i-Perception

1. Open Access
2. Article Processing Charge (APC)
3. Manuscript types
4. Editorial Policies
   4.1 Peer review policy
   4.2 Authorship
   4.3 Acknowledgments
   4.4 Declaration of conflicting interests
   4.5 Research ethics and patient consent
   4.6 Data
   4.7 Research Data
5. Publishing Policies
   5.1 Publication Ethics
   5.2 Contributor's publishing agreement
   5.3 Permissions
6. Preparing your manuscript
   6.1 Word processing formats
   6.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
   6.3 Graphical Abstract
   6.4 Style
   6.5 Equations and Formulae
   6.6 Nomenclature
   6.7 Supplementary material
   6.8 Journal layout
   6.9 Reference style
   6.10 English language editing services
7. Submitting your manuscript
   7.1 ORCID
   7.2 How to submit your manuscript
   7.3 Title, keywords and abstracts
   7.4 Corresponding author details
   7.5 Early Career Advancement Prize
8. On acceptance and publication
   8.1 Sage Production
   8.2 Continuous publication
9. Further Information

This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Please read the guidelines below then visit the Journal’s submission site to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.

Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of i-Perception will be reviewed.

As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you. Any submission found to have been submitted elsewhere will be automatically rejected.

Note that any submission based on material previously available on-line is expected to be considerably extended, with a different title, and with the previous on-line version fully referenced.

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1. Open Access

i-Perception is an open access, peer-reviewed journal. Each article accepted by peer review is made freely available online immediately upon publication, is published under a Creative Commons license and will be hosted online in perpetuity. Publication costs of the journal are covered by the collection of Article Processing Charges which are paid by the funder, institution or author of each manuscript upon acceptance. There is no charge for submitting a paper to the journal.

For general information on open access at Sage please visit the Open Access page or view our Open Access FAQs.

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2. Article Processing Charge (APC)

If, after peer review, your manuscript is accepted for publication, a one-time article processing charge (APC) is payable. This APC is discounted for a limited time and covers the cost of publication and ensures that your article will be freely available online in perpetuity under a Creative Commons licence.

• The article processing charge (APC) for Regular Articles is 1000 GBP (+ VAT where applicable*).
• The article processing charge (APC) for Short reports and Methods is 520 GBP (+ VAT where applicable*).
• The article processing charge (APC) for Registered Reports is 1000 GBP (+ VAT where applicable*).
• The article processing charge (APC) for Journal Club and Short & Sweet Articles is 385 GBP (+ VAT where applicable*).
• There is no charge for i-reviews.

*The article processing charge (APC) is payable upon acceptance after peer review and is subject to value added tax (VAT) where applicable. If the paying author/institution is based in the European Union, to comply with European law, VAT must be added to the APC. Providing a VAT registration number will allow an institution to avoid paying this tax, except for UK institutions. Payments can be made in GBP or USD.

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3. Manuscript types

Manuscripts may be submitted as Standard articles, Short Reports, Registered Reports, i-Reviews, Journal Club (formerly, i-Comment), Short & Sweet, Replies or Methods papers.

Standard articles: These form the bulk of the content in both journals. They are open submissions on any aspect of perception involving any one or more sensory modalities. Sections should usually include (in order): abstract, introduction, methods, results (and discussion), and (general) discussion. The abstract is limited to 200 words. Authors are particularly encouraged to aim for brevity and, where possible, to submit content that is not essential to understanding the paper as supplementary materials.  Authors should also write in a style that will be accessible to readers without expertise in the immediate subject area of the article.

Short reports: These should be to-the-point and aimed at a broad readership. The word limit is 4000 words, including the abstract (up to 150 words), figure captions, and references, but excluding acknowledgements. There is no limit on the number of tables and figures, but authors are advised to aim for no more than two or three. Short reports should be structured the same as standard articles, clearly labelled, and present one or two experiments or theoretical analyses that either (i) have broad, accessible appeal or (ii) are likely to have high impact and relevance within a subfield of perceptual/sensory science. Reviewers and editors should recognise that papers are likely to have less content than a standard article, and this should also speed up the review process. 

Registered Reports:  These allow you to submit a prospective manuscript for a study that you have not yet run. The review is completed in 2 stages.  At Stage 1 (before results) the manuscript will be assessed on the basis of how strong the hypotheses are and whether the methodology and design are robust and promising. At this point the paper can be accepted in principle or rejected. If accepted in principle then the final article should be accepted unless the final manuscript fails to conduct the study originally described. The Stage 1 manuscript should include: introduction - spelling out why the study is important; methods - including information to interpret whether the study is sufficiently sensitive to find a positive result (or to interpret a null result); analysis - detailing as fully as possible the analysis steps that will be used. We recognise that many submissions to the journal do not conform to a classical approach of making inferences based on group statistics. Therefore, we deliberately have no mandatory requirements for power analyses or evidence levels. However, a Stage 1 submission should lay out how evidence for or against a hypothesis will be assessed, and contain appropriate outcome-neutral conditions (e.g., manipulation checks, quality assurance, minimum curve-fit statistics, etc.) to evaluate whether results are conclusive. The Stage 1 submission may also include pilot data, but this is not required. You may write in the past tense, but must have an explicit statement at the top to make sure readers of the Stage 1 manuscript understand this. Stage 1 acceptance is conditional on the authors also submitting, immediately after Stage 1 acceptance, a formal registration to an appropriate repository such as the Open Science Framework (see https://osf.io/rr/). This preregistration can be kept private but must be accessible to the editorial team. At this point authors should also declare an approximate date by which they expect the study to be completed (this can be amended in consultation with the editors). At Stage 2 (after results), you should add the data and analyses previously described, and a discussion, so the final paper is similar to a Standard Article. Additional data and/or analyses, not included in Stage 1, can also be provided at this stage but these must be clearly distinguished from the a priori analyses. At the point of submitting a Stage 2 manuscript, the preregistered Stage 1 manuscript must be made public. The Stage 2 manuscript will then undergo peer review again. Failure to submit the Stage 2 manuscript by the deadline will result in withdrawal of the Stage 1 manuscript by the journal. Authors can also choose to withdraw an accepted Stage 1 manuscript. The journal will publish a note about withdrawn manuscripts, including a link to the preregistered Stage 1 submission. For queries about this format, please contact the Registered Reports editor Sam Schwarzkopf.

i-Perception is affiliated with  the Peer Community In Registered Reports as a PCI-interested journal. The journal may offer in-principle acceptance for any Stage 1 manuscript within its disciplinary range but reserves the option for further peer review at Stage 2. Authors taking advantage of the PCI RR track should submit their Stage 2 Registered Report using our usual submission system. The manuscript must include the URL to the reviews and recommendation at PCI RR. The submission must also be accompanied by a cover letter stating that the authors are submitting via the PCI RR track, including a URL to the recommended preprint, and confirming that the manuscript is identical to the recommended preprint. To facilitate this process, authors may suggest Sam Schwarzkopf as recommender in their coverletter submitted to PCI:RR at Stage 1. For queries about this format, please contact the Registered Reports editor Sam Schwarzkopf.

Journal Club (formerly i-Comment): This section publishes journal club style articles that review recently published literature from any journal in the study of perception. This format is open to researchers at any stage of their career, but those at an early stage of their career (graduate students, post-docs) are particularly encouraged to submit to this section. Submissions can review articles published within the last two years. Submissions to this section could take the form of a concise and articulate summary of the most critical findings from an empirical article. More critical submissions, however, are also welcome: all too often the concerns raised by journal clubs in individual labs have no airing space in widely accessible publication formats. More speculative submissions, for example, that link an empirical article to a theoretical position, or field of research, not considered by the authors, are also encouraged. Articles should be no more than 1500 words. Submissions may contain figures. Please contact the Journal Club editor Vebjørn Ekroll with specific questions about content.

Short & Sweet (SAS): For this section, the conventional rules of publication are relaxed. Papers should report material that will appeal to sensory scientists, but for which detailed experiments, complex analysis, and well-worked computational models should not have been performed. The work should be easy to describe, have theoretical relevance, and appeal to a broad readership. The point(s) should not require much (or any) data or analysis, though the methodological details that are important for interpretation should be clear where appropriate (these details can be placed in figure legends if desired). A light-hearted approach is strongly encouraged and the work might be written to amuse or entertain. The word limit is 1200 words, including the abstract (up to 150 words), figure captions, and references, but excluding acknowledgements. To encourage brevity and informality, there should be no section headings apart from the abstract. Other than length and headings, one of the main differences between SAS and Short reports, is the quirky nature of SAS. These papers will usually be sent to just a single reviewer. Occasionally, a second reviewer might be asked at the editor's discretion. The journal aims to publish one SAS paper per issue.

Replies: commenting upon an article published in i-Perception, may be considered for publication but the author should contact the editorial office to gauge suitability before submission. Replies should be shorter than the target article in length.

Methods: This section publishes papers specifically relating to any aspect of methodology in perceptual science, including experimental set-up, measurement techniques and analysis.  Manuscripts focusing on innovations, developments or evaluations of existing methods will all be considered. 

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4. Editorial policies

4.1 Peer review policy

i-Perception adheres to an anonymized peer review process in which the reviewer’s name is routinely withheld from the author unless the reviewer requests a preference for their identity to be revealed. Where article replies are commissioned/submitted, these replies will be subject to review at the handling editor's discretion. 

 

4.2 Authorship

All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis (see APA guidelines).

If you would like your author biography included in your published paper then please upload this during the submission process on Step 6: File Upload, and designate it as ‘Author Biography’.

i-Perception is trialing the publication of CRediT author contribution statements. At submission stage, there will be the ability to list the roles that each author was responsible for. Please refer to the CRediT Gateway page for more information. You should not include an author contribution statement in your manuscript as this will be added at Production stage. This does not replace the Acknowledgements section.

Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools.

4.3 Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgements section. The sources of financial support or any other support can also be mentioned there.

4.3.1 Third party submissions
Where an individual who is not listed as an author submits a manuscript on behalf of the author(s), a statement must be included in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript and in the accompanying cover letter. The statements must:

• Disclose this type of editorial assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input
• Identify any entities that paid for this assistance
• Confirm that the listed authors have authorized the submission of their manuscript via third party and approved any statements or declarations, e.g. conflicting interests, funding, etc.

Where appropriate, Sage reserves the right to deny consideration to manuscripts submitted by a third party rather than by the authors themselves.

4.4 Declaration of conflicting interests

i-Perception encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.

4.5 Research ethics and patient consent

Medical research involving human subjects must be conducted according to the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki

Submitted manuscripts should conform to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, and all papers reporting animal and/or human studies must state in the methods section that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board provided (or waived) approval. Please ensure that you have provided the full name and institution of the review committee, in addition to the approval number.

For research articles, authors are also required to state in the methods section whether participants provided informed consent and whether the consent was written or verbal.

Information on informed consent to report individual cases or case series should be included in the manuscript text. A statement is required regarding whether written informed consent for patient information and images to be published was provided by the patient(s) or a legally authorized representative.

Please also refer to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Protection of Research Participants.

4.6 Data

Sage acknowledges the importance of research data availability as an integral part of the research and verification process for academic journal articles.  Once accepted for publication, the author is expected to make stimulus material and raw data available if requested.

Some funders require, and Sage strongly recommends, that you provide a statement on how any underlying research materials related to your paper (for example data, samples or models) can be accessed. This information should include links to third-party data repositories or detailed contact information for third-party data sources. Data available only on an author-maintained website will need to be loaded onto either the journal’s platform or a third-party platform to ensure continuing accessibility. Examples of data types include but are not limited to statistical data files, replication code, text files, audio files, images, videos, appendices, and additional charts and graphs necessary to understand the original research. All data submitted should comply with Institutional or Ethical Review Board requirements and applicable government regulations. For further information, please contact the editorial office at:  Annabelle.redfern@bristol.ac.uk

4.7 Research Data

The journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. For more information, including FAQs please visit the Sage Research Data policy pages.

Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:

• share your research data in a relevant public data repository
• include a data availability statement linking to your data. If it is not possible to share your data, we encourage you to consider using the statement to explain why it cannot be shared.
• cite this data in your research

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5. Publishing policies

5.1 Publication ethics

Sage is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the Publication Ethics page on the Sage Author Gateway.  

5.1.1 Plagiarism

i-Perception and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of articles published in the journal. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked using duplication-checking software. Where an article is found to have plagiarised other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article (removing it from the journal); taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author’s institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; banning the author from publication in the journal or all Sage journals, or appropriate legal action.

5.2 Contributor's publishing agreement

Before publication Sage requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. i-Perception publishes manuscripts under Creative Commons licenses. The standard i-Perception license is Creative Commons by Attribution (CC BY 3.0), which allows others to re-use the work without permission as long as the work is properly referenced. For more information, you are advised to visit Sage's OA licenses page.

Your responsibilities as author: inclusion of other copyright material

Sage is sympathetic to the needs of scholars to include other copyright material, and is happy to provide guidance on this.  Responsibility for obtaining permission to use any other copyright material rests with you as the author of the Contribution.

If your Contribution includes material which is not your copyright, you are responsible for submitting with your manuscript the written permission from those who control copyright in that material to include it and reproduce it within your Contribution. In most cases this will be the publisher of the work.  As the Journal is available in both print and electronic media and may be translated or archived, this permission needs to be for all media in all languages in perpetuity. You are responsible for the payment of any permission fees.

5.3 Permissions

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.

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6. Preparing your manuscript

6.1 Word processing formats

Preferred formats for the text and tables of your manuscript are Word DOC, RTF, XLS. LaTeX files are also accepted.The text should be single-spaced or 1.5-spaced throughout and with a minimum of 3cm for left and right hand margins and 5cm at head and foot. Text should be standard 10 or 12 point. Word and (La)Tex templates are available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines page of our Author Gateway.

6.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics

We request that the submitted manuscript file includes low resolution figures embedded in the text, for the convenience of the reviewers.  For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit Sage’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

If your article is accepted, please prepare images as outlines below:

1. If figures are in vector format, an eps/pdf could be accepted, if in image format Lineart=1200DPI, Linetone=600DPI and halftone=350DPI would be preferred.

2. Vector files such as AI and EPS can remain editable to allow us to edit any text or other elements within the graphic.

3. If figures are in the form of flowcharts, drawings, slides, maps, bar/pie/line/column charts which are created in excel, word, power point or in pdf format with editable text format could be accepted as source file.

Please do not provide the figures that contain jelly images, photographs, and halftone and line tone images with text in formats like JPG/PNG/TIFF as we would not be able to edit the text/objects.

Figures supplied in colour will appear in colour online.

If your article contains videos please upload these as “Supplementary Material” on Sage Track. Upon acceptance, please specify if you would like your videos embedded directly into your article or uploaded as supplementary material alongside your article. If you would like your videos uploaded as supplementary material then please refer to this within your article, e.g. “please see Video 1A in online Supplementary Material”. Please note videos are only embedded in the HTML, in the PDF readers will be directed to view videos in the HTML version of the article. When you receive your article proofs please confirm with the production editor that the information they have regarding videos is correct. After the proof has been signed off for publication no further changes to the article can be made. 

6.3 Graphical Abstract

Authors may choose to submit a Graphical Abstract that will be published in the online version of each manuscript. This is a concise, visual summary of the article’s main findings, and should capture the content of the article for the readers at a single glance.

Please download this template to create a Graphical Abstract. Authors should add text and graphics/icons as applicable for their content. Please do not include the entire abstract text, but rather present a brief summary of the key findings. We are unable to accommodate reprinted or attributional material within the Graphical Abstract. Graphical abstracts should be submitted as a separate file in the submission system by selecting “Graphical abstracts" from the drop-down list at the File Upload stage.

6.4 Style

Authors are urged to write as clearly as possible, in English (either UK or US usage is acceptable but should be consistent throughout the manuscript), with emphasis on what they judge to be of greatest importance and interest with, where possible, clearly stated theoretical implications.  Experimental results should be presented in sufficient detail for replication to be possible.  Statistical tests need not be given in full.  Abbreviations should be used sparingly.  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is recommended as the spelling reference.

6.5 Equations and Formulae

Great care should be taken in differentiating between capital and lowercase characters (s and S, c and C, p and P, etc), Latin and Greek characters (k and kappa, p and rho, w and omega, etc), and letters and numerals (l and 1, z and 2, etc).

6.6 Nomenclature

It is recommended that the authors follow the Royal Society's latest publication `Quantities, Units, and Symbols' and use the SI system of units.

6.7 Supplementary material

This journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc) alongside the full-text of the article. These will be subjected to peer-review alongside the article.  For more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplementary files, which can be found within our Manuscript Submission Guidelines page.

6.8 Journal layout

i-Perception conforms to the Sage house style.  Click here to review guidelines on Sage UK House Style.

6.9 Reference style

i-Perception adheres to the APA reference style. Click here to review the guidelines on APA to ensure your manuscript conforms to this reference style.

All references must contain the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), e.g.:

Krix, A. C., Sauerland, M. & Schreuder, M. J. (2017). Masking the Identities of Celebrities and Personally Familiar Individuals: Effects on Visual and Auditory Recognition Performance. Perception, 46, 1133-1150.  doi:10.1177/0301006617710621

Reference to on-line materials such as blogs should include the URL with a date for when the link was last accessed.

Please note: All references must be in English or include an English translation.

6.10 English language editing services

Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using Sage Language Services. Visit Sage Language Services on our Journal Author Gateway for further information, including costs.

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7. Submitting your manuscript

7.1 ORCID

As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process Sage is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized. 

The collection of ORCID IDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID iD you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID iD will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID iD is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.

If you do not already have an ORCID ID please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.

7.2 How to submit your manuscript

Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you carefully read and adhere to all the guidelines and instructions to authors provided below. Manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.

i-Perception is hosted on Sage Track - a web based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne Manuscripts. Please read the Manuscript Submission guidelines below, and then simply visit https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/i-perception to login and submit your article online.

IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created. For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne Online Help.

All papers must be submitted via the online system. If you would like to discuss your paper prior to submission, please refer to the contact details below.

7.3 Title, keywords and abstracts

Please supply a short title and keywords (in addition to the main title and abstract)  to accompany your article. The title, keywords and abstract are key to ensuring readers find your article online through online search engines such as Google. Please refer to the information and guidance on how best to title your article, write your abstract and select your keywords by visiting the Sage Journal Author Gateway for guidelines on How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online

7.4 Corresponding author contact details

Provide full contact details for the corresponding author including email, mailing address and telephone numbers. Academic affiliations are required for all co-authors. In the case the first author is likely to move in the near future, as is often the case with PhD students and post-docs, we advise use of a longer-term email address (for example a gmail address).

7.5 Early Career Advancement Prize

If the primary author is either working towards a PhD, or is no more than 5 years beyond their PhD viva date when the paper is first submitted, the paper may be entered for an Early Career Best Paper Prize. Please tick to confirm that you wish the paper to be considered, and provide details of PhD viva and supervisor together with a brief explanation of why you feel the author is a worthy candidate for this submission. Please note that it would be very difficult to show sufficient excellence for a prize within the confines of the Short and Sweet format. You will be advised whether or not your application was successful after acceptance of the paper.  Prize-winning papers will be published in i-Perception for free and publicised by the journal. Candidate papers which are accepted for publication but are not awarded the prize may, if the author chooses, be transferred to Perception to avoid publication charges. This opportunity is open to any new submissions to i-Perception from eligible authors who have not previously received this prize.

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8. On acceptance and publication

8.1 Sage Production

Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be sent by PDF to the corresponding author and should be returned promptly.

8.2 Continuous publication

One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no issues to fill and no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as it has completed the production process. At this time it will be completely free to view and download. Check the ‘Latest Articles’ tab on the journal website for the latest published content. Articles are batched six times per year, and are then available in the archive.

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9. Further Information

Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the i-Perception editorial office as follows: annabelle.redfern@bristol.ac.uk

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