FAQ

• Language
• Contact in case of technical problems/questions
• Contact concerning the editorial policy or to propose a topical issue
• Open Access
• Permission requests
• Preprint servers / ArXiv
• Good scientific practice in publishing
• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
• Author contribution statements in EPJB, D, E and Plus
• Research data policy

Language:

Only articles written in English are accepted for submission. The language must be sufficiently clear to allow for the effortless understanding of the scientific content, otherwise the manuscript will not be considered further by the editorial board. If an author repeatedly submits the same manuscript without significant improvement in the basic clarity and readability of the presentation, the manuscript may be definitively rejected by the Editorial Board on these grounds. Language polishing of an already accepted paper is provided by the journal as part of its basic services.

Contact in case of technical problems/questions:

In the pull-down menus of the individual EPJ section on the main portal page you will find the contact details for the editorial and production offices.

Contact concerning the editorial policy or to propose a topical issue:

Please contact the respective Editorial Office with a detailed proposal. For contact details, please click on "Editorial Boards" in the pull-down menu of the corresponding EPJ section on the main portal page.

Open Access:

Please consult this page.

Permission requests:

A) Authors of an EPJ article (= an article published in one of the journals: The European Physical Journal A,B,C,D,E,ST) can re-use material from their own article(s) free of charge provided that:

A.1) Full credit (journal title, volume, year of publication, page, article title, name(s) of author(s), original copyright notice) is given to the publication in which the material was originally published by adding: With kind permission of The European Physical Journal (EPJ).

A.2) If the material in question is cited from another source, authorization from and reference to that source are required.

B) More generally, authors requesting permission to re-use material from an EPJ article in form of tables and illustrations of articles can do so free of charge, provided that:

B.1) No more than three tables/figures of any given article are concerned.

B.2) The work in which this material is re-used is eventually published by one of the Scientific, Technical and Medical publishers listed on http://www.stm-assoc.org/.

B.3) Full credit (journal title, volume, year of publication, page, article title, name(s) of author(s), original copyright notice) is given to the publication in which the material was originally published by adding: With kind permission of The European Physical Journal (EPJ).

B.4) Permission is also obtained from theauthor(s) of the material to be re-used.

B.5) If the material in question is cited from another source, authorization from and reference to that source are required.

In all cases, these free permissions:

• include the useof the material in question in any electronic form,
• are limited to non-exclusive rights throughout the world,
• and do not affect any rights the EPJ publishers might have to charge for reproduction of their copyrighted material in the future.

For all cases that are not covered by A or B please send your inquiry directly to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Preprint servers / ArXiv

In the case of non-open access articles, for which the copyright must be transferred to the publishers, the EPJ copyright transfer statement explicitly states that a pre-print (the author’s version of the article before peer-review) can be freely posted on institutional repositories. For articles to be published in EPJ this explicitly includes the relevant preprint servers, in particular ArXiv (arxiv.org).

Good scientific practice in publishing:

EPJ is committed to safeguarding good scientific practice in publishing at all levels:

Involvement of co-authors in the submission process

It is understood that every author listed as co-author of a paper submitted to any of the EPJ journals has reviewed the final draft of the full manuscript and endorses his/her responsibility for the entire work. If submitted by a corresponding author it is understood that he/she can provide evidence that the final version of the manuscript as submitted to the journal has been shown to all authors listed at the beginning of the article. If submitted by a corresponding author on behalf of a larger collaboration, it is understood that this is done following the rules of publishing as applied by this collaboration and in line with the first sentence of this paragraph.

After submission of the signed copyright transfer statement by the corresponding author, changes of authorship or in the order of authors listed will not be accepted by the publishers.

Scientists other than the corresponding author and those listed as co-authors on a paper submitted to or published in this journal who become aware of their possibly unknowing involvement in the paper publication procedure should contact the corresponding editorial office immediately.

Parallel submissions

It is understood that a paper submitted to a given EPJ journal is not simultaneously under consideration by a different journal (even within the EPJ range of journals). Should a paper turn out to have been submitted to other journals concurrently, this paper will be rejected categorically and immediately, and the editorial office(s) of the other journal(s) will be informed about this case. Further the management of the home institution of the authors concerned may be informed as well.

The authors concerned will not be allowed to publish in the journal concerned for two years.

Parallel publications

Should a paper turn out to have been published in essentially the same form in a journal other than the EPJ journal for which it has been submitted and accepted, the authors involved will no longer be allowed to publish in that EPJ journal. Both the editorial office(s) of the other journal(s) and the management of the home institutions of the authors concerned will be informed.

Concluding remarks

Major learned societies in the physical sciences worldwide offer further, more detailed statements regarding good scientific practice in research and publishing on their homepages. EPJ does not endorse any particular statement but reserves the right to refer to and use such documents at its discretion when handling cases not covered by the statements made above.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Please consult this page.

Research data policy

EPJ strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. For further information on recommended repositories please see List of Repositories

Datasets that are assigned digital object identifiers (DOIs) by a data repository may be cited in the reference list. Data citations should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite: authors, title, publisher (repository name), identifier.

Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory. Persistent identifiers (such as DOIs and accession numbers) for relevant datasets must be provided in the paper.

For more information see Research Data Policy Frequently Asked Questions. For EPJ Research Data Policy Type 2 applies.

Data availability

EPJ encourages authors to provide a statement of Data availability in their article. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. Data availability statements can also indicate whether data are available on request from the authors and where no data are available, if appropriate.

Data Availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

1. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
2. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
3. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
4. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
5. All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here

Springer Nature provides a research data policy support service for authors and editors, which provides advice on research data policy compliance and on finding research data repositories. It is independent of the journal editorial office and does not advise on specific manuscripts.