Providing the best publishing experience for scientists

We continued to put the needs of the physical sciences community at the heart of our decision-making in 2018, using customer feedback to improve our author and referee services.

Following the release of our dedicated support portal – Publishing Support – at the start of the year, we launched our Track My Article service to help authors quickly and easily review the status of their submitted manuscripts. This was followed by the roll-out of our new online proofing tool to give authors an easy format to review final proofs of their manuscript, and by improvements to our article payment service to streamline how authors and funders pay their article publication charges.

publication in numbers

Reduced time to first decision: down from 45 to 42 days

Reduced time to acceptance: down from 85 to 79 days.

Reduced time from acceptance to publication: down from 32 to 22 days.

Overall time from receipt to publication: down from 138 to 120 days.

All of these improvements helped us to record an excellent author Net Promoter Score in 2018: +64 (up from +58 in 2017). The Net Promoter score for reviewers in 2018 was +43 (up from +33 in 2017).

track my article

The tracker has been used more than 210,000 times since launch.

Diversity and inclusivity

To mark Peer Review Week 2018, IOP Publishing produced a report looking at diversity and inclusion in our peer-review process.

22% of our papers accepted for publication in 2016* came from women, compared to a global average of just 17%.


*The latest full year for when we have gender data.

23% of accepted papers in 2018 came from a corresponding author based in China – up from 14% in 2015.