All users must be registered to JCAP. Registration gives access to your personal pages for all the roles you play in the journal (author, referee, editor). There you can perform all the actions connected with the stages in the editorial procedure. Registration is easy and free of charge. To register you have to fill in the form on the JCAP home page with the following data:

• Username
• Password
• First Name
• Last Name
• E-mail
• Institution

You can sign in to JCAP either by using your JCAP username and password or via your ORCID account. If you sign in via your ORCID account, you will be requested to enter your JCAP username and password only the first time in order to correctly connect your ORCID and JCAP accounts.

If you are registered to JCAP but cannot remember your username and password, please do not register again, just click on "Forgot your username?"/"Forgot your password?" on the JCAP home page.

After signing in you can update your profile, change username and password and connect your JCAP account to your ORCID account by clicking on "modify my personal data".

ORCID iDs are 16-digit numbers which will usually be presented in the form of a web address that leads to the researcher's profile, for example http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8534-5985. They provide a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. Associating your ORCID iD to your JCAP profile helps JCAP to keep your personal records correctly updated for all the roles you play in the Journal (author, editor, referee, ...).

For information on the status of your submission please use the "WRITE TO EDITOR" or the "WRITE TO EDITORIAL OFFICE" buttons available at the bottom of the preprint page (this link will only be accessible from the JCAP home page once you have submitted your contribution as a corresponding author). Please ALWAYS use these tools instead of normal e-mail so that these messages may be saved in the database and associated to the document they refer to.

On your author pages you can find all your pending preprints divided into sections according to their status:

• Under review: your submissions that are still being considered for publication. Any revised preprint that you have sent following editor's request can be found here.
• To be revised (major revision): preprints that you have to revise and resubmit from your Author pages.
• To be revised (minor revision): preprints for which you have to make some small modifications prior to acceptance.
• To proofread: accepted preprints that have been typeset in the JCAP style, and must be proofread by you before publication.
• Appeals against rejection: rejected preprints that you have asked the Journal to reconsider for publication.

Furthermore, in the top part of the page there are two navigation bars. The bottom one leads to all archived contributions, which are divided into

• Accepted: accepted preprints that are being typeset and proofread
• Rejected: preprints that have not been accepted for publication
• Withdrawn: preprints withdrawn
• Not suitable: preprints considered as not suitable for the journal
• Published: papers published.

Authors take full responsibility for the content they submit for publication which must abide to the journal ethical standards. In particular authors have a responsibility to fully acknowledge the work of others, disclosing their sources clearly and thoroughly in the manuscript. Authors should also be aware of the possible shortcomings of AI generated material in this respect, and are thus required to declare and properly reference in detail the use of AI assisted technology in the preparation of the manuscript, either in the methods or acknowledgments section.

Title, Authors (first and family names), affiliations and e-mail addresses must be clearly indicated, we recommend the use of the ASCII character set in order to improve the compatibility with other systems

You will need to provide an arXiv article id. This is necessary for your paper to be processed correctly. Should you need any assistance, please contact the Editorial Office.

The abstract should briefly summarize the content of the contribution and must fit in the first page.

Please avoid formulae and references in the title and abstract.

At the time of submission you must characterise your work with a number of keywords selected from the JCAP keyword list. Please indicate these keywords after the abstract.

Please divide the text into sections. Write your work in standard, comprehensible English. Conciseness is strongly encouraged, but clarity and consistency are more important. Short and simple words and sentences are helpful for readers. Please keep jargon and acronyms to a minimum. The Editors will consider whether the content is of sufficient scientific interest compared to the overall length and may recommend ways of shortening the text (JCAP papers do not normally exceed 50 pages).

Tables and figures can be used to improve the information in the text. Tables and figures should be referred to in the text and always have a caption describing their content.

If you include pictures or other material that has already been published elsewhere, please obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) before incorporating it in your article.

Particularly large tables and figures or multimedia materials can be submitted as attachments to the contribution, by clicking the "upload attachment" button after the submission of the main files for the paper has been successfully completed. They will be made available to reviewers but, in case of acceptance, will not be typeset or transformed in any way. Authors are therefore kindly requested to use standard formats to prepare them, so that editors, referees and readers will be able to view them. SISSA Medialab and IOP bear no responsibility for uncommon formats, viruses and other problems that may arise.

JCAP uses the sequential numerical system for references in the text. The sequential numbers occur within square brackets, and the reference list at the end of the preprint lists the references in numerical order, not alphabetically. Please write the reference as in the following example:

JCAP strongly encourages citations to data files and similar supplementary material available in external repositories. Citations should follow the repository style (i.e, the “cite as” notice) and should include persistent identifiers such as DOIs wherever possible.
Correct citations allow for proper tracking, attribution and recognition apart from increasing discovery & further citations.

Data/Software/Code Availability Statements should be included at the end of articles submitted to JCAP to improve their discoverability.

Manuscripts must be prepared in TeX/LaTeX and will be automatically transformed by the system into PDF files.

Your contribution can be one of the following:

1. a single .tex file
2. a file archive (a zipped or a gzipped tar archive)
   If your preprint includes more than one file, the files will have to be archived. In this case it is essential for the master file to be saved in the root (main) directory, while the other files may be included in subdirectories. Please note that if two or more source files have the same extension (i.e. "abc.tex" and "def.tex"), in making the submission you must specify the master file name together with the extension in the appropriate field, otherwise the submission will fail.
3. a file or archive plus attachments (additional figures, large tables, videos etc.).
   In this case an additional step will be requested of you when you see the upload confirmation screen ("submission report"). Please click on the button "upload attachment" (at the bottom of the page), and you will be able to recursively upload additional material. These will be viewed as separate file attachments throughout the review procedure and on the paper's publication.

Manuscripts should be prepared in LaTeX preferably in one of the following ways:

• using the template available on Overleaf
• using the package JCAP style class

We accept figures in the follwing formats: .ps, .eps and .jpg, .png, .pdf. During the compilation process we try to produce .pdf files. If your images are only in the .ps or .eps format then we first we produce a .dvi file and next we gnenerate a .pdf file from it. Otherwise the compilation produces a .pdf file directly.

If you use packages like feynmf that require the use of metafont please include the .pk, .tfm and .t1, .t2, ..., files in your archive.

Please include the .gls file if you use the glossaries package.

If the document consists of a stand-alone (La)TeX file this alone can be submitted as it is, without compressing it.

Preprints can be submitted only via the Internet by authors previously registered to JCAP. The person making the submission (corresponding author) must be one of the authors. To register to JCAP, please complete the appropriate form available on the home page of the Journal. Registration is free (see also General). Please note that submitting a preprint implies the acknowledgement of the Open Access and Copyright Terms.

In order to submit a new preprint, please login to JCAP .

There are two ways to submit a contribution after you have entered your paper arXiv id.

This facility only works for TeX/LaTeX files. To submit your contribution you need to follow the steps below:

You are first requested to select the appropriate keywords to characterise your work from a multiple choice menu.

Make sure you select them accurately because the keywords will be used by the software to identify the most suitable editor in charge for your submission.

Click here to see the complete list of keywords. You must choose from 2 to 4 keywords (which can be in more than one section) to accurately describe the subject of your work.

After you have chosen the keywords, press the button "Submit" at the bottom of the page. Requests for changing keywords after the submission has been completed will not be accepted.

You can now check the metadata for your paper (they have been automatically downloaded from the arXiv) and indicate the .tex master file name together with the extension, if your archive includes more than one .tex files.

If some of the metadata need updating, please go back and start a submission through web upload (button "upload your file").

On the same page you are also reminded of the keywords you have chosen and can assign a value to each keyword to establish its relevance for the paper. The default value is [100], meaning that all keywords will be considered equally relevant.

If applicable, please also use this form to communicate if your paper should be published open access according to one of the listed items. You may request open access publication upon payment of an article publication fee by selecting the options "Open Access paid by Author". Click here for further information.

After filling in the fields described above, please click on "upload file". The system will take care of uploading the file(s) together with the full metadata. Please DO NOT double-click. The system is processing your files. This can take up to a few minutes, depending on their size.

After completing the procedure, a submission report will be shown to you with the data of your contribution, the link to the compilation log file and the link where you can upload additional materials (the "upload attachment" button). If, on the other hand, the submission fails the report will inform you of the error(s) that have occurred. In particular if the (La)TeX compilation fails, please read the .log file, fix the error and start a submission through web upload (button "upload your file"). Should you be unable to solve the problem, do contact the Editorial Office.

To upload additional figures, tables and multimedia see below point C.

On your computer, please prepare a compressed archive (a .tar.gz or a .zip file) containing all necessary LaTeX (or TeX) files, all figures in the formats metioned above, any nonstandard package, and, if you use bibtex, a single .bbl file.

Please do not include cover letters and other communications to the editor and referee.

You are first requested to select the appropriate keywords to characterise your work from a multiple choice menu.

Make sure you select them accurately because the keywords will be used by the software to identify the most suitable editor in charge for your submission.

Click here to see the complete list of keywords. You must choose from 2 to 4 keywords (which can be in more than one section) to accurately describe the subject of your work.

After you have chosen the keywords, press the button "submit" at the bottom of the page. Requests for changing keywords after the submission has been completed will not be accepted.

Please check the metadata for your paper (they have been automatically downloaded from the arXiv) and edit them as necessary.

In "File to process" enter the file (tex, tar.gz or zip) containing your contribution. If more than one .tex file is included in your archive, please specify the master file name in the appropriate field; the extension must be included (e.g. myfile.tex).

On the same page you are also reminded of the keywords you have chosen and can assign a value to each keyword to establish its relevance for the paper. The default value is [100], meaning that all keywords will be considered equally relevant.

If applicable, please also use this form to communicate if your paper should be published open access according to one of the listed items. You may request open access publication upon payment of an article publication fee by selecting the options "Open Access paid by Author". Click here for further information.

Finally click on the button "upload file". Please DO NOT double-click. The system will process your files. This can take up to a few minutes, depending on their size.

After completing the procedure, a submission report will be shown to you with the data of your contribution, the link to the compilation log file and the link where you can upload additional materials (the "upload file" button).

If, on the other hand, the submission fails the report will inform you of the error(s) that have occurred. In particular if the (La)TeX compilation fails, please read the .log file, fix the error on your computer and try again. Should you be unable to solve the problem, do contact the Editorial Office.

Your contribution can be completed with additional tables and figures, multimedia or any other attachment. To submit additional material, please click on "upload attachment" in the "Submission report" page after successfully uploading the main files for your contribution. After clicking on "upload attachment" you can repeat the procedure as many times as necessary.

The attachments will be processed along with the main document.

Please make sure that after you have submitted your paper you go to "My author pages (corresponding author)" from the JCAP home page. Click on the appropriate preprint number and scroll down the page. Please check all available data on your submission. Should you need to communicate with the editor or the editorial office, you will find the appropriate e-mail tool. You will be able to communicate with the editor-in-charge in this way at every stage of the editorial procedure.

JCAP strongly encourages posting data files and similar supplementary material to publicly-accessible, discipline-specific, community-recognised repositories that comply with the FAIR principles as much as possible.
In cases where a suitable discipline-specific resource does not exist, such files may be submitted to a generalist repository (for example, Zenodo), including any such repositories provided by universities, funders or institutions for their affiliated researchers.
Authors may also wish to explore repository registries such as FAIRsharing.org and re3data.org

Supplementary material should conform to the FAIR principles as much as possible.

Revised versions can be submitted only if requested by the editor, contributions must therefore be originally submitted in their final form.

Once accepted, revised preprints will be labelled as "revised". If the revision required is only a minor revision, once published, the preprint will not be labelled as "revised".

The revisions requested by the editor-in-charge are listed in your author's page in "State of preprints" in the sections "To be revised (major revision)" and "To be revised (minor revision)" respectively.

Authors who have been asked to revise their preprints must attend to the requested modifications and provide a new version of their preprints within 90 days at most in case of major revision, 30 days in case of minor revision. If the revised version is not submitted by the deadline the original submission will be withdrawn and any revised version will have to be considered as a new submission.

The revised preprints must be uploaded from the preprint page by clicking "submit revision" or "submit minor revision". You can make your resubmission using the submission via the arXiv or by web upload.

Please note that revisions submitted to the arXiv do not automatically update preprints submitted to JCAP.

The cover letter with your reply to the referee report is mandatory. You will be asked to enter the cover letter in a text area during the upload procedure. The text should clearly describe all the changes with respect to the previous version, explaining whether or not you have addressed the editor's requests (please make sure you save the text locally before uploading it in case you need to repeat the procedure).

The cover letter can alternatively be uploaded as an attachment, the button to upload attachments will be available at the end of the submission process in the web page confirming the successful upload of the main file. Please do not include the cover letter in your submitted archive file (zip/tar.gz) as it will be not be visible to the editor.

To make the review easier and quicker, it is strongly recommended that you also upload as an attachment a .pdf version of your revision with the changes highlighted (you can mention this in the cover letter for completeness). If you forget to enter the cover letter or to upload the pdf file, please send these by email to jcap-eo@jcap.sissa.it.

Please do not include the cover letter in the archive for your paper as it will be ignored by the system.

Contributions are selected, processed and reviewed as fairly as possible, with no discrimination by active scientists in the field. Authors of contributions that have been rejected can appeal and reply to the editor and referee(s). Appeals must be scientifically justified and not polemic. Please send your rebuttal letters by connecting to the preprint page and using the "write to Editorial Office" button.

Although the identity of editors is anonymous, authors can communicate at all times with them through the appropriate "write to editor" button on their pages, or through the Editorial Office.

Errata and addenda can be submitted to JCAP as stand-alone articles following the instructions below.
1) Click on "submit an erratum" or "submit an addendum" in JCAP to see the list of your published articles (as corresponding author).
2) Find the article in question and click on "submit erratum" or "submit addendum".
3) Continue the submission process (see instructions).

The file submitted should be as follows.

File format - TeX/LaTeX
Title - "Erratum: Title of the original paper" or "Addendum: Title of the original paper". Different titles will be corrected during the typesetting stage.
Abstract - the author can choose whether or not to include an abstract in the file. Note however that the abstract will not be displayed on the published erratum/addendum's web page.
Keywords - they must not be included.
References - references to specific parts of the original article (equations, figures, tables, etc.) must be consistent with the numbering of its published version.

Please refer to the section File preparation if you need to submit an archive.

Errata and addenda are the only way to modify articles after publication. They are peer-reviewed, typeset and proofread before being published open-access.

A preprint can be withdrawn during the review process by clicking on the relevant button or, if not available, upon request to the editorial office.

A coauthor is a registered user selected by the corresponding author that has access to the author pages without being able to view the correspondence relating to the paper or change the status of the paper.

If the person you wish to select as a coauthor is not already registered, please ask them to register by completing the appropriate form available on the home page of the Journal. Remember that registration is free (see General for further details).

Coauthors are encouraged to update their JCAP profile with their ORCID iD as a way to avoid cases of homonimy and incorrect attributions of published papers. In order to update their JCAP with their ORCID iD, coauthors can use the link "modify my personal pages", that is available on the JCAP home page after signing in.

Select Coauthors

After submission you can select your preprint's coauthors by clicking "Select Coauthor" at the bottom of the preprint web page.

Switch Corresponding Author

Once a coauthor has been selected it is also possible to change the corresponding author to one of the coauthors using the "Switch Corresponding Author" button.

With this operation, the existing corresponding author becomes a coauthor and the selected coauthor becomes the new corresponding author.

As soon as a new contribution is submitted to JCAP, a preprint number is assigned and the preprint appears in the section "Waiting for editor's decision". The preprint number identifies your contribution throughout the editorial procedure, and is required for any correspondence with the JCAP Editorial Office.

Figure 1. The preprint number

To access the preprint web page of a particular document, you should:

1. Sign in to the JCAP website at SISSA Medialab (jcap.sissa.it)
2. Click on "my Author pages"
3. The preprints still in progress are in the "pending papers" page divided into sections according to their status.

The preprint web page for a particular preprint contains all the information about that preprint, except for confidential data (i.e., editor and referee names). From the preprint web page, you can perform the following actions:

• check the status of the preprint and the progress of the editorial procedure
• download the preprint itself in PDF format
• communicate with the Editor and the Editorial Office
• read and download the report
• submit the revised version of the preprint, if requested by the editor

After the contribution has been accepted and typeset you will be notified and you will be able to:

• view the typeset version of your document (in PDF format)
• proofread the document for mistakes or minor changes before publication. The only corrections acceptable at this stage are the following:
  • layout (i.e., wrong floating of figures or tables),
  • spelling mistakes in words or formulae,
  • wrong cross-references among formulae and text,
  • mistakes or updating in references
• the corrections must be suggested using the web form accessible with the button "send proofs", explaining where they occur in the document (page number, paragraph and line, or equation number) and specifying both the old (wrong) version and the correction.
  Please notice that if the corrections you request are not minor, the paper will be shown to the editor-in-charge for approval. If (s)he reckons that they affect the content significantly, you may be requested to submit a revised version of the preprint for which a new review process will begin. This will be listed in the "Pending revision after proofreading" section.
• approve the document for publication (unless there is a request for information from the editorial office).

When you approve the document for publication, or after your requested corrections have been implemented, the document is sent to the IOP Publishing Office for publication. Please note that if there is no feedback from the authors within 7 days from the first proofreading notification, the document is considered suitable for publication as it stands, and is sent to the IOP Publication Office for publication. It will be stored in the "published" section of your JCAP author pages and will also be available on the IOP website.

After acceptance of your paper you will be contacted by the IoP Publishing Office to fill in and sign an Assignment of Copyright before publication.

At the time of publication on the IOP EJ's site, the paper will receive a definitive paper number (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Definitive paper number

The submitting author will be asked to complete a copyright form online, on behalf of themselves and their co-authors, once their article has been accepted. There are two different options, depending on whether the article is to be published on a gold open access basis or on a subscription basis.

In the case of multi-author papers, only one author needs to complete the form, but they should have obtained the written consent of all the other authors beforehand. By signing the copyright form, it is assumed that all authors have received the final version of the contribution, have agreed to it being submitted to the journal and agree to the terms of the copyright form.

If your institution/employer owns the copyright of your manuscript, please ensure that they agree to the terms of the copyright form and that the full legal name of your institution/employer is inserted at the top of the form. If an authorised signatory of your institution/employer needs to sign the form, then they should do so at the bottom of the form along with the author who must also sign the form.

JCAP encourages authors to submit their accepted manuscript to arXiv and/or to another institutional archive at any time provided that the 'non-exclusive licence to distribute' is granted to arxiv.org. We recommend the inclusion of the DOI when citing the published manuscript. The publisher's current authors rights policy can be found here

Articles to be published on a subscription basis

For articles to be published on a subscription basis, ownership of copyright is transferred to the Institute of Physics Publishing and SISSA Medialab, 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 of their manuscript to the Institute of Physics Publishing and SISSA Medialab;


• authors are granted back certain specific rights under the copyright form;

Transfer of copyright allows IOP Publishing to participate in the work of the UK's Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), which licenses copying in the UK. In addition, through bilateral arrangements, it participates in the work of other reproduction rights organizations around the world, principally the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in the USA. IOP Publishing supports these organizations as they represent a development in copyright protection that is extending to other countries, so that copying beyond those permitted under legislation should be paid for by the copier.

Articles to be published on a gold open access basis

Gold open access articles are subject to an Article Processing Charge (see below).

For gold open access articles, the author grants a non-exclusive licence to the Institute of Physics Publishing and SISSA Medialab, from the date on which the article is accepted for publication. This means that ownership of copyright is retained by the authors (or if your institution/employer owns the copyright then your institution/employer).

Gold open access articles are published under a Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY 4.0) (more information on this licence can be found here). The Creative Commons attribution license allows anyone to re-use the content in any way they like, provided it is accurately attributed and the terms of the licence are adhered to.

CERN

Please note that in the case of papers where the copyright is owned by CERN, authors need to notify us of this on submission. Authors do not need to sign a separate copyright form, as CERN articles are covered by a collective license agreement between CERN, SISSA Medialab and the Institute of Physics Publishing.

Please email jcap@ioppublishing.org if you have any questions about the form.

Authors can access all versions of their JCAP papers on their Author pages (in the link "published"). If your article was published years ago, the pdf file might be not available anymore. In this case, please write jcap-eo@jcap.sissa.it to request it. Regrettably, source files cannot be provided.

JCAP encourages authors to submit their accepted manuscript to arXiv and/or to another institutional archive at any time provided that the 'non-exclusive licence to distribute' is granted to arxiv.org. We recommend the inclusion of the DOI when citing the published manuscript. The publisher's current authors rights policy can be found here.

Articles can be published on open access terms. Gold open access articles are published under a Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY 4.0). More information on this licence can be found here. The Creative Commons attribution license allows anyone to re-use the content in any way they like, provided it is accurately attributed and the terms of the licence are adhered to. Copyright stays with the agreed copyright owner (usually the authors).

How can I have my article Open Access?
There are 2 options called “Open Access paid by Author” and “Open Access – Transformative Agreement”. Choose the appropriate option while submitting your article or change your article’s settings at any time before acceptance by using the button “Open Access Settings” on your preprint web page.

What is the option “Open Access paid by Author”?
Authors can opt to have their article published Open Access upon payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC) while submitting their article to the Journal or, during the review process, by using the “Open Access Settings” button on the preprint web page.

The APC for JCAP is available here.
The fee covers all publication costs, from the management of peer review to the online hosting, dissemination and long-term archiving of the published paper. The corresponding author/paying third party will be sent an invoice after the article has been accepted for publication.

Does it make any difference in the review process or after publication?
Open access articles are treated in the same way as all other articles in the journal; they are peer-reviewed to the same high standard and are processed in the same way. Downloads of Open Access articles are included in Counter usage statistics and Open Access articles are indexed by abstracting and indexing services in the same way that regular articles are. The only difference is that they are published under a Creative Commons attribution license and are available to all on Open Access terms.

Who should I contact for more information about the copyright statement and Open Access publication fee?
For copyright and licensing issues you should contact permissions@ioppublishing.org

For the Open Access publication fee you should contact jcap@ioppublishing.org