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Frequently Asked Questions

A: As a top journal in its field, JLT strives to publish work with high technical impact. A concise impact statement helps our Editors to assess your paper prior to entering peer review. Your impact statement must be concise (at most 100 words), should not simply be a copy of the abstract, and must contain information on the significant and impactful contributions beyond the state of the art that you believe are reported in your submission. A paper may have “impact” in various dimensions, including:

New concepts that solve a problem better than the state of the art in at least one aspect (speed, capacity, power, size, complexity, …)

Unprecedented and non-incremental experimental results

In-depth studies that compare different solutions and result in novel conclusions

In general, reproduction of previously published material should be avoided if at all possible, and earlier work should instead be referenced in your JLT submission. To reproduce previously published material, you need to do all of the following:

• Obtain written permission from the contact or lead author of the previous publication.

• If the previous publication is not an IEEE publication, obtain written permission from the copyright holding organization to reproduce the material. This also applies if you reproduce your own work published under a third party’s copyright.

• Clearly indicate in your submission the material that is being reproduced.

• State in the introduction of your paper in how far your work goes beyond previously published work which you partially reproduce in your JLT submission.


Requesting permission through IEEE

Permission to reuse IEEE content, including use in a thesis or dissertation, must be given through the Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink service, using IEEE Xplore.

1. Please locate the content beginning at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp.

2. Once on the abstract page of the article, please locate the "Request Permission" link in the left navigation panel.

3. You can also find the copyright symbol directly on the article Table of Content.

4. If you find there are none of these links, you should open the free front pages of the content to determine if there is another rights holder, as this is an indication that IEEE is not the intellectual-property rights holder and cannot grant permission for reuse.

5. If the links are there, please choose one, as this will take you to the permission application page.

If you are not able to use the RightsLink service, permission licensing may also be obtained through www.copyright.com.

If you experience difficulty with the RightsLink service, please contact the customer care group at customercare@copyright.com or write to IEEE Publications at pubs-permissions@ieee.org.

A: Both IEEE and Optica Publishing Group support evolutionary publishing of an author's own body of work, such as submitting a first account of the work to a conference, a second, more detailed analysis to a Letters publication, and a third, significantly extended version or a summary of several related pieces of prior work to a full-length journal like JLT. The guiding principle for evolutionary publishing is that a reader must have a significant advantage of reading the next evolutionary stage of publication compared to having access to earlier stages. As such, simple 1:1 reproduction of prior work does not justify a JLT submission. Whenever re-using prior results, it is mandatory to (1) minimize direct 1:1 overlap in text and figures wherever possible, (2) properly reference all earlier paper(s) whenever copies of text and figures are made, and (3) highlight in the introduction the technical advances of the JLT submission with respect to earlier work or the rationale behind summarizing multiple prior conference papers in a full-length journal paper. Papers that do not follow these guidelines will be immediately rejected without review.

A: The first hurdle every JLT submission must pass is the editorial screening. Several reasons might lead to immediate rejection in this phase, before any reviewers have been assigned:

• Out-of-scope: The topic covered in your manuscript does not fall within the scope of JLT

• Quality of text or figures: The English or the figures in your manuscript are of insufficient quality to allow for a solid technical review, during which the reviewers should focus on the technical content as opposed to on non-technical aspects of your write-up.

• Insufficient novelty: The technical content covered by your paper is not at a level that allows for a meaningful JLT review process. Immediate rejection on these grounds is always based on the technical opinion of at least 3 members of the Editorial Board, and a brief technical justification is typically provided.

A: The Journal of Lightwave Technology is entirely based on volunteers doing the technical part of the work, including the Editor-in-Chief, the Deputy Editors, the Associate Editors, and the Reviewers. While we strive to provide the fastest possible review times, we do not compromise on the quality of our reviews. Finding diligent yet responsive expert reviewers can sometimes be difficult, which may result in longer review times than the average of around 40 days. The best way of speeding up JLT’s review times is to become a speedy, high-quality reviewer yourself. In order to do so, please submit your publication list and your areas of expertise to jltstaff@ieee.org. Your volunteer work will be highly appreciated!

A: The decision about a paper’s acceptance or rejection is not a simple majority vote between reviews but is a complex process, weighing multiple factors of which the reviews are as important as the technical judgment of the Editorial Board. Please also note that if we believe a paper requires such extensive revisions that we don’t think these can be addressed in a major revision phase, we may decide to reject the paper in its current state. Furthermore, if a revised paper fails to address the reviewer concerns, we may decide to reject the paper at that point.

A: No process is perfect, and we certainly do make occasional mistakes in our decisions, although we try not to. If you have strong technical arguments as to why you think our decision was wrong and your paper should be published, please send a rebuttal letter to jltstaff@ieee.org, laying out your technical arguments. The Editorial Board will then examine the case and reach a decision as to whether or not the paper will be allowed for revisions. However, please note that a rebuttal process is involved and requires several members of the Editorial Board to examine your paper in detail. Depending on the case, this may take a substantial amount of time. As an alternative, you can refrain from a formal rebuttal but rather address all reviewer comments to their full extent and re-submit your paper to JLT, indicating that this is a re-submission, attaching a detailed response to the original reviews, and indicating the changes you made to your manuscript. The handling Associate Editor will then examine whether your re-submission incorporates substantial enough revisions for another review process to make sense.

A: In general, we advise against the use of on-line repositories. JLT is a sufficiently fast publication that such pre-publication mechanisms should not be necessary. Should you still want to use on-line repositories (such as TechRxiv or ArXiv), please note that (1) you must reference your originally uploaded TechRxiv or ArXiv paper in your JLT submission, (2) upon submission of an article to JLT, you must update any previously posted version of your submitted article with a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice, and (3) upon publication of an article by JLT, you must replace any previously posted electronic versions of the article with either (a) the full citation to the JLT paper with its Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or (b) the JLT accepted version with the DOI (not the IEEE-typeset version). Upon your request, IEEE will make available to you the preprint version of your article that you can post and that includes the DOI, IEEE’s copyright notice, and a notice indicating the article has been accepted for publication in JLT.

A: Please submit your publication list and your areas of expertise to jltstaff@ieee.org. Your volunteer work will be highly appreciated!

A: Choosing Associate Editors is at the heart of ensuring the high quality standards of JLT. As such, the selection process is extremely selective and has to pass several stages of quality control and voting, where topical, geographic, institutional, and gender diversity within the Editorial Board are also taken into account. If you would like to contribute to JLT as an Associate Editor and you believe that you are a suitable candidate whose technical background and expertise compare favorably with existing members of the Editorial Board, please send an email with your cv and publication list to jltstaff@ieee.org.

A: If you find an essential technical mistake in your own JLT paper, please submit “Comments/Corrections” to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jlt-ieee, indicating the paper and the mistake in it, and writing a short clarification that corrects the mistake. This document will be examined within the Editorial Board and published accordingly. If you discover a mistake in another author’s publication, it is good practice to inform the other author of the mistake and initiate a dialogue. As an outcome of this dialogue, the other author may choose to publish an “Comments/Corrections”, or you may choose to publish a “Comments/Corrections” on the paper in question. For further questions, contact jltstaff@ieee.org

A: The new eCF has expanded features that meet the evolving publishing world.The eCF now provides additional publishing agreements such as the Open Access Publishing Agreement, and the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors submitting to hybrid journals now will be given a clear explanation of publishing options and will have an opportunity to select their preferred publishing model(Traditional or Open Access). The eCF has also added extensive information sidebars throughout the process to help instruct authors about each step, and an overall streamlined process.

As with the original eCF, the eCF2 allows authors to choose from a variety of languages (Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian,Spanish),and will provide authors with an opportunity to reassign the eCF to another author or agent if necessary.

If you would like more information about the new eCF2, please contact the IEEE IPR or visit the IPR Office web site at http://www.ieee.org/IPR or http://www.ieee.org/eCF.

Douglas Hargis
Phone +1 732 562 6829
d.hargis@ieee.org

Sonal Parikh
Phone +1 732 465 5859
s.parikh@ieee.org

General Inquires
jltstaff@ieee.org

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445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331
www.PhotonicsSociety.org

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