Quantum

Quantum submission guidelines

To submit: You will be asked to supply the arXiv reference of your pre-print (must be posted to or at least cross-listed to quant-ph) and a list of keywords. You can also suggest referees and name referees to avoid.

Suggest editors: Please use the field “suggested referees” to also list 2-3 Quantum editors (list here) who could handle the paper. Don’t include editors with conflicts of interest (same institution as authors, close collaborators, etc). This will help our editorial assistants to assign an editor, and will speed up the processing of your manuscript.

Format: There are no typesetting, format or length constraints. Nevertheless, the main contributions, assumptions, and results of the work should be made clear in a non-technical summary in the beginning, for the benefit of all readers. We encourage the use of the Quantum LaTeX template) for the final version, but this is not mandatory.

Terms and conditions: By submitting a work to Quantum you accept Quantum’s terms and conditions. In particular, you certify that you have the permission of all co-authors and othe right holders to pursue publication of the work in Quantum, that no part of the work infringes on anyone’s copyright and that you will be fully liable for all charges resulting from copyright infringement, and that you will not submit this work to any other publishing venue unless it is definitely rejected by Quantum.

Timeline and expectations of the peer review process:
In a first step, Quantum’s editorial assistants will try to find a suitable editor for your manuscript, matching their expertise to your paper. At the moment, Quantum currently receives around 100 submissions per month (including resubmissions), and all our volunteer editors are full-time researchers who can only handle 2-4 manuscripts at any given time, so it can take 2-6 weeks for an editor to become available to handle your manuscript. This depends on the time of the year and the field of research (for example, it is harder to find available editors during review periods for large conferences or holiday seasons, or in fields that had a sudden boost in popularity).

After a Quantum editor who is an expert in the field of your manuscript is assigned, they will read it, discuss it with the editorial board, and make a decision as to whether the paper meets Quantum’s acceptance threshold. This usually takes 1-3 weeks. Most rejected papers are rejected at this phase, and this decision cannot be appealed. If the paper is rejected, the editor will justify their reasoning in the rejection letter; note that this is a decision based solely on the scientific merit of the paper, it will have been discussed with several editors, and is final.

Editorial “revise and resubmit” decisions are also common, if the editors believe that the paper can be published, but needs revision before being sent out to external referees. This includes for example cases where the results are good but the presentation should be improved, or cases where the manuscript should expand on some results to be above acceptance threshold.

If the editors agree that the paper meets Quantum’s high quality thresholds and already has good presentation, they will invite external referees to review the manuscript more thoroughly for technical correctness, relation with the literature and impact in the field. In first instance referees are given 1 month to review the paper but in practice it often takes longer, up to 2-3 months, to receive enough reports in order to make an editorial decision at this stage.

There are several good reasons for why the process takes a long time: referees and editors are full-time researchers, and this is volunteer work that’s not always recognised by their institutions or grant committees, so it ends up being low priority. We want to respect the referees’ time and work, and as such we are flexible with our deadlines, so we ask authors for some patience.

Authors can always write to us through a ‘discussion’ on the Scholastica page of the manuscript and ask for a more detailed update.

For more information refer to the full guidelines for authors. You may also read the instructions for editors for a deeper explanation of the peer-review process.