Instructions for Authors — Quantum

Source: https://quantum-journal.org/instructions/authors/

Guidelines for Authors

Submission process

Submission: Authors are only required to supply the arXiv reference of the pre-print (which must be posted to or at least cross-listed with quant-ph). Authors are encouraged to suggest a handling editor and may also suggest referees and provide supplementary files. To submit a work to Quantum, follow the instructions in the box below. There is no fee upon submission.

Format: There are no typesetting, format or length constraints. Nevertheless, please state clearly, at some point in the first couple of pages, the main results and assumptions of the manuscript (for example, in a “Contributions” subsection in the Introduction). This improves the paper for the benefit of all readers, and helps our editors judge the suitability of the paper for Quantum; if you’re not sure of the level of detail you should aim for in that summary, consult Quantum’s list of editors, and imagine that you’re addressing the 2-3 editors closest to the topic of your manuscript. Cover letters are not necessary, as Quantum expects manuscripts to speak for themselves. Reviews should contain the word “review” in the title and state the intended target audience in the abstract.

Author contribution statements are mandatory. The contributions of the co-authors can be described in terms as vague or specific as the authors see fit (ranging from “all authors contributed equally to this work” to “Alice wrote the introduction and proofs, Bob wrote sections 2-4 and made the pictures, Eve supervised the project and reviewed the manuscript”). If a Large Language Model or other AI model was used in producing the work, the scope of that use needs to be disclosed in the author contribution statement (examples of uses to be declared: as a grammar-checker, for reformatting, for text production, for image production, for bibliographic research, for production of code or calculations). Note that as per the journal’s terms and conditions, all authors are fully responsible for the work, and for ensuring they are not infringing on anyone else’s copyright with the materials contained in it. If no AI was used in producing the work, authors are welcome to state this.

Template: Authors are encouraged to use the Quantum document class for typesetting the final version, ensuring a consistent look while providing maximal compatibility with existing LaTeX document classes. This is however not mandatory.

The Quantum document class and a template document with further instructions is available on github, CTAN, and via the following direct download links:

quantumarticle.cls

quantum-template.tex

quantum-template.pdf

Terms and conditions: By submitting a manuscript to Quantum, you confirm that you agree with Quantum’s terms and conditions and editorial policies. In particular, you certify that:

• you have the permission of all co-authors and other right holders to pursue publication of the work in Quantum,
• you are not infringing on anyone’s copyright with the material contained in your work,
• you will be fully liable for any charges resulting from copyright infringement, and
• you will not submit this work to any other publishing venue unless it is terminally rejected by Quantum.
• the work is not currently under consideration at and has not previously been published in any other journal.

In addition, authors, referees and members of all boards of Quantum commit to follow the Code of Conduct laid out in the terms and conditions.

Editorial criteria

What: Quantum is a highly selective journal, publishing original research and reviews (theoretical, experimental, and numerical), as well as works showcasing the utility of new software for quantum science.

Acceptance criteria: Quantum aims to select:

• Original research that:
• Significantly advances the particular sub-field of quantum science
• Contains a very significant technical or conceptual contribution

• Provides evidence that the employed methods or obtained results go significantly beyond the state of the art

• Reviews that:

• Address a need for a standard reference on a topic or fill a gap in the literature
• Summarize a coherent body of knowledge in a way that facilitates further progress

• Cover the relevant literature comprehensively and concisely

• Software showcases that:

• Introduces a software package that uses novel methodology or programming paradigms to address a significant scientific challenge, and/or provides a general and extensible framework designed to facilitate further progress in the field
• Empirically demonstrates that such software has capabilities that clearly go beyond the state of the art in the solution and analysis of the problems it addresses

Acceptance threshold: Correct but incremental work is below threshold and an absence of negative reviews is not in itself sufficient for acceptance; referees should make a case for why a work deserves to be published. Submissions are judged based on the following editorial criteria:

• Technical correctness
• Significance of the contribution
• Clarity of presentation and verifiability/reproducaibility
• Honest statement of scope and limitations

Not taken into account are:

• Expected number of citations.
• Wide scope / whether a work is aiming at a broad or interdisciplinary audience.

Quantum reserves the right to desk reject a work in case the editors have substantial doubt whether it meets the acceptance criteria and would thus be unlikely to make it through peer-review.

Open source policy: Quantum strongly encourages authors to publish their data and code under a FOSS license whenever possible. The open-source nature of software projects will be taken into account positively when making editorial decisions. If inspecting the source code or data is necessary to judge a work, such access must be given to editors and referees anonymously and free of charge, at the editors’ request (even if it is not publicly available for the community). If there is any reason why authors cannot provide access, they should inform the editors, and the subject will be discussed on a case-by-case basis.

• For research papers,we highly encourage publishing under a FOSS license raw and plotted data, as well as code that was used to analyse data and do simulations.
• For software showcase papers,access to the software must be provided to the whole community in a way that is compatible with the requirement of significantly advancing the field. In most cases this will mean that most of the code and data should be available be under a FOSS license. Exceptions can apply, for example to close-to-hardware drivers or control electronics.

Timeline and peer-review process

Expected timeline: Due to increased submission rates (around 80 papers per month for around 40 voluntary editors, as of January 2022), submissions are currently taking a long time to process. Referees and editors are full-time researchers and their volunteer work is not always recognized by their institutions or grant committees. Quantum respects the referees’ time and work and asks authors for some patience. To put some concrete numbers to this: it takes at least two weeks to assign a new submission to an expert editor (with high variance, depending on the field and availability of editors). It then takes on average two to three weeks for the editor to make a first decision (details below). If the paper is sent to additional external referees, it can take two to four months to collect all the necessary reports and make a decision. If that’s a “revise and resubmit”, authors can submit the new version at their own convenience (no deadlines), and then it can take one to two months for the final decision (faster if all referee and editorial concerns are addressed). When a paper is accepted, authors update the arXiv and fill in the publication form at their convenience. It then takes up to one week for the paper to be published. These numbers are highly variable: it tends to be slower for long, mathematically involved papers, as it’s harder to find referees, and they need more time to carefully check the correctness of the paper; other areas are experiencing a surge in papers (for example NISQ) and even if papers are short, referees and editors in those fields are handling too many submissions and the paper waits in queue for longer; there are slower periods over the year (like holiday season and conference review months); finally, the global pandemic has increased review times across all fields. Referees and editors are human, and the last two years have not been easy on humans; voluntary, unpaid and anonymous work is likely to suffer.

In the following we detail the steps of the peer review process at Quantum.

Assigning an editor and first reading: In a first step, our admins look for a Quantum editor who is an expert in the field of your manuscript and is currently available; it helps if authors list suitable editors by using the field “suggested referees”. Editors only accept to handle a paper if they are experts in the field (to the extent that they could comfortably act as referees for the paper) and are presently available. The editor then reads the paper: make sure that your main results and assumptions are listed clearly in the first couple of pages. Editors are not expected to read through proofs at this point, just the main text and statements, so that they can make a decision about suitability of the paper for Quantum; for very long papers, editors are only required to read the first few pages at this stage. Therefore it may help your submission if you aim the introduction at convincing an expert in the field of the value of your contributions (rather than an overly general overview, unless it is a very niche area).

Internal editorial review and first decision: After reading the manuscript, the editor makes a first decision of either (1) desk reject the paper, (2) send it back to authors for a revision, or (3) send it out to external referees for a thorough analysis. In the vast majority of cases, this first decision is discussed with several editors until there is a consensus on the merits of the paper and its suitability for Quantum.  Let us go in more detail through the different options.

• Many papers are rejected at this phase, and these decisions cannot be appealed. Indeed, Quantum aims to make most rejections at this point, as to spare authors’ and referees’ time. If the paper is rejected, the editor will justify their decision in the rejection letter, which we hope will help the authors submit to another venue. Note that this is a decision based solely on the scientific merit of the paper, made by expert editors who are very familiar with both the topic and the journal’s acceptance thresholds. In other words, this phase of internal editorial review is a thorough expert peer review on itself.
• If the editors believe that the paper needs clarifications or some extra work before it can be published, they can either start a discussion with authors (usually for short clarifications) or make already a “revise and resubmit” decision at this point. For example, this happens if the editors judge that the paper could only make it to Quantum if a conjecture was proved, if the code was publicly available, or if presentation was improved.

• If the editors are convinced that the paper is already in good shape, and that its scientific contribution merits acceptance in Quantum, they send the paper to external referees for additional analysis. This could be a global review of the paper, or a more pointed check, for example “could you check the proofs of theorems 2-4?” or “how do these claims fit in with the work of X and Y?” Typically, a paper is only sent out to external referees if it has very good chances of being accepted after revisions, unless the referees find major problems. There are exceptions: sometimes none of the available editors has the expertise in the topic of the paper needed to make the first decision on its significance, and external referees are necessary to make that call; this is rare, and we react to repeated instances by recruiting more editors to cover that topic, but it can happen.

• Many papers are rejected at this phase, and these decisions

External review and second decision: When a paper goes out to external reviewers, we aim to obtain two independent referee reports. Depending on the field, the paper and external factors like the time of the year, this is not always attainable. Referees are given 1 month to review the paper but in practice it often takes longer, up to 2-4 months, to receive enough reports in order to make a well-founded editorial decision. If the decision is not clear after reports, the handling editor will again consult with other editors in the field. They may also write to the authors and referees for additional clarifications before making a decision. There are some rejections at this point, a few rare straight acceptance decisions, and the vast majority are a “revise and resubmit” where the editor explicitly states what needs to change for the paper to be published (sometimes this is “please address all comments by referees” but often it is “… and in particular you should correct the proof of lemma 4, clarify assumption 2 and cite the work of X appropriately”).

Additional rounds of review and final decision: When authors submit a revised version and response to referees, the editor decides whether the paper should (1) be accepted right away, if the changes are satisfying and there are only cosmetic comments left, (2) be rejected, if the previous concerns were ignored, (3) go back to the referees, in case the editor believes that referees should check by themselves. Again, the editor is encouraged to consult with other editorial board members in case of doubts.

Editorial decision and publication

Upon acceptance: Authors upload an approved final version of the manuscript to the arXiv, which will become the published version of the paper. The running costs of Quantum are covered through a voluntary fee (article processing charge). Please see the payment page for the applicable fees and payment methods.

DOI: For the final accepted version of the manuscript, DOI linking is mandatory. Quantum is a member of Crossref, therefore in all publications by Quantum all references to works that have a DOI must contain clickable hyper-links to the URLs under https://doi.org associated with the work’s DOI. A link to the publisher homepage is not sufficient. Also shortDOIs are unfortunately not accepted by Crossref. Works that do not have a DOI may, of course, be cited without giving a link. For more information on how to add appropriate links, please consult the latest version of the template of the Quantum document class.

Publication: The published work is given a DOI and is announced in Quantum. All works are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence and the final version must previously be uploaded to the arXiv by the authors under the same license. Publications in Quantum can be cited by volume and article number, and are indexed in the webofscience and on Google Scholar, so that citations count for citation metrics. Authors and other copyright holders retain the copyright on their works without restrictions.

Publicity: If provided by the authors, a non-technical abstract or popular summary is also released by Quantum and publicized in social media. For exceptional publications, the editor may ask a referee or external expert to write a short viewpoint about the paper.

Appeal: To submit an appeal against an editorial decision, please use the appeal form, on which you can also find further information on how appeals are handled.

Post publication

Errata: Authors are strongly encouraged to notify Quantum of any corrections and modifications made to already published papers. Errata to papers published in Quantum can be uploaded by the authors as a new version to the arXiv. More detailed information can be found on our Crossmark policy page.

Name change policy: If your name has changed after your manuscripts’ publication, write us an email and we will change it everywhere on the website and in our systems.  We recommend changing your name on the arXiv before [instructions here] but this is not necessary. If you have updated the arXiv version of your published papers, let us know.

Quantum will never ask you for “proof” of name change, notify your coauthors or list the previous name, unless you explicitly ask us to. We want to make this process as easy as possible for authors, so if you’ve gone through it please let us know if there’s anything we could improve.

The fastest way of getting your request processed is to email [email protected], which forwards to the executive board (Christian Gogolin, Lídia del Rio and Marcus Huber) and to the two editorial assistants (who are not researchers). Alternatively, you can email any individual member of the executive board. In the latter case, whoever receives your email will keep it confidential even from the remaining members of the executive board, unless you explicitly tell us otherwise.

Some technicalities: we can change the name on the paper’s webpage, the paper’s pdf, the DOI metadata, and internal systems. We can also change it in the list of references of other papers published in Quantum that refer to yours. We cannot easily change it on Scholastica’s records (the external platform where the peer review process takes place, and which stores for example the reviews your paper received and editorial discussions). We contacted Scholastica, who told us that users can change their name by logging in to their account and changing it under “my profile”. The change should be reflected along the platform, but not on stored pdfs, or lists of authors if you weren’t the corresponding author. If it’s important to you not to have a record of the previous name even in this closed environment, we can ask to delete the manuscript from Scholastica, and just keep a record elsewhere of the review process with the correct name.

Writing pieces for Quantum Views

The publishing process of Views (perspectives, editorials, etc) in Quantum Views is different from that of regular articles in Quantum. Views are published as html only, and need not be uploaded to the arXiv.

While we can process other formats, our publishing team much appreciates if you submit your perspective in the following format:

• The perspective itself as a plain text file ending in .txt containing the title, your affiliation(s), and the main text, in which you may use:
• Blank lines to separate paragraphs
• Standard html tags, such as

  to

  for sectioning,

  for tables and

  and
  for lists
  • Standard LaTeX math notation such as $A |\psi\rangle = \sin(\alpha) |\psi\rangle$

  • LaTex style cite macros written in the usual way as in \cite{ID} (you can cite multiple references in one macro as you would do in LaTeX)

  • A .bbl file with with a bibliography starting with \begin{bibliography}{…} and ending with \end{bibliography} and \bibitem{ID}s matching the references cited in the main text. The \bibitems of all works that you cite and which have a DOI must contain a \doi{DOI} makro, or alternatively a link such as \url{https://doi.org/DOI} or \href{https://doi.org/DOI}{}. You can of course use BibTeX to create the .bbl file.

  • Optionally a featured image with a 2:1 aspect ratio and white background.

  It may be a good idea to use a LaTeX document class (such as article or quantumarticle) to generate the main text and bibliography and only in the final step replace all LaTeX sectioning commands (in case any were necessary at all) by html sectioning.

  On the Quantum website your mathematical formulas are displayed with the help of MathJax. Your bibliography is formatted, DOIs become hyperlinks, and all \cite{ID} macros in the text are be replaced by the respective links to the entries in the bibliography.

  Note that homemade macros like \ket are not processed by MathJax. If you include such macros, a human from our team will have to go through them by hand.

  Thank you very much for writing a piece for Quantum Views! By adhering to these guidelines you greatly facilitate the publishing process for us. Don’t hesitate to ask in case you have further questions.

  If you have special formatting requirements or, e.g., want to embed a video or a figure from another article, please indicate this when you submit your View.

  Editorial policies

  Nature of the editorial board

  Editorial term: 2 years by default

  Editors serve 2 year-terms by default. There is no limit on the number of successive terms an editor can serve and resignation at any point is possible. Withdrawing editors are expected to finish handling the submissions assigned to them. If this is not possible, another competent editor will take over. When necessary (for example if the terms of several editors end at the same time), renewal of editors will be phased to ensure continuity in the editorial board.

  Selection of editors: by the Steering Board

  The approval of editors is in the hands of the steering board. Quantum will hold open calls for editors whenever needed. In addition, the steering board may appoint new editors at any time.

  Composition of the editorial board: broad

  The editorial board of Quantum consists of Editors and Coordinating Editors. The main role of the latter is the selection of appropriate Editors for incoming submissions, but they can also handle submissions themselves, and they are the first port of conflict resolution. The editorial board should be broad enough to cover the main subfields of quant-ph. Ideally, editors should only handle submissions in their fields of expertise. If lack of expertise in one field, or overworking of editors in a particular field become evident, the steering board may be asked to suggest additional editors. See the current Editors of Quantum here.

  Conflicts of interest: are to be declared

  Upon joining the editorial board, editors are required to declare any interests — financial or otherwise — that might influence, or be perceived to influence, their editorial practices. Further, editors are expected to declare conflicts of interest regarding individual submissions by excluding themselves from the editorial and peer-review process of these submissions in the online system (see below).

  Discharge of editors: by the steering board

  Editors can be discharged in case of negligence, action contrary to the spirit of Quantum, or failure to declare conflicts of interest. The final decision is in the hands of the steering board.

  Acceptance criteria

  Scope: Wide scope

  A necessary condition for consideration is that the submitted version of the manuscript has appeared in the quant-ph section of the arXiv. Apart from that, Quantum has a broad scope, covering all aspects of quantum science and related fields. This includes (but is not limited to) atomic and molecular physics, condensed matter physics, foundations, quantum information and computation, quantum optics, and quantum thermodynamics (in alphabetic order). Quantum publishes theoretical, numerical, and experimental works, both original research and review articles. Quantum also welcomes submissions that are more rooted in adjacent fields such as mathematics, computer science, (software) engineering, or philosophy, as long as the manuscript makes clear why the work is of interest for researchers in the quantum sciences and Quantum has an Editor competent in the respective area.

  Acceptance threshold: Quantum is selective

  Correct research that incrementally improves a limited technique is below threshold. For original research, either a very significant technical or conceptual contribution or a nice combination of both is necessary for acceptance in Quantum. Literature reviews must be unbiased, comprehensive, and timely to be considered.

  Editorial pre-selection: Quantum uses editorial pre-selection

  Editorial rejection without external reviewers is possible. It should happen only on formal (e.g., work not on arXiv) or scientific grounds (as described above), in case of insufficient quality of presentation, or when the submission clearly falls outside the scope of Quantum. A short justification is required. External pressure by the authors on editors or referees outside the due editorial process may also result in editorial rejection.

  Impact and seniority: The expected impact (number of citations within the first two years after publication) and the perceived seniority of the authors are not acceptance criteria.

  Rejection rate: No target rejection rate

  Quantum does not aim for a pre-set number of published papers per year and there is no target rejection rate. The quality of every paper is evaluated independently of other submissions.

  Handling of submissions

  Peer-review process: single-blind

  Quantum employs a standard single-blind peer review process that is overseen by an editor and decisions are based on reports prepared by referees from the scientific community.

  Assignment of editors: by assistants/admins

  Editorial assistants/admins query editors for incoming submissions with the aim of ensuring that every submission is handled by a knowledgeable editor. If an assigned editor declares a conflict of interest, cannot handle the submission in a timely manner, or does not believe they are sufficiently knowledgeable in the field of the submission, they may pass it on to another editor.

  Online system: Scholastica

  Quantum provides an efficient online system that makes it easy for editors to carry out their work efficiently. The system include pre-written template texts for author communication and collects all relevant information about the review-process in one place.

  Open pigeon hole principle: all editors can see all submissions

  All submissions, referee reports, and decisions are visible to all editors, except those who have themselves declared a conflict of interest or have been excluded from a given evaluation process because of such a conflict of interest by other editors. We believe that this will make the evaluation process more transparent and fair. Authors will know which editor is assigned to the submission.

  Conflicts of interest: must be declared

  Editors and referees should declare whether there exists a potential conflict of interest regarding a particular submission, and, if appropriate, exclude themselves from handling that submission. Reasons for conflict of interests include: close collaboration with the author(s), personal relations with the authors, concurrent competitive research, same institution, and financial co-dependence. As a guideline, editors should not have joint papers with the submitting authors in the previous four years, and referees should not have joint papers with the submitting authors in the previous two years, if possible.

  For referees

  Guidelines for referees: Quantum asks specific questions

  Referees are not expected to read through pages of complicated guidelines for refereeing. In order to obtain fair, meaningful, comparable, and maximally objective reports that focus on estimating the scientific quality of a submission, referees will be asked specific questions. See the full guidelines for referees.

  Viewpoints: Quantum publishes viewpoints on exceptional submissions

  Referees will be asked whether they think the work deserves further coverage and whether they would be willing to write a viewpoint. The final decision lies with the editor.

  Review process

  Referee assignment: authors suggest, decision by  the editor

  Authors are encouraged to suggest referees for their submission, and to indicate referees to avoid. Suggestions are just that, and the editor has total freedom to invite referees.

  Communication with referees: led by editor

  Editors invite referees via the online system provided by Quantum. There is a pre-written invitation message, which editors may personalize. The invitation should indicate clearly: paper to review, assigned editor, refereeing process and proposed timeline for acceptance of the invitation and for the report. Referees accept or reject to review through the online system. Editors may insist once in case of no reply, and after that assume a rejection.

  Deadlines: no strict deadlines

  Quantum does not impose strict deadlines on authors or referees. We believe that authors that seriously want to get their work published will re-submit their works as fast as possible and we think it is crucial to give referees the time they need to evaluate a work.

  In the initial referral, referees will usually be asked to submit their review within a month and are encouraged to inform the editor if they predict it will take longer. Should the referee accept to review the submission, they will receive an automatic reminder (including a direct link to the review functionality) every  two weeks. If no report is submitted in the given time, the editor will get back to the referee to confirm their willingness to write a report.

  Minimal number of referee reports: two, if possible

  Every paper that is subject to peer-review should ideally be evaluated based on at two reports from independent referees. The assigned editor must make a reasonable effort to find willing referees. In case some of the reports turn out to be of too low quality, the editor may contact additional referees until at least two reports of reasonably high quality are obtained so that an informed decision can be made. In some cases, two willing referees cannot be found in a timely fashion; then (and whenever the decision is not clear after reports)  the editor should consult with other expert editors and make the decision with the existing information.

  **Open reviews: ** can be used in the editorial process

  Editors may take into account publicly available information about submitted manuscripts in their editorial decisions, so long as they communicate this transparently to the authors. This includes open reviews published in blogs, public community discussions about a manuscript, journal clubs, for example. In principle, such an open review can fully replace a standard confidential review in the peer review process.

  Decision notifications: sent to authors and referees, editorial justifications appreciated

  Upon decision,  authors and referees receive a notification letter from the editor, enclosing the editorial decision and all referee reports. Short justifications summarising the referee reports are appreciated in the notification letter. Only the editorial and executive board members know the identity of the referees, and the reports are to be considered confidential.

  Number of resubmissions: no strict limit

  The editor decides when further correspondence would only be incremental and a final decision is made.

  Appeals: authors can appeal

  Please see the description provided on the appeals page.

  Reviewing the editorial policies

  Editor-led change: any time

  Editors are encouraged to contact the executive board if they find issues in the review process that could be helped by a change in the editorial policies. The executive board will discuss the proposal, confer with the remaining editors, and finally submit a suggested change to approval of the steering board.

  Regular revision: after the first year, then every two years

  The editorial policies will be reviewed by the steering board after the first year of operation, and then every two years. Prior to each regular revision, the executive board will ask the editorial board for feedback, and take it as a basis to formulate proposed changes.

  Open reviews: to be considered in regular revisions

  Quantum will regularly review its policies concerning open reviews. It is the aim of Quantum to initiate a community-wide discussion of alternative forms of peer review. In any case, open review will never be applied retroactively and there should always be an option for anonymous and confidential closed review.

  Crossmark policy page

  https://doi.org/10.22331/q-crossmark-policy-page

  Crossmark is a multi-publisher initiative from Crossref to provide a standard way for readers to locate the current version of a piece of content. Quantum is committing to maintaining the content it publishes, and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur.

  Retraction and correction policies

  Quantum is committed to ensuring high quality standards in all its publications.

  Being an arXiv overlay journal the published version of every article as well as all pre-prints remain forever publicly accessible via arXiv.org. Quantum publishes a specific version or an article also available on the arXiv. Authors can add updated versions of their work to the arXiv under the same arXiv identifier. This creates a new version.

  In case Quantum is notified of mistakes in published works the following policy applies:

  If the mistake is minor, such as a typo, a missing affiliation, or a typesetting error in an equation that can be corrected by a skilled reader, Quantum may update the published version of an article to a new arXiv version uploaded by the authors post publication.

  If the mistake is more severe and in particular if it changes material results of a work, changes the equation numbering, changes the reference list, or any theorem, lemma, or similar, Quantum will leave the published version as is, still pointing to the version on the arXiv that was originally accepted, and instead place a note about the mistake and if available a link to an updated/corrected version of the work on that work’s page.

  Terms and conditions

  By submitting a manuscript to Quantum, you agree with Quantum’s terms and conditions. In particular, you certify that:

  In addition, authors, referees and members of all boards of Quantum commit to follow the Code of Conduct laid out here.

  The above summary is just for informative purposes. The binding terms and conditions follow.

  Table of contents

  1. Preamble and definitions

  Access to Quantum is subject to the following terms and conditions, which constitute a contract between Quantum and any user. By engaging in any form of interaction with Quantum or its members, the user accepts these terms and conditions in full.

  We denote by “Quantum” the Association for the Promotion of Open Access Publishing in Quantum Science, legally known as

  Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften

  Quantenwissenschaften

  Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Wien, Austria

  (ZVR-Zahl 941922539),

  the journal Quantum, the website quantum-journal.org, and the online system provided to organize submission and peer review of works, as well as Quantum’s social media accounts.

  We denote by “user” any person accessing, using, exchanging, downloading, or submitting any type of content or information with, from and to Quantum and all services it provides, interacting with Quantum in any way, or holding or exercising any function within Quantum.

  A “work” submitted to Quantum refers to the actual manuscript as publically available on arxiv.org (“the arXiv”), as well as all supporting material, such as, but not limited to, appendices, supplementary information, a popular summary, datasets, computer code, images, plots, videos or other recordings that are transmitted or made available to Quantum in order to assess the manuscript’s suitability for publication. This refers to both the manuscript and material present in the initial submission, as well as all further versions and additions of material in later resubmissions.

  The “submitter” is anyone who carries out the submission of a work to Quantum for publication, either through the provided online system or via email, and who is identified by their account in the online system or name and address used in the email. In case of multiple submitters, the definition applies in full to every single one of them.

  2. Code of conduct

  Quantum fosters scientific integrity and ethical conduct. Consistent with the bylaws of Quantum (such as the constitution of the Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften), its code of conduct upholds those values, detailing the ethical guidelines and expectations for participation in Quantum. Authors, referees, editors, all board members and all other users of Quantum are expected to act at all times in accordance with the principles and standards described in this code.

  Unacceptable behaviour

  In particular, the code of conduct specifies behaviour that Quantum deems unacceptable, both in interactions with Quantum and in professional life in general. This includes but is not limited to:

  • Plagiarism and fabrication of data and results, including misrepresentation of contributions and authorship, selective reporting, failure to promptly correct errors, or theft of data and/or other research materials, as well as misrepresentation and overstatement of results and the omission of crucial conditions and assumptions.
  • Publication (or submission for publication) of works submitted to or published in Quantum to other publishing venues, unless the work is terminally rejected by Quantum. “Other publishing venues” include other journals and conference proceedings, but exclude public pre-print servers such as the arXiv and personal or institutional websites of the authors. Re-publication of excerpts or the entirety of a work submitted to or published in Quantum as part of a work with a broader scope, such as a review article of thesis, is explicit allowed.
  • Subversion of peer review, including failure to declare conflict of interest, failure to recuse under conflict of interest, misuse of information during review, unnecessarily delaying the peer-review process, violation of the anonymity of referees, premature solicitation of press coverage, corruption and/or bribery.
  • Impersonation of other persons or entities, as well as unrightfully claiming the ownership of scientific titles, professional positions, or affiliations.
  • Using Quantum or any other system for the dissemination of scientific works to promote hate or discriminatory speech, or to infringe on the rights of others.
  • Sharing of confidential information, such as the identity of reviewers, referee reports, and other internal correspondence to persons not involved in the peer-review process.
  • Discrimination of any kind, such as on the basis of religion, disability, age, national origin, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Discrimination includes the use of derogatory comments or slurs.
  • Harassment, including bullying and intimidation, false accusations, threats and assault, as well as sexual harassment in public or in private.
  • The violation of public trust, including making false or misleading statements, to media, and misrepresentation to grant and/or funding agencies.

  Reporting and investigation

  Quantum may learn of violations through reports from witnesses or aggrieved individuals and parties, including anonymous reports filed through the dedicated online form. For the safety of all reporters, once a report has been made, Quantum editors and board members are bound to maintain the confidentiality of the report except as explicitly requested by the reporting parties. Upon receiving a report, Quantum will progress as follows:

  • The Executive Board of Quantum will name an investigator or form a small investigation body of no more than three people, each of whom must be free of conflict of interest.
  • The investigator or investigating body may solicit additional information from the reporter, with the goal of reaching a tentative conclusion over the course of two weeks.
  • The tentative conclusion of the investigating body will be delivered to the Steering Board, along with a suggested resolution action as described in the section below.
  • If the tentative conclusion and suggested resolution action are agreed upon by the Steering Board, Quantum will inform the reporter of their decision and seek agreement before proceeding.
  • The party suspected of a violation of the code of conduct will be informed of the allegations and planned resolution action and given 20 working days to respond.
  • Depending on the findings, on communication from the involved parties, and consensus of the Steering Board, the resolution action may be implemented or further investigations carried out with the aim of resolving the situation.

  During the reporting and investigating process, all individuals must exercise all due diligence to prevent divulging any report details beyond those strictly necessary to enact and uphold the code of conduct. In particular, if upon receiving an initial report, it is deemed the alleged infraction would not result in a penalty more severe than a formal warning, the Executive Board may decide to directly handle the report without the aid of an investigating body, provided that no conflict of interest is introduced.

  Enforcement and penalties

  If a Quantum user is found through the preceding process to have committed any violation of the code of conduct, Quantum may enforce the code of conduct in a number of different ways. An appropriate resolution is decided by the Steering Board, taking into account all factors, and having as a goal to improve the situation. Possible actions to enforce the code of conduct include but are not limited to:

  • A formal (written) warning made to the infringing party.
  • Requiring the infringing party to make a formal (written) apology.
  • Reporting the infringing party to their home institutions, employers, and/or professional societies.
  • Reporting the infringing party to the relevant authorities, in case of suspicion of criminal offences.
  • Retraction of compromised manuscripts (based on scientific reasons).
  • Refusal to consider future manuscripts from the infringing party.
  • Expulsion from the Steering, Executive or Editorial Board.

  3. Submission and publication of works

  Works submitted to Quantum undergo the peer-review process following the Editorial Policies of Quantum. This process ends with either the acceptance of the work for publication, or the terminal rejection of the work.

  Responsibilities of the submitter

  By submitting a work to Quantum, the submitter warrants all of the following points and assumes full responsibility and liability for any costs and damages resulting directly or indirectly from any of them being untrue:

  • The submitted work is an original creation of the authors listed on the manuscript, and all listed authors have made substantial contributions to the creation of the work.
  • The submitter has the permission of all authors and all other copyright and intellectual property rights holders to pursue the publication of the work in Quantum, and to grant Quantum all the rights specified in these terms and conditions.
  • The manuscript is publicly accessible on the arXiv in the section quant-ph, or at least crosslisted to quant-ph.
  • The work has not been previously published in any other journal or publishing venue, except in conference proceedings and on public pre-print servers such as the arXiv or the authors’ personal or institutional websites. Works previously published in conference proceedings must substantially differ from or expand upon the conference version (for example contain previously omitted proofs) and indicate the previous publication on the first page of the manuscript. An example is when the proceedings contain only an extended abstract of the work, without technical proofs.
  • The submitter has obtained permissions to grant Quantum the rights specified in these terms and conditions for all material contained in the work and has included appropriate credits and prominently marked or indicated any rights held by third parties.
  • The submitter has clearly informed Quantum at the time of submission of any parts of the work which, due to copyright or other constraints, cannot be published by Quantum under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)licence.
  • In case of acceptance, the final published version of the work will be uploaded on the arXiv under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
  • In case of acceptance, the final published version of the work on the arXiv complies with the Crossref DOI guidelines. In particular, all references cited by the submitted work that have a DOI assigned to them contain DOI links.
  • In case of acceptance and publication in Quantum, the work will not be submitted to other publishing venues, such as journals or conference proceedings.

  Rights of the submitter

  The submitter is granted the following rights:

  • At any point prior to acceptance the submitter, as well as any author of the work, can withdraw a work from Quantum. A notification of withdrawal has to be submitted to the handling editor either through the online submission system or by email. Upon receiving a notification of withdrawal prior to acceptance, Quantum terminally rejects the work, thereby ending the peer-review process.
  • The submitter, as well as any author of the work, can also withdraw a work from Quantum after acceptance and publication by notifying Quantum through email. This however does not trigger a terminal rejection of the work and in particular does not invalidate the rights granted to Quantum during submission. Quantum will instead put a notification on the publication page that the work was withdrawn.

  Internal correspondence

  Unless explicitly agreed otherwise by all parts involved, all correspondence between editors, referees and authors during the peer review process should be treated as confidential, and may only be shared with the present and future Editorial Board members who have not declared a conflict of interest with the work.

  Rights of Quantum

  By submitting a work to Quantum, the submitter explicitly grants Quantum the following additional rights:

  • The right to terminally reject the work, in particular on the basis of the editors’ judgement and/or referee reports.
  • The right to permanently store and share the work, referee reports, and intermediate correspondence with the referees and all current and future members of the Editorial Board who have not declared a conflict of Interest.
  • The right to share the identity of the referees with all members of the current and future Editorial Boards who have not declared a conflict of Interest.
  • The non-exclusive right to share, publish, host, distribute, print, advertise, classify, and otherwise use the manuscript, other parts of the work and all metadata associated with it under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)licence, unless the work is terminally rejected by Quantum, expect for parts of the work that are covered by incompatible licences. This does not imply any restrictions on the right to publish parts or the entirety of the work of other parties.
  • The right to deposit the metadata associated with the work in the Crossrefsystem and to assign a DOI to the work.
  • The right to publish anonymized statistics on submissions and the peer-review process.

  Copyright of works published by Quantum

  All manuscripts and other parts of works that were previously submitted to Quantum and then published by Quantum, as well as the associated meta-data, including for example a work’s title, abstract, author list, figures, datasets, or popular summary, are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

  For material associated with a manuscript, such as that linked to from the manuscript, or a work’s page on Quantum’s website, especially if hosted on other platforms, other licences can apply.

  Each owner of copyright on parts or the entirety of a work submitted to or published by Quantum retains their copyright.

  4. Data protection and privacy policy

  The purpose of this data protection policy is to inform all users of Quantum and this website about the type of personal data that is collected and processed by Quantum and the company providing the hosting infrastructure for this website, as well as the purpose of said data processing.

  Quantum is taking data protection very seriously, and it is treating your personal data according to the legal requirements.

  In particular, Quantum complies with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

  Please keep in mind that any data transmission over the Internet and any form of digital data processing can be affected by security flaws is software and hardware that are beyond the control of Quantum.

  A complete protection from unauthorized access by third parties can thus never be fully guaranteed.

  As Quantum does not fall in any of the categories of entities that are required to appoint a DPO according to the GDPR, it does not have a dedicated DPO.

  Should you have any questions on this data protection and privacy policy, please contact us through one of the channels described in the impressum.

  Personal data

  Personal data is any information related to a natural person or data subject that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person.

  This website collects personal data only to the extent necessary and in a way that is legally permissible (see below for more details).

  Cookies

  This website does not uses cookies.

  The backend of Quantum’s website,  the WordPress dashboard, collects necessary cookies from logged-in users only. This only affects Quantum staff who are logged in to the backend, as those cookies are necessary for user authentication. Website visitors are not affected.

  Note that the third-party peer-review platform used by Quantum, Scholastica, may use cookies on their website.

  A cookie is a small file that is saved on the device with which you are accessing this website. Should you not want to be served a cookie when using this website, most common browsers can be configured to disallow the usage of cookies. This may affect the usability of websites (such as the ability to opt out of the data collection for analytics, see below).

  Sharing buttons

  The sharing buttons for sharing content on social media and other platforms displayed on this website are provided by the WordPress plugin Shariff Wrapper. By design, the Shariff Wrapper plug-in does not transmit any data to the social media platforms and other sharing services unless one of the sharing buttons is explicitly clicked. Shariff Wrapper’s statistics feature is disabled on this site, so that no personal data about sharing activity is stored.

  Data stored and processed of all users

  Quantum and the company hosting this website may collect, store, and process the following data of all users of Quantum:

  • visited pages
  • time of access
  • number of transmitted bytes
  • link that lead to the page being accessed
  • browser used
  • operating system used
  • ip address from which it was accessed
  • data (text, files, tick boxes, …) entered in forms and search boxes

  The data may be collected in server log files and for the purpose of analyzing how this website is being used (analytics) by means of the WordPress plug-in WP statistics.

  Unless stated otherwise below, the data is saved exclusively on the servers of the company providing the hosting infrastructure for this website and on computers controlled by Quantum (for the purpose of archiving and backup) and can only be accessed through password protected accounts on these systems and is not shared with any third party service such as Google Analytics.

  Unless stated otherwise below, the data collected in this way is used exclusively for statistical analysis and improvement of the website as well as to ensure its safe and lawful operation.

  In particular, ip addresses are saved only in pseudo-anonymized form, either hashed or with the last block truncated.

  If the WP statistics plug-in is enabled, you have the option to opt-out of the data collection for analytics by performing the following steps: (1) Clear all cookies for this website in your browser. (2) Refresh the page. (3) Click/tap the button “opt out” in the banner at the bottom of the page.

  Data entered into or resulting from the use of forms and transmitted via email

  Data entered into or resulting from the use of forms on this website and such sent to Quantum via email may be processed in additional ways.

  In particular, it may be stored and processed on information technological devices controlled by members of Quantum as well as in password protected collaborative working and cloud computing platforms such as Jira, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Docs/Google Sheets.

  For data relevant for the peer-review and publication process additional rules apply (see the next section for more details).

  If the data entered in such forms is stored or processed of purposes other than those described in the last section, the form contains a more detailed description of the type and purpose of the data storage and processing.

  You have to tick a tick box on such forms to express your explicit consent to such additional data storage and processing.

  Data stored and processed for and during the peer-review and publication process

  During the peer-review and publication process (which includes the handling of appeals) additional personal data is collected, stored, and processed by Quantum, as well as the third-party service Scholastica, namely:

  • written communication with and between authors, editors, and referees
  • the times and other meta-data associated with this communication
  • the email addresses and account names at other services used to carry out this communication
  • all data and material provided to Quantum by the submitter, including the submitted work

  This this data is permanently stored by Quantum to ensure long-term accountability and justifiability of editorial decisions and to ensure a means of contacting the submitter or authors (e.g., in case of later corrections to published works).

  Such data may further be stored and processed on the collaborative working platform Jira and the third-party service < href=”https://scholasticahq.com/”>Scholastica to the extent this is necessary to carry out and supervise the peer-review process.

  On such platforms the data is accessible only through password protected accounts.

  Quantum retains the right to process this data for the purpose of performing statistical analysis of the peer-review process, correlate this data with other publicly available information, and to publish such analysis and the underlying data in a suitably anonymized form.

  In doing this, Quantum takes the utmost care to ensure that no personally identifying information is leaked and in particular that the anonymity of referees is guaranteed.

  For accepted works, Quantum publishes the work itself (including all companioning material and meta-data) in accordance with the terms and conditions.

  In particular, as part of its service, Quantum uploads the meta-data of accepted works, as well as parts or all of the work, to platforms such as Crossref, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Clarivate Analytics, and Clockss for the purpose of registering DOIs, making the work discoverable by readers, facilitate biometrics, and archiving.

  Data on payments and donations

  Data on payments of article processing charges and donations are obviously available to the handling services, such as the involved banks and, if applicable, PayPal. Such data is processed for accounting purposes in accordance with applicable law.

  On top of that, Quantum practices public accounting. All donations and payed fees are made available on this publicly shared shared spreadsheet.

  Data publicly available on this website

  Data that is publicly available on this website may be shared by Quantum in posts on social media platforms including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, either directly of by means of third-party services such as buffer.com or IFTTT, in accordance with the license under which this data was published.

  Backups

  All data described above may be included in backups to ensure the continued availability of the services of Quantum. Such backups are stored “off-site”, i.e., in a different physical location than the production system on servers or storage systems controlled by Quantum or people working for Quantum and access to which is suitably restricted with passwords. The data in backups is not processed and is stored in such a way that it can not even be directly accessed from the production systems.

  Data protection

  Quantum uses strong and individual passwords for all accounts and services that can be used to access personal data of its users. Quantum uses individual email accounts for each third party service to ensure a fine grained access to personal data, restricted to only those members of Quantum who actually need access.

  Data breach procedures

  In case of a data breach that reveals otherwise not publicly available personal data in our own data handling systems or any of the third party services Quantum relies on, all identifiable users will be notified in due time after a suitable assessment of the situation.

  User rights

  As a user, you have the right to request information about which of your personal data is stored and processed by Quantum and for what purpose. You can demand that personal data is corrected (in case it is incorrect) or deleted (to the extend this is compatible with the terms and conditions of Quantum and applicable law), and have the right to obtain a digital copy of the stored personal data. To contact Quantum on such matters, please use one of the channels described in the impressum.

  Data protection and privacy policy changes

  Quantum may change its data protection and privacy policy from time to time, at Quantum’s sole discretion. Quantum encourages its users to check this page for changes frequently. Your continued use of any service Quantum provides, including but not limited to this website, after any change in this data protection and privacy policy constitutes your acceptance of such change.

  5. Further aspects

  Disclaimer of warranty

  There is no warranty for the services provided by Quantum, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing, the copyright holders and/or other parties provide these services “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose or future availability. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the services is with the user. Should the services prove defective, the user assumes the cost of all damages incurred.

  Limitation of liability

  In no event, unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, will Quantum be liable to any user for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the services provided by Quantum, even if Quantum has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

  External content

  Links to other works, websites, or other documents, including but not limited to hyperlinks on the website quantum-journal.org as well as in manuscripts published by Quantum, may link to content that is beyond the control of Quantum. Quantum hence does not assume any kind of responsibility or liability for the content to which such links point or transmissions that can be received through them.

  Infringement notification

  In case you believe that any material published by Quantum infringes on your copyright or intellectual property rights in any way, you must contact in writing, in either English or German, the

  Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Wien, Austria.

  Logos, images and materials created by Quantum

  The term “Quantum” and the Quantum logo are a registered trademark of the Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften in the European Union (EUIPO) for the publishing of scientific papers, electronic publishing, the publishing of journals, and several other categories of goods and services.

  All other company and product names, logos, trademarks, registered trademarks, and brands are property of their respective owners. All such company, product and service names used in this website are for identification purposes only. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement.

  The logo of Quantum, as well as all images created by Quantum, are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. The LaTeX template quantumarticle is published on GitHub under the LaTeX Project Public licence version 1.3c.

  Right to modify terms and conditions

  Quantum retains the right to modify these terms and conditions following consultation with the Steering Board. All submitters of works undergoing peer-review at the time of change must be notified if affected by the changes. Submitters are always bound to the version of these terms and conditions at the time of the last (re-)submission.

  These terms and conditions, as well as the Editorial Policies and the Constitution of Quantum, are published under a Creative Commons “No Rights reserved” (CC0) licence. Sharing, tweaking and reuse of these policies is allowed and encouraged. If you adapt them to other projects, we would love to hear from you.

  Guidelines for referees

  At Quantum, peer review should work towards improving papers. Referees are not expected to read through pages of complicated guidelines for refereeing or the full editorial policies. In order to obtain fair, meaningful, comparable, and maximally objective reports that focus on estimating the scientific quality of a submission, referees will be asked specific questions in an online form to be filled out in the browser.

  When answering these question as a referee for Quantum, please keep in mind that it is a highly selective journal. Correct but incremental work is below threshold. A very significant technical or conceptual contribution is necessary for acceptance in Quantum. In other words, the paper should be very relevant to experts in the field. Quantum publishes three types of manuscripts, with the following acceptance criteria:

  • Original researchthat:- Significantly advances the particular sub-field of quantum science
  • Contains a very significant technical or conceptual contribution

  • Provides evidence that the employed methods or obtained results go significantly beyond the state of the art

  • Reviewsthat:- Address a need for a standard reference on a topic or fill a gap in the literature

  • Summarize a coherent body of knowledge in a way that facilitates further progress

  • Cover the relevant literature comprehensively and concisely

  • Software showcasesthat:- Demonstrate the ability of a newly introduced software package to address a significant scientific challenge and facilitate further progress

  • Show that such software has capabilities that clearly go beyond the state of the art

  Please refer to the detailed selectivity criteria for more information.

  If you think a work should be published in Quantum you must make a case for it.

  Log in on Scholastica.

  Reviewer form (preview)

  Private feedback

  Visible only to editors:

  • Overall rating (1-5 stars).
  • For this manuscript, I recommend: “Accept as it is” / “Revise and resubmit” / “Reject.”
  • General comments for the editor.
  • Would you be willing to referee an updated version of this work before a final decision is made?
  • If this work is accepted, would you be willing to write a short Perspective based on your report?
  • How was your reviewing experience? Is there anything you would like us to improve?

  Open response questions

  Visible to editors and authors:

  • Summary: what are the main questions posed by the manuscript and how does it answer them?
  • What is your assessment of the paper? If you recommend acceptance, make a case that this work does indeed make a significant contribution to scholarship.
  • To what extent have you checked the technical correctness of the paper?
  • Comment on the presentation of the paper. Is it well written? Are the main results clearly laid out? Does the manuscript clearly describe assumptions and limitations? Is the literature review adequate?
  • If the submission includes numerical or physical experiments, does it provide sufficient details such that they could be reproduced by readers? This includes for example source code, documentation, experimental data, experimental setup specifications, etc.
  • Suggested changes, corrections, and general comments.

  Further guidelines

  No strict deadlines

  Quantum does not impose any strict deadlines on authors or referees. We believe that authors that seriously want to get their work published will re-submit their works as fast as possible and we think it is crucial to give referees the time they need to evaluate a work.

  In the initial referral, referees will be asked to submit their review within 30 days and are encouraged to inform the editor if they predict it will take longer. Should the referee accept to review the submission, they will receive an automatic reminder (including a link to the review functionality) a week before the proposed deadline. If no report is submitted in the given time, the editor will get back to the referee to confirm their willingness to write a report. If the referees are unresponsive, editors will assume that they cannot make it, and will invite further referees.

  Conflicts of interest

  Referees should declare whether there exists a potential conflict of interest regarding a particular submission, and, if appropriate, exclude themselves from handling that submission. Reasons for conflict of interests include: close collaboration with the author(s), personal relations with the authors, concurrent competitive research, same institution, and financial co-dependence.

  Guidelines for editors, navigating Scholastica and FAQs.

  These guidelines are continuously evolving according to feedback from our editors, referees and authors, as well as the sporadic Scholastica update. Latest update: February 2024.

  Examples: We added examples of good practices throughout the instructions. To protect the privacy of authors, editors and referees, the examples link to Scholastica discussions and decision letters, and should be available only to editors who are logged into Scholastica.

  If links don’t work: If you are an editor and several links below do not work for you, let us know. If it is just one broken link, it could be that you have a CoI with that manuscript. If you are a new editor, you don’t have default access to manuscripts submitted before you joined, so let us know and we will give you access manually.

  General aspects

  Troubleshooting/admin team

  Currently the Scholastica troubleshooting team consists of:

  • Eva Jelinek and Lukas Schalleck, Quantum’s editorial assistants. Eva and Lukas go through the system 2-3 times a week, and keep things rolling overall, by responding to technical questions by editors, referees and authors, sending reminders when something is delayed, going through all the tasks below marked as[admin], and notifying the executive board in unclear or urgent cases.
  • Christian Gogolin, Marcus Huber and Lídia del Rio from the executive board. We intervene occasionally: when Eva and Lukas notify us, when editors have general questions or comments about Quantum, when something needs urgent action, when a new editor is being trained, and when we wake up at 6am wondering how the journal is doing. Lídia and Christian are mostly using the Admin account, while Marcus uses his personal editor account due to COIs with submissions.

  Roles of different editors

  • Editorial assistants (admins)receive new submissions, check that they meet minimal requirements, and assign editors. They also do all the troubleshooting described above.
  • Coordinating editorsconsult when there are questions about science and good practices, for example ‘is this manuscript above threshold for Quantum in this field?’ ‘is this the right editor for the manuscript?’, ‘how do I make a decision given these conflicting reviews?’, ‘I am junior to the author and am afraid of repercussions if I reject the paper, what can I do?’ Every week, there’s one coordinating editor on call for questions specifically about manuscript assignment.
  • Editorsare in charge of specific papers, reading them, making a first decision, sending them out to review, weighing in referee reports, and making a final decision.

  The Golden Rule: when in doubt, ask!

  For all sorts of doubts, please start an Editor discussion with Scholastica with all the admins and, if relevant, editors in your field and a coordinating editor. We are a community journal, and we are here to answer your questions. Don’t worry about being a burden or wasting our time; it is much better to consult with others, so that you can reach a decision that reflects the collective will of the journal, than to try to guess and decide individually.

  Explicit examples:

  • The paper arrived on your desk, you read it, and you aren’t sure whether it meets the quality thresholds and is worth sending to external reviewers. Write to a couple of editors in the field and a coordinator to ask their opinion. Summarize the issue in your message.Here is an example.
  • You have only received poor quality reports, and don’t know whether to make a decision based on them, or to invite further referees, risking further delays in the process. Write to a couple of editors in the field and a coordinator to ask their opinion. Summarize the issue in your message.Here is an example.
  • The referee reports are contradictoryor insufficient for you to make a decision. Write to a couple of editors in the field and a coordinator to ask their opinion. Summarize the issue in your message.Here is an example.
  • There is a conflict with authors or a referee. Before escalating the conflict, please consult with admins and a coordinating editor.
  • Authors or referees make an unusual requestor you encounter anew situation. Unless you know the journal’s procedure in those cases (e.g. it’s listed here or in previous editorial discussions), always ask admins before responding.Here is an example.
  • Authors contact you outside of Scholastica(in person or by email, for example) to discuss a current submission. Report the communication to the admins, and let the authors know that the journal policy is to only allow communication through Scholastica. This is to avoid undue, unchecked pressure on editors. You may refer authors to this page. Assume good intentions: authors may not have been aware of the policy. If authors don’t have access to Scholastica (e.g. it’s not the corresponding author contacting you), then email communication is allowed, and should have CCed [email protected], or be posted as an editor discussion on Scholastica.
  • If you observe another editor acting contrary to standard procedure, please let admins know. You can do this by email. We will discuss the case and address it with the editor.

  Absences

  It’s ok to take breaks! The well-being of our editors comes first. If you go through a busy or difficult period at any point (examples: writing a grant, reviewing for a conference, holidays, family duties, burnout, too much on your plate, mental health hardships, just need a break), you can just let the admins know that you won’t be able to handle submissions for X weeks/months, and we will take care of it, no questions asked. You don’t have to tell us why. Towards the end of that period, we’ll get in touch to check if you are ready to return to action. You can let us know by email or any other form of communication (including via third parties).

  If an editor is unresponsive to emails for over two weeks, without warning us that they would be absent, we will react at two levels:

  • On the editorial side, we will take measures to ensure that their manuscripts under review don’t get stalled; these measures may include transferring the manuscripts to other editors. We will also mark this editor as “currently absent” so that the coordinating editors won’t assign them new manuscripts.
  • Internally, in the executive board, we will assume that the editor is not doing ok, that they are going through a difficult time. The reasoning is: if this was a planned break, or the editor was simply very busy, they’d be able to notify us. Empirically, this is what happened most of the time. We will try to reach out to the editor and see if they would like support. We won’t insist, if the editor chooses not to be contacted.

  Note: If you are not doing ok, know that you can always reach out to a member of the executive board. We will never judge, and any information shared is confidential. We can help. We may not be able to pay our editors, but at least we can look after each other.

  Acceptance criteria

  Quantum is a highly selective journal. Please refer to the detailed selectivity criteria for more information.

  Examples of papers in scope:

  In response to editors’ queries, we will keep updating this list with kinds of (non-obvious) papers that are in scope for publication in Quantum. See also the full list of papers published in Quantum.

  • A clever solution to a difficult, reasonably well known, and long-open technical question of narrow scope. Broad interest is appreciated, but not a necessary criterion for acceptance as per our editorial policies.
  • A timely, comprehensive review on a topic that was not already covered elsewhere.

  In case of doubt, always check with other editors before making a decision.

  Editorial discussion forum

  We use the manuscript Quantum Editorial Board Communication for discussions among editors and admins regarding the editorial process and Scholastica.  (Links will only work if you are logged in to Scholastica as an editor.)

  If you have a general question, comment or suggestion that may be of interest to more editors, start a discussion there. If it’s a question regarding a specific manuscript, start a discussion on the manuscript’s page. Make sure that the admins are CCed in these discussions.

  Workflow of manuscripts

  Manuscript assignment

  New manuscripts are assigned to the editorial assistants.

  The assistants:

  • Check if the paper is on the arXiv. If it is not, desk reject, with the template “desk rejection (not on arXiv)”.
  • Check if the authors suggested editors (in the field “suggested referees”). If so, check if there’s one of them without many assigned papers, and ask them if they can take the paper.
  • Check if keywords match the expertise of some of the editors. If so, ask one of them if they can handle this submission.
  • If they cannot find an editor with the above steps, contact the coordinator of the week and give them a todo: find an editor, explaining which ones you’ve tried so far.
  • Once an editor says yes, change the assigned editor to them (if they haven’t done it themselves).

  Coordinator of the week: If you’re given this assignment by the assistants, please have a quick check to see that the paper meets basic criteria. If it’s an obvious rejection, make that decision. Else, try to find an editor (ask first).

  Assistants: Check once a week if there are coordinators with assigned papers, and if so, see if they need any help.

  Editors: Only accept to handle papers in topics where you are very comfortable (i.e. a paper that you could act as a referee for). By saying yes you commit to reading the paper within 1-2 weeks. Exceptions: you can handle papers tangent to your expertise if a coordinator asks you as a favour, because it has been very difficult to find a suitable editor. If you are assigned (or first accept to handle) a paper and for some reason later realise that you cannot handle it (too busy, lack of expertise, conflict of interest), please reassign it back to the assistant immediately, and write them a note on the “discussions” tab to let them know.  You can also suggest alternative editors from the board.

  First stage of review: editorial call on desk rejection

  In the following “you” are the editor who is assigned a submission. We expect editors to use their own judgement as experts in their field. We also expect them to consult with each other in borderline cases, and when they first join the journal.

  Read the paper: If you choose to handle the paper, you are expected to read it within 1-2 weeks. You don’t have to read the proofs or technical appendices, but you should be able to understand the results and assumptions. You should also be able to judge the clarity of exposition and intellectual honesty of the paper. The idea is that you will make a call on the scientific significance of the paper.

  Ask questions: If you have questions about these or how the paper fits in the field, you are encouraged to write to the authors for clarifications; here is a good example. You are also very  welcome to consult with other editors in your field, to gauge significance against the usual acceptance threshold. These editorial discussions are the backbone of the peer review process at Quantum: they ensure that we have smooth acceptance criteria across the journal, and are usually stimulating. You can do this by starting an editor discussion on the manuscripts page. Include only 1-2 editors, to avoid filling everyone’s inboxes.  Example of a good editorial discussion.

  New editors: Always consult with 1-2 other editors (including a coordinator) for your first 3-4 submissions, until you have a good feeling of how the acceptance criteria apply in your field.

  Make a first decision, out of:

  • Send it out to referees.This is when you’re fairly convinced about the significance of the paper (according to the acceptance criteria above), and want experts to check the proofs, techniques and relation to other work more closely.
  • Send it back to the authors(“revise and resubmit”). When you think that the paper could in principle be published but the authors should first change something about the presentation or clarify some results before you subject referees to read it. You are encouraged to be specific to tell the authors what needs to be changed. Examples of a good- editorial revise-and-resubmit,- another oneand a- soft desk rejection.
  • Desk reject.When your assessment is that the paper is too weak for publication, even after revision. The idea is that authors don’t have to wait months for the referee reports before a rejection based on significance. Justify the reasons for rejection in the decision letter (see templates), and mention how many editors reviewed or discussed the submission.- Example of a good desk rejection, another- good detailed desk rejectionand a- good shorter desk rejection.

  Anonymous desk rejections: If you worry that the authors could retaliate after a desk rejection, ask one of the coordinators to send out the rejection letter for you. Fortunately this is rare, but has happened a couple of times, in particular when the editor was more junior than some of the authors.

  Inviting referees

  Inviting referees: If you choose to send the paper out to review, you then invite 2-3 referees. We have templates for the invitation letter, and assistants to help you keep track of unresponsive reviewers. If you only need the referee to look at specific aspects, mention it in the invitation. For example: “how does this result fit with your previous work on X?”, “could you check the proofs of theorems 2 and 3?”, “result 3 seems a bit strange, could you check the code?”

  Authors’ list of suggested referees. Editors should use their judgement on a case-by-case basis. These lists can be quite useful, and if the editor believes that some of the referees suggested by the authors could give a good, unbiased review, do invite them. As a rule of thumb, try to also include one referee who was not suggested by the authors.

  Authors’ list of referees to avoid. By default respect the request. If the editor cannot find reliable referees outside the blacklist, or has reason to believe that all competent referees have been included on the blacklist, then they may, at their discretion, invite one of those referees.  If a paper is rejected as a result, and the authors appeal, then any bias of the referees should be investigated by coordinating editors.  As a policy we do not ask authors why they chose to blacklist a referee, as this may be personal, confidential information.

  Ensure a varied referee pool. Don’t invite all referees from the same group, or the same school of thought (for example, all did their PhD in the same group). This is to mitigate bias.

  Conflicts of interests. Editors and referees should declare whether there exists a potential conflict of interest regarding a particular submission, and, if appropriate, exclude themselves from handling that submission. Reasons for conflict of interests include: close collaboration with the author(s), personal relations with the authors, concurrent competitive research, same institution, and financial co-dependence. As a guideline, editors should not have joint papers with the submitting authors in the previous four years, and referees should not have joint papers with the submitting authors in the previous two years, if possible.  Like most editorial guidelines here, this is just a rule of thumb, and we expect editors to use their judgement on a case-by-case basis, and to consult with each other and admins when in doubt.  Often a referee will say something like “I’d be happy to review the paper, but I’m not sure if X constitutes a conflict of interest.” Editors can ask follow-up questions and make their own call. You can judge whether you trust the referee to be unbiased in circumstances X, and if you end up accepting them, you can weight their report according to this information.

  Number of reports: Ideally we’d like to have 2 reports per paper, though this is not always possible, in particular for long technical papers. Often we have to do with one report, but given that you already read the paper, this is acceptable.

  Unresponsive referees: The editorial assistants deal with unresponsive referees (protocol below) and will notify you if you need to invite new referees.

  Second stage of review: making a decision after referee reports

  Weigh reports. One of the questions asked in the report form is “to what extent did you check the technical correctness of the paper?” If all the reports received recommend acceptance and at the same time have not checked the proofs, this this a problem. As an editor, you are then encouraged to write back to the referees with something along the lines of  “All referees are very positive about this paper, but none seems to have checked the correctness of the results. Would you be able to go through the proofs?” On the other hand, if the reason why the referees have not gone through the proofs in detail is because they are unreadable, it is more than fair to ask the authors to write a clearer version of the proofs for the next revision. As a rule of thumb, papers published in Quantum should be pedagogically written, and technical details should have been checked by referees.

  Open reviews and publicly available information. Editors are allowed and encouraged to include all publicly available information on submitted works into their decision making process, so long as they can reasonably judge and do take into account the quality and bias of this information. This includes but is not limited to conference talks and seminars, blog posts, online and offline discussions, publicly posted open reviews (solicited and unsolicited), and information in the literature.

  Make a decision. Once the reports are in, you should read them and make an editorial decision. This can again be a rejection, an acceptance, or a “revise and resubmit”. At this stage it’s usually the latter: most rejections were already filtered out in the first phase, and referees often have comments to be implemented before the final acceptance. You are once again encouraged to consult with other editors, or ask informal clarifications from both referees and authors before sending the decision out to the authors. For example, you can write to Referee 1, “Referee 2 mentioned that the proof of X is very similar to Y, and that result W has the problem Z, would you agree?”. In your decision letter, you should specify which referee comments are the most pressing.  You should also make it very clear whether the paper is likely to get accepted or not (we have templates for the two options). New editors: consult with 1-2 other editors (including a coordinator) before sending out this decision for your first 3-4 papers. All editors: whenever the decision is not clear from the reports, consult with other editors.

  What to include in a decision letter. Editors should use their expertise in the field to clarify the position of the journal on a given position, rather than just middle-manning between referees and authors. Let authors know what changes are necessary to reach the acceptance threshold, which referee comments are the most important in your view, or why the paper is better suited to another venue. Concrete comments and suggestions are better than vague and abstract ones.

  Revised version and final decision

  Revised version. When the authors submit a revised version, it will be automatically assigned to you, the previous editor. You can decide whether to send it back to referees, or to read through the changes yourself and decide if they are good enough for acceptance. This will depend on the nature of changes, and availability of the referees (we do ask them if they’d be willing to review the revised version, and you can judge how long this takes them). You can then make the final decision. In some cases there will be need for another round of revision, but this is relatively rare. Once a paper is accepted, you’re done, and we take care of the publication part.

  Response letters. By default, if the authors upload further files such as a response to the first round of reviews, these are not visible to referees. It is the editor’s task to read the files and decide if they are suitable for sharing with reviewers (e.g. there’s no confidential information intended only for the editor). In most cases you will want to share the letter with referees: do so by changing the file permissions, as shown above. Exception: If the authors ask explicitly that the letter is confidential for the editor, please respect their wishes. This can happen for example if authors want to voice confidential complaints about a referee report.

  Must referees fill out the whole report form again? Yes and no. This is annoying, but at the moment Scholastica does not have a feature for an updated referee report form for the second round of revision, nor to make the answers voluntary. At the moment, our solution is to tell referees that they can simply fill in most spaces with “see above”, ” – “, etc. Alternatively, the referees may send a free-form review, and then it’s up to the editor to fit it into the form, as above. These instructions are already written on the template for the invitation letter to review the revised manuscript. Here is a good example of an editor asking a clarifying question to the authors after some revisions and before the final decision.

  Only minor issues in the revised version: If the formal decision is “acceptance” you won’t see the paper again, as the next steps for the authors are to upload the final version to the arXiv and to notify the journal. This means that if there are only very minor changes left to do, and you trust the authors to implement them, you can accept the paper, and specify those suggestions in the decision letter. If the changes are not so minor and you still want to see the paper before you give the final ok, then use the template “revise and resubmit (almost certain after changes)”.

  Instructions for editorial assistants

  Editorial assistants are in charge of troubleshooting all kinds of matters. You are the tissue that keeps this journal together, thank you!

  Golden rule: If you run into a new procedural  issue, contact the executive board, and if you run into a science question, contact a coordinating editor.

  Routine communication

  Assigning papers to editors: See workflow above.

  Communicating with authors: Notify the authors of the status of their manuscript every two months after the submission. There is a template for this. In particular, let them know who the assigned editor is, and when we expect the reviews to be in. CC the editor in charge.

  Communicating with referees: Once a decision is made on a paper (rejections, ‘revise and resubmit’ or acceptance), print the decision and attach it to a thank you message for the referees who submitted reports. There is a template for this. When v2 of a paper is submitted, share the original decision again with referees, as depicted below.

  Unresponsive editors and referees

  Routine checks: Assistants are expected to go through the list of manuscripts a couple of times per week and troubleshoot when there is a roadblock like those described below.

  Unresponsive editors: If a paper has been with an editor for two weeks and nothing has happened (no discussion, no invited referees), immediately reassign the paper to a coordinating editor (for example, the coordinator of the week). Start an editorial discussion on the paper with the coordinating editors and the unresponsive editor, saying “Dear [coordinating editor], I am reassigning this paper to you as [editor] has been unresponsive and nothing has happened within the first two weeks. Please find another editor to handle this paper.” Mark the editor as ‘currently unavailable’ on the spreadsheet (you can find the link to that spreadsheet in the yellow sticky note on the left side of the Quantum Editorial Board Communication manuscript on Scholastica).

  Unresponsive referees. Automatic reminders (including a direct link to the review functionality) are sent out to referees in the following basis:

  In addition, editors can send personalised reminders any time via ‘referee discussions’ through Scholastica, to check in with the referees.

  In our experience, if a referee has been unresponsive for a month, odds are they won’t finish the report, so we recommend editorial assistants to:

  • Ask the referee if they think it’s feasible to finish it in that time line, if they need an extension, or if we’re better off inviting another referee, and
  • If there is no response within a few days, assign a “to do: invite new referees” to the editor, and decline the invitation on behalf of the referee.

  If a paper has been out for review for months and it has been particularly difficult to find referees to review it, then start a discussion with the editor and the coordinators letting them know and asking them to make a decision.

  Bypassing Scholastica’s shortcomings

  Free-form reports. Not all referees will fill out the report form. Some may send an email with a free-form report as text or pdf. In these cases, assistants can submit the report on their behalf (under the tab ‘Reviewers’). In these cases:

  • Leave all star ratings as neutral.
  • In the first text box that’s seen by the authors, write “[Admin note: This referee submitted a free-form report, posted below. The star ratings are arbitrary.]”
  • If the report is a txt or doc, post it whole in the first box, if it’s a pdf add it as an attachment at the end.
  • Fill in the remaining boxes with “[see above]”.

  This should be primarily the job of the admin staff, as to not overburden editors. However, editors can also do it if for whatever reason they wish to.

  Including original decision in resubmitted versions. We want the original decision and reports to be easily accessible to the reviewers. For this:

  • Go to v1 of the manuscript >> Read decision >> Print decision. Save as pdf.
  • Go to v2 of the manuscript >> Add another file >> Add the pdf of step 1.
  • Top right of the file list: blue button “Edit file permissions” >> Make the decision file available to reviewers.

  The decision pdf includes the initial referee reports (except for confidential comments for the editor), so it should be all that you need. This pdf will also be visible to new referees that you invite to review v2.

  Warning: please make sure that you print and share the decision, and not the original reviews directly, as they contain confidential information (like the reviewers’ names and comments to the editor).

  Appeals

  Appeals were taking a large portion of our coordinators’ time, and were generally unsuccessful. As such, we have now severely limited the scope of appeals, and they can only be based on genuine misunderstandings.

  Appeals are submitted by authors via the Quantum website’s appeal form (not through Scholastica). The appeal is received by the admins as an email.  The protocol for processing appeals is currently the following. All times are suggestions rather than strict deadlines, and are counting from the receipt of the appeal.

  By t=2 days: Appeal is received by the admins. Admins upload appeal to the manuscript file on Scholastica and start a discussion with the original editor and all coordinating editors to inform them. The Admins address this discussion at the coordinating editor who originally assigned the manuscript to the editor who made the rejection and make clear that it is this coordinating editor’s duty to supervise the appeal (in case the manuscript was handled and rejected by the coordinating editor who first received it, the Admins pick another coordinating editor as the one supervising the appeal). Admins should also upload the appeal message as a file on the manuscript’s page on Scholastica, with the permissions such that it’s visible to authors but not to reviewers.

  By t=1 week: The coordinating editor who is assigned to supervise the appeal and the editor who made the decision to reject, discuss with other editors who work in the topic of the paper (or close enough). If no action has been taken by the coordinating editor supervising the appeal, the Admins get in touch with them.

  By t=3 weeks: Coordinating editor supervising the appeal writes to the authors to update them on the process. Relevant information to include could be:

  a) whether the editor has sent the appeal back to the original referees (or plans to),

  b) whether a new referee will be or has been asked to weigh in,

  c) how many editors are involved in the discussion,

  d) if there are any specific questions that the authors could help with,

  e) additional reasons for the original rejection decision (which may be found in internal discussions but were not communicated to the authors)

  f) whether the appeal is likely to succeed (if it can be communicated at this point),

  g) when the authors may expect new updates (this may depend e.g. on referee deadlines).

  The goal of this update is to be as transparent as possible while still protecting the privacy of referees and editors involved. Our editors are doing a great job discussing decisions behind the scenes, and it is important that this is communicated appropriately to the authors, as to not give the impression that the editorial decisions are arbitrary.