submit using our online submission form: Complete the form with information about your submission. There are two options to upload your article: Use the 'Browse' button on the form to select your article's single compressed archive file, OR If your article has already been posted to the arXiv.org e-print archive, select the archive name and enter the e-print number. (Note: We cannot download your paper from the arXiv.org e-print server until it has been publicly released, usually by 10pm on the day you submitted it there.) Use the 'Transfer file' button at the bottom of the form to submit your file. E-mail Send your article's single compressed archive file as an attachment to an e-mail to the journal's e-mail address (see the journal's home page) with the words 'electronic submission' in the subject line. Please do not send each of your text and graphics files as separate e-mails as this causes a considerable delay in processing your submission. NB: Microsoft Word documents and the output files from most compression utilities are binary files and must be encoded using uuencode, binhex or MIME before being sent by e-mail. Your e-mail system may do this automatically, but if it does not, or if you are unable to encode your submission in one of these ASCII formats, you must send your submission by FTP or on disk instead. Some e-mail systems have a file size limit, for example 100 KB; if this is the case for your e-mail system, files that are larger than 100 KB after compression should not be split into multiple parts, but should be sent using our online submission form, FTP or on disk. FTP Send your article's single compressed archive file by anonymous FTP to ftp.iop.org. Please log on with username anonymous and use your e-mail address as the password. Change to the /incoming directory. Change to the directory of the journal to which you wish to submit. Upload your compressed file using the appropriate commands for your FTP software. Make sure that ASCII files are sent as text only while other files are sent as binary. Once you are satisfied that your file has been uploaded correctly, disconnect from the FTP server. An automatic program runs periodically to check the /incoming directory for new uploads: it will move your files to a separate, secure directory to be processed. Your file will remain in the /incoming directory for no more than 90 minutes. Disk Send your article's single compressed archive file on: 3.5 inch floppy disk (MS-DOS or Macintosh formatted) Zip disk (PC or Macintosh) CD-Rom Please label your disk with the journal name, date and the name of the first author. Hard copy If it is not possible or practical for you to use electronic submission, or if you are submitting to one of the journals where the refereeing is not administered at the Publishing Office (see the Exceptions sections), you can send us your article conventionally by mail in hard copy form. You need to send the following material: One single-sided copy of the manuscript including the submission information detailed in Prepare your submission information. Two further copies of the manuscript. One set of good-quality copies of all illustrations, suitable for reproduction (see the section on preparing your Figures). On line diagrams, please ensure that labelling, line thickness and other detail are clear and bold so that we can digitize them successfully. If photographs are included these should be supplied as good-quality glossy prints (not negatives or slides). Please mark your illustrations clearly with your name and figure number. A completed Assignment of Copyright form Copies of any references that are unpublished or may be hard to obtain but would be vital to the refereeing process. Please supply an e-mail address or fax number at which you may be contacted. Please pack your typescript carefully. Use stiff card to protect the typescript and pack it in a padded or reinforced envelope. Authors from outside Western Europe should ensure that their articles are sent by airmail; delays caused by the use of surface mail can be very considerable. 4. Send us your signed Assignment of Copyright form Please note that a signed hard-copy version of the Assignment of Copyright is always required, regardless of submission method. Acknowledgment of electronic submissions Successful receipt and processing of your electronic submission will be manually acknowledged by the Electronic Services Specialist by e-mail. If you do not receive this notification within one week then you should contact the Electronic Services Specialist (esub@iop.org ). Shortly afterwards you will receive a further acknowledgement from the Publishing Administrator when your article has been assigned a reference number. Exceptions Articles for consideration by Chinese Physics, Chinese Physics Letters, Journal of Radiological Protection, Public Understanding of Science and Smart Materials and Structures (for which the refereeing is not administered at the Publishing Office) must be submitted in hard copy form. Details of the hard copy material required are given in the section Send us your article and submission addresses are given on the relevant journal's home page. Please send your electronic files on acceptance or when requested by the Editor. How we assess your article The refereeing process When we first receive an article here at IOPP it is given a reference number. This number subsequently appears on all future correspondence, so when you enquire about your article you should quote the reference number if possible and give the name of the first author. We make use of a streamlined refereeing system that aims to be both fair and consistent. For every submission that falls within the scope of one of our journals, we select two independent experts in the subject of the paper who normally act as referees and advise the editors on whether the paper should be accepted or rejected. We ask our referees to take into account the content of the article, its quality and presentation when reaching their recommendations. As a result we may ask you to revise your paper in the light of the referees' comments. If the referees give conflicting advice, a senior referee acts as an adjudicator. If the referees recommend rejection of your article, you can appeal to the Editorial Board for further consideration. You should note, however, that an article rejected by one IOPP journal on quality grounds is essentially rejected by all of them. Our electronic refereeing facility has now been extended across our journals. Articles submitted electronically will be converted into a PDF file, unless this has been supplied, and placed on a home page created for the referee. We then send referees instructions to enable them to access their home page. We strongly encourage referees to report via the web or by e-mail to speed up the review process. Variations on the procedure Some journals, however, have slightly different refereeing procedures, among them the following: Every paper considered for New Journal of Physics and Nonlinearity is allocated to a specific member of the Editorial Board, who assesses the referees' reports and advises the Honorary Editor on the paper's suitability for publication. All articles submitted to Network: Computation in Neural Systems are assessed for interdisciplinary content before technical refereeing. Papers submitted to Combustion Theory and Modelling are sent first to the Editor-in-Chief for assessment of their suitability for the journal, and then to a Board Member who selects referees and examines reports. Articles may be rejected as unsuitable at this stage. Papers for Superconductor Science and Technology and European Journal of Physics are sent to only one referee; referees' reports are scrutinized by the Honorary Editor, who may request that a further referee is consulted. Details of the refereeing procedure for Physics Education are available from the Publishing Office. You can also submit to a journal by means of the 'Communication' procedure: this enables any paper which has been supported by an Editorial Board member to be sent to just one further referee. Clearly this can speed up the assessment process and is therefore advantageous to both the journal and yourself as author. Board members are listed on the journal home pages and also at the front of each journal issue. Papers of a possibly speculative nature are often referred on arrival to a Board member in the first instance, to decide whether or not the article should be sent to referees in the usual way. The normal length of submissions is given as part of each journal's scope accessible from its home page; where this length is exceeded the article may be referred to the Editorial Board for special consideration. External journals In the case of Chinese Physics, Chinese Physics Letters, Journal of Radiological Protection, Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering, Public Understanding of Science and Smart Materials and Structures all articles are handled externally up to acceptance for publication. The addresses for submissions and enquiries prior to acceptance are given both on the respective journal home pages and in the journals themselves. Enquiries concerning accepted articles, however, should be sent to the Publishing Administrator of the journal. Revising your article When you submit a revised or amended version of your article in response to the referee's comments we advise you to compare the original version with the revised one and list any changes you have made (ignoring typographical errors, but mentioning additional paragraphs, changes to figures, etc). You may also wish to send in a second copy of your article with the changes marked or underlined. If changes have been made in response to the referees' remarks it is helpful to mention this and indicate where they can be found. If this is detailed enough, it can eliminate the need to provide a separate 'list of changes'. You should go through the referees' comments and for each comment mention whether you followed their suggestion or whether you disagree and wish to respond to the comment. Some authors copy out each of the referees' comments in turn and include their response immediately after. In other cases responses can be made referring back to the reports. Finally, please make sure that you send your revised article to us and not simply the original version again. This is a common mistake, especially when authors send in their work electronically. Electronic revised articles should contain all text and graphics files needed to generate the revised version, and not just those files that have changed. By observing these guidelines you will be assisting the referees, who give up their time to review manuscripts. If you prepare your article carefully then this can save valuable time during the publication process. Letters Letters to the Editor, Rapid Communications and Preliminary Communications should contain material that is important and urgent, and therefore deserving of accelerated processing. Due to this emphasis on timeliness, we usually send such articles to only one referee, usually a member of the Editorial Board or a Senior referee. Only minor amendments are allowed, and Letters are basically accepted or rejected. If more major revision is required, a Letter may be changed to a Paper or the authors may be advised to fully revise and resubmit a new Letter. Letters communicated and supported by an Editorial Board member are usually accepted without further refereeing. Comments and Replies If you wish to submit a short item as a Comment on a published article or a related scientific issue then you should be aware that these are subject to assessment by the respective journal's Editorial Board. In addition, any criticized author has the right to submit a Reply (and will normally be invited to do so); this will also be assessed on receipt. The expected series of items when published consists of: Article/Comment/Reply. Where possible, a Comment and its related Reply are published together in the same journal issue. What we do with your article after it is accepted After acceptance your article will be edited and processed and a proof will be produced. Proofs Proofs of articles are usually sent to you for correction by e-mail as an annotated PDF file attachment. If you cannot receive proofs in this way then please let the Publishing Administrator know and tell us if you would like us to send the proofs by fax or conventional mail. To ensure rapid publication of Letters to the Editor, authors resident abroad are not always sent proofs; when they are you should return them within 24 hours. You should check your proofs carefully and return corrections to the Publishing Administrator by e-mail if possible. If you are using e-mail then we prefer to receive the corrections as a list with each correction given a precise location in terms of, for example, page and line number. Alternatively you can add annotations to the PDF file itself and return this as an e-mail attachment. Please do not amend the PDF file or send an amended manuscript at this stage. You can also send corrections by fax, first-class post or airmail. The ultimate responsibility for ensuring the accuracy of the published paper rests with you. If proofs reach you during an absence of which we have not been informed, or if the proofs are not returned sufficiently quickly, we may publish the paper without your corrections. When checking your proofs you should take particular care checking mathematics, tables and references. Only essential corrections should be made. You may be charged for excessive corrections arising from your own errors or omissions. You should provide new files if figures need correction. We recommend that you check the accuracy of your original diagrams very carefully before submission: we cannot accept responsibility for any errors in original diagrams. Offprints For articles in most publications you will receive 25 free offprints of your article, groups of six or more authors will receive a further 25 offprints. However some publications give authors 50 free offprints. If you would like to check your entitlement, please contact custserv@iop.org and include the name of the journal. You may purchase additional offprints using the order form that accompanies the letter of acceptance for your article. You should order your offprints promptly and they must be ordered before the journal issue goes to press. Please note that we are unable to accept late orders for offprints. You should send payment or an official purchase order from your organization with your order. Current prices appear on the order form. Reprints You may subsequently purchase reprints of your article, for which the minimum order is 100. Since the cost of reprints is substantially higher than that for offprints, you are advised to ensure that you purchase sufficient offprints for your needs. Copyright, reproduction and permissions Transfer of copyright Before we can publish any article in one of our journals the copyright must be transferred to Institute of Physics Publishing, or a legal Licence to Publish must be signed by the authors. Transfer of copyright helps Publishers such as IOPP to make articles more widely accessible across different media, whether supplementing or replacing printed versions, and hence ensures that the research gains global exposure. We ask you to submit a completed Assignment of Copyright in hard copy, regardless of the means of submission of your article. This form appears on our website and can be completed, signed and sent in with your article (the form is not appropriate for Nonlinearity or European Journal of Physics, however). If you cannot send an Assignment of Copyright form with your article we will send you one when receipt of your article is acknowledged. If you cannot assign copyright then an agreement giving Licence to Publish will be required instead. Please consult the Managing Editor, Copyright and Permissions (permissions@iop.org) if the standard form is not appropriate for your circumstances. Copyright of articles is assigned to Institute of Physics Publishing from the date on which the article is accepted for publication. The main features of the copyright transfer are that: authors transfer the worldwide copyright in their work to Institute of Physics Publishing; authors automatically retain certain rights for the future use of their own work; authors who may not own the copyright (e.g. authors in industrial companies or government research establishments) are asked to state this explicitly; in the case of multi-author papers, only one author needs to sign the form but he or she should have obtained the written consent of all the other authors beforehand. The transfer assumes that all authors have received the final version of the article and have agreed to it being submitted to the journal. The copyright assigned to IOPP covers all formats and media (including electronic, microform and paper). 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Permission is normally given upon request to the Managing Editor, Copyright and Permissions (permissions@iop.org), for illustrations, tables and short extracts from the text of individual articles published in our journals to be copied, provided that the original source of the material is acknowledged in each case and the permission of the authors is also obtained. Multiple copying of articles is permitted in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the UK's Copyright Licensing Agency, under the terms of its agreement with Universities UK (UUK). Libraries in the UK participating in the schemes agreed between the CLA and various other bodies may photocopy items as set out in the guidelines that govern these particular arrangements. Libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service may photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients in the USA, provided that the fee given at the bottom of the first page of the article is paid directly to CCC, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Reproducing published material If you wish in your article to make use of material published previously by other authors (including short extracts or diagrams) then you must first obtain the written permission of the author and the publisher concerned before incorporating the work in your article for any IOPP journal. This is especially important for authors of Topical Reviews, who often use substantial amounts of material (e.g. diagrams and tables) from the work of colleagues within their own field. For such articles, we ask authors to submit evidence along with their article that all the necessary permissions have been obtained beforehand. We do not undertake to perform this task for you. Similarly, if you wish to reproduce material from Institute of Physics Publishing journals ?in an article for either another IOPP journal or elsewhere ?then you should contact the Managing Editor, Copyright and Permissions (permissions@iop.org), as well as the author of the article concerned, before proceeding with your intentions. Please include as much information as you can when sending in any requests to us at IOPP and we will be pleased to help you. Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief N Hershkowitz, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA Regional Editors D C Schram, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands (Western Europe) Y P Raizer, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia (Russia) Editorial Board N St J Braithwaite, The Open University, Oxford, UK I G Brown, University of California, Berkeley, USA G Collins, ANSTO, Sydney, Australia H F Döbele, Universität Essen, Germany A Garscadden, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA R A Gottscho, Lam Research Corp., Fremont, CA, USA U Kortshagen, University of Minnesota, USA M J Kushner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA J E Lawler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA M A Lieberman, University of California, Berkeley, USA J J Lowke, CSIRO, Lindfield, Australia T Makabe, Keio University, Japan J Margot, Universit?de Montreal, Quebec, Canada T Ohmi, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan L C Pitchford, Universit?Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France O A Popov, Matsushita Electric Works, Woburn, MA, USA J Röpcke, (INP)-Greifswald, Germany A Sen, Institute for Plasma Research, Bhat, India R Stenzel, University of California, Los Angeles, USA M M Turner, Dublin City University, Ireland T Yoshida, University of Tokyo, Japan