About Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation

This page includes information about the aims and scope of Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

Aims & scope

Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation is committed to building a seamless and dynamic engineering design framework supporting the accelerated discovery, development, and application of materials, materials systems, and materials processes for practical use in manufacturing. Combining the rigor of scholarly publication with enhanced digital content, the journal covers innovations from the discovery of materials to their deployment.

Great strides have been made in developing experimental, computational and data management techniques that provide insight to solving specific scientific and engineering problems. We are entering an era where individual tools and dispersed data must be brought together into integrated toolsets and made available to materials, manufacturing, and design engineers to create a materials innovation infrastructure. The tasks of integration and management across length and time scales as well as discipline boundaries are extraordinarily complex, but are at the forefront of engineering advances.

IMMI provides an Open Access platform for the presentation of novel efforts seeking to build an integrated engineering framework to solve a pervasive or recurring need in materials and manufacturing. It also provides a venue for presenting innovative approaches to overcome key technical challenges in integrating experiment, models, and data. These challenges include description and representation of complex structure, data curation, model verification and validation, and seamlessly linking models and data.

The journal will publish:

• Detailed case studies of endeavors to integrate experiment and modeling to solve an enduring engineering problem in materials and manufacturing
• Introduction of novel experimental or computational techniques or data sets that enable bridging length or time domains
• Best practices in verification and validation of models, data curation, and standards and protocols for model integration and exchange of data
• In-depth descriptions of databases and database tools in the area of materials and manufacturing

Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation highly encourages submission of the key digital datasets supporting the article. Sufficient metadata must be included with datasets to adequately describe their provenance.

Open access

All articles published by Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

Authors of articles published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the SpringerOpen copyright and license agreement.

Article-processing charges

The publication costs for Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation are covered by The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), so authors do not need to pay an article-processing charge.

Indexing services

SpringerOpen is working closely with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation will be available.

Publication and peer review process

Articles suitable for Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation include:

•  Detailed case studies of endeavors to integrate experiment and modeling to solve an enduring engineering problem in materials and manufacturing
•  Introduction of novel experimental or computational techniques or data sets that enable bridging length or time domains
•  Best practices in verification and validation of models, data curation, and standards and protocols for model integration and exchange of data
•  In-depth descriptions of databases and database tools in the area of materials and manufacturing

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation, a personalized section of the site.

Portability of peer review

In order to support efficient and thorough peer review, we aim to reduce the number of times a manuscript is re-reviewed after rejection from Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation, thereby speeding up the publication process and reducing the burden on peer reviewers. Therefore, please note that, if a manuscript is not accepted for publication in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation and the authors choose to submit a revised version to another SpringerOpen journal, we will pass the reviews on to the other journal's editors at the authors' request. We will reveal the reviewers' names to the handling editor for editorial purposes unless reviewers let us know when they return their report that they do not wish us to share their report with another SpringerOpen journal.

Copyediting and proofs

Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation will copyedit manuscripts before they are published.

Following the acceptance of an article, it is published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation as a provisional PDF file with minimal delay (subject to formatting checks, copyediting and author verification). Fully formatted PDF and full-text (HTML) versions are made available shortly after that.

Reprints

Please see our reprints website for information about reprinting articles.

Supplements

Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. For further information, please contact us.

Editorial policies

Any manuscript, or substantial parts of it, submitted to the journal must not be under consideration by any other journal. In general, the manuscript should not have already been published in any journal or other citable form, although it may have been deposited on a preprint server. Authors are required to ensure that no material submitted as part of a manuscript infringes existing copyrights, or the rights of a third party.

Correspondence concerning articles published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation is encouraged. A 'post a comment' feature is available on all articles published by Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation. Comments will be moderated by the editorial office (see our Comment policy for further information) and linked to the full-text version of the article, if suitable.

Editorial standards

SpringerOpen is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). In order to safeguard the quality of SpringerOpen journal publications, Springer has developed a policy on Publishing Integrity which is in line with the philosophy of COPE.

We follow the principle that we have a prime duty to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. Springer’s Policy on Publishing Integrity addresses:

• Clear definitions of what violation of Publishing Integrity is.
• A manual on how to identify such a violation (in the document referred to as an Act of Misconduct).
• Clear (COPE) examples of what such an Act of Misconduct looks like in practice.
• Clearly defined actions which have to be undertaken by the Editor and Springer when such an Act is a clearly proven fact.
• Q & A – a useful list of Questions and Answers on the definition of Publishing Integrity.

Please find the full document of Springer’s Policy on Publishing Integrity here.

Data and materials release

Submission of a manuscript to Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation implies that readily reproducible materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes.

Any 'in press' articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should, in the first instance, contact the Editor-in-Chief who will provide details of the journal's complaints procedure.

Competing interests

Submitting authors are asked to declare that they have observed the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. A statement confirming this will be added to all submitted articles.

Plagiarism detection

Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation's publisher, SpringerOpen, is a member of the CrossCheck plagiarism detection initiative. In cases of suspected plagiarism CrossCheck is available to the editors of Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts by using the plagiarism detection tool iThenticate. CrossCheck is a multi-publisher initiative allowing screening of published and submitted content for originality.

Citing articles in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation

Articles in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. Integr Mater Manuf Innov [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Integr Mater Manuf Innov 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation?

High visibility

Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.

Speed of publication

Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation and SpringerOpen.

Flexibility

Online publication in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example to relevant databases and papers).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation's pages and on the SpringerOpen homepage.

In addition, articles published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation.

Copyright

Authors of articles published in Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the SpringerOpen copyright and license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from SpringerOpen, please click here.