The Proceedings of XXI Nuclear Physics Workshop
The Proceedings of XXI Nuclear Physics Workshop will be published as a regular issue of Physica Scripta. Rather than publish proceedings with a strict restriction on the number of pages, we are striving to produce publications that will be of genuine use to the community. Conference proceedings have been undervalued by subsequent publication of the work presented elsewhere in extended form, as a result of which, they often receive no attention and are never cited. This means that authors are spending time writing papers that are unlikely to be read, and that journals have seen their impact factors plummeting because the conference papers pull down the perceived quality of the journal. With your assistance, we wish to try an experiment: Publishing high quality papers from conference contributions to see whether we can produce an extremely high quality special issue centred around the XXI Nuclear Physics Workshop. Thus, as explained below, we would prefer authors to provide a clear explanation of their work in the manner of a regular submission to an international journal and not within a very short constraint in terms of the number of pages.
In 2015, Physica Scripta will be publishing several very special series:
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The Nobel Symposium on topological insulators and superconductors
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A virtual issue on quantum optics to celebrate the International Year of Light, with guest editors Professors Scully, Schleich, and Glauber
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The Proceedings of STORI, the 9th International Conference on Nuclear Physics at Storage Rings
We write this from the latter conference, at which the guest editors have welcomed the idea of enforcing the journal’s publication standards to produce a truly high quality publication. It is the hope of Jerzy and myself that you will also rise to the challenge.
At present, the journal’s rejection rate for normal submissions is almost 80%, representing increasingly high standards, but please do not feel that this rejection rate is applied point blank: We wish all contributors to be proud of their submissions and to use this opportunity to produce a superb publication together that will grab the attention of the international community. Every paper is judged on its merits, and I would always prefer editors to assist the authors of borderline publications to have their work brought up to the appropriate standards.
Your contribution to the proceedings should be sent in an electronic form directly to IOP Publishing, the publisher of Physica Scripta, through the web page:
http://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/physscr-rsas.
Logging in to an individual account is required. When submitting, please choose “Manuscript Type: Special Issue Article” and on the bottom of the page “Select Special Issue: XXI Nuclear Physics Workshop”.
Instructions for authors can be found here: http://atom.iop.org/atom/help.nsf/LookupJournalSpecific/general-guidelines-for-authors~**
A Latex template for the article, as well as IOP Publishing style is available from the web page:. http://authors.iop.org/atom/help.nsf/0/B042B0AF79C815B88025702000409514?OpenDocument
There is no page limit for the individual articles, however editors may request authors to shorten submitted articles to correspond to a length that they consider appropriate; they might also request additional explanation. Each author of a presentation from the Workshop may submit an article and may invite another scientist to submit an extra paper relevant to the topics covered by the conference. Both papers will be published in the same issue resulting from the proceedings of the Workshop.
Citation to other papers in the conference proceedings are encourage. The production department is skilled at finding the appropriate links, and could always contact you if the author list on a paper to be cited does not correspond exactly to that of the paper listed in the references, leading to uncertainty about which paper to cite. An acknowledgement at the end of the paper with a link to the Table of Contents for the proceedings would be another way to achieve this.
All articles will pass through the standard referee procedure of the journal.
The deadline for submission to the special issue of Physica Scripta is November, 16.
I hope that you have enjoyed a successful and fruitful meeting and look forward to reading the papers as they come in.
Jerzy Dudek
and
Suzy Lidström
Editor-in-chief, Physica Scripta
suzy.lidstrom@kva.se
PS This month represents a landmark for the journal:
In the October issue of the journal, we have published a teaching paper on nuclear physics for undergraduates The Manhattan Project and, as the Nobel prizes are soon to be announced in Stockholm, we have invited a paper intended to make undergraduate students more aware of the importance of research; the latter is our first Open Access publication:
Multiscale modelling of nerve agent hydrolysis mechanisms: a tale of two Nobel prizes
Please take a look at these manuscripts and let us know how useful and interesting you find them, as, like the proceedings of the XXI Nuclear Physics Workshop, the publication of these papers is something of an experiment intended to make our journal more useful to you as researchers and lecturers or students.