For authors

Article types

We welcome different submission types:

• Letters: short articles of very high interest emphasizing recent and outstanding research results with a 4500 words limit without abstract and references (the word equivalent for figures is about 300 words and 15 words for single-line equations).
• Regular article: research papers with no page limitation.
• Topical reviews on proposal of the editorial board. No page limitation.

The journal also publishes periodically proceedings of international conferences. If you are a member of a steering committee please contact us at ops@episciences.org

Manuscript preparation

LaTeX users

Authors are encouraged to use the LaTeX article class when first submitting an article to OPS for review. Accepted articles will be required to comply with the OPS template, which comprises the main_template.tex file, a refs.bib file (and a refsbibtex.bib file for BibTeX users) and suitable figures. Authors should be aware of the following:

• The OPS LaTeX template is compatible with the standard LaTeX article class and BibTeX engine for bibliography generation.
• The default engine for compilation is pdfLaTeX. Accordingly, graphics with .eps or .ps file extensions should first be converted to the .pdf format.
• A very recent LaTeX distribution (like Texlive 2020) is highly recommended to avoid compilation glitches.
• Authors are responsible for creating a .bib file of the cited bibliographic entries. In addition to authors' names, full journal name, volume, issue/number, page range, year and DOI (when available) are requested. For books, the edition, publisher and ISBN identifier entries are requested as well.

Non-LaTeX users

The use of LaTeX to prepare manuscripts for submission to OPS is highly recommended. However, manuscripts prepared in Word/OpenOffice will also be considered and will be internally reformatted using the official OPS LaTeX template. Authors should be aware of the following:

• They are responsible for creating a .bib (also called bibtex format) file of the cited bibliographic entries. See, for instance, text2bib, jabref, Zotero, or Endnote2bib. Most publishers can export citations in the bibtex format. In addition to authors' names, full journal name, volume, issue/number, page range, year and DOI (when available) are requested. For books, the edition, publisher and ISBN identifier entries are requested as well.

Graphics and colors

• Attention to the clarity of figures is requested. Authors are invited to read The misuse of colour in science communication by Fabio Crameri, Grace E. Shephard & Philip J. Heron on this matter.
• The paper Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures by Nicolas P. Rougier is a must-read.

Manuscript evaluation

Manuscripts are evaluated by at least two reviewers with the following criteria:

1. Novelty
2. Relevance of findings
3. Technical correctness
4. Figures and Tables quality
5. English correctness
6. Relevance of the bibliography

A reviewer’s report completes the assessment, detailing the study's strengths and weaknesses in as much detail as possible with the aim of helping the authors to amend their article. The reviewer may conclude that the article should be rejected: in this case, a clear, well-argued explanation will be provided to the authors.

The publication process of Open Plasma Science is backed up by open repositories such as arXiv, HAL or Zenodo. In practice, an author deposits its proposed article in an open archive before connecting to the OPS website and proposing it for review. The deposit of a pre-publication in an open archive allows the author to make its research available immediately and to be protect from possible plagiarism (institutional open archives time-stamp the deposit, which is then indexed in scientific databases and research engines).

Detailed information on the article submission procedure is available in the Episciences documentation.

The editorial workflow can be summarized as follow: