IEEE Photonics Technology Letters

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

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

Unprecedented and non-incremental experimental results

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

Yes, if there is proper disclosure of information. The use of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in an article (including but not limited to text, figures, images, and code) shall be disclosed in the acknowledgments section of any article submitted to an IEEE publication. The AI system used shall be identified, and specific sections of the article that use AI-generated content shall be identified and accompanied by a brief explanation regarding the level at which the AI system was used to generate the content.

The use of AI systems for editing and grammar enhancement is common practice and, as such, is generally outside the intent of the above policy. In this case, disclosure as noted above is recommended.

Under no circumstances is it permitted to use AI tools to fabricate/manipulate data, code, figures or other research output with the intention of falsifying/distorting research results.

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

• Obtain written permission from the contact or lead author of the previous publication.
• If the previous publication is not an IEEE publication, obtain written permission from the copyright holding organization to reproduce the material. This also applies if you reproduce your own work published under a third party’s copyright.
• Clearly indicate in your submission the material that is being reproduced.
• State in the introduction of your paper in how far your work goes beyond previously published work which you partially reproduce in your PTL submission.

Requesting permission through IEEE

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

1. Please locate the content beginning at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp.
2. Once on the abstract page of the article, please locate the “Request Permission” link in the left navigation panel.
3. You can also find the copyright symbol directly on the article Table of Content.
4. If you find there are none of these links, you should open the free front pages of the content to determine if there is another rights holder, as this is an indication that IEEE is not the intellectual-property rights holder and cannot grant permission for reuse.
5. If the links are there, please choose one, as this will take you to the permission application page. If you are not able to use the RightsLink service, permission licensing may also be obtained through www.copyright.com.

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

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

This publication is entirely based on volunteers doing the technical part of the work, including the Editor-in-Chief, the Deputy Editors, the Associate Editors, and the Reviewers. While we strive to provide the fastest possible review times, we do not compromise on the quality of our reviews. Finding diligent yet responsive expert reviewers can sometimes be difficult, which may result in longer review times.

We are always looking to expand the reviewer pool. Please consider becoming a speedy, high-quality reviewer yourself.

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

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

Authors may share or post their accepted article in the following locations:

• Author’s personal website
• Author’s employer’s website or institutional repository
• arXiv.org
• TechRxiv.org
• Funder’s repository*

Once accepted by IEEE, the posted article must be removed from any other third-party servers.

Unless the work is published as an open access article or with a U.S. Government, EU, or Crown copyright, IEEE must be credited as the copyright holder with the following statement included on the initial screen displaying IEEE-copyrighted material:

“© 20XX IEEE.  Personal use of this material is permitted.  Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”

For articles under U.S. Government, EU, or Crown copyright protection, authors must follow the copyright holder’s requirements.

*IEEE policy provides that authors are free to follow funder public access mandates to post accepted articles in repositories. When posting in a repository, the IEEE embargo period is 24 months. However, IEEE recognizes that posting requirements and embargo periods vary by funder. IEEE authors may comply with requirements to deposit their accepted articles in a repository per funder requirements where the embargo is less than 24 months. Information on specific funder requirements can be found here.

Early Access articles are intended to help authors get published as quickly as possible. Early Access articles are accepted and peer-reviewed but may not be fully edited or assigned to a publication issue or volume. All Early Access articles are fully citable (by DOI) as soon as they appear in IEEE Xplore.

Early Access articles are available online much sooner and are normally posted on IEEE Xplore within one week of authors uploading their final files upon acceptance.

To be considered as a reviewer, you must create an account for the IEEE PTL Author Portal Site. Once you create the account, your name will be added to a pool of potential reviewers. You may also submit your publication list and your areas of expertise to our staff to forward to the journal Editor-in-Chief. For further information IEEE Reviewer Information visit the IEEE Author Center. Your volunteer work will be highly appreciated!

No. IEEE policy states the following regarding the use of AI by peer reviewers: Information or content contained in or about a manuscript under review shall not be processed through a public platform (directly or indirectly) for AI generation of text for a review. Doing so is considered a breach of confidentiality because AI systems generally learn from any input.

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

If you find an essential technical mistake in your own published paper, please submit “Comments/Corrections” to the IEEE Author Portal for this publication indicating the paper and the mistake in it and writing a short clarification that corrects the mistake. This document will be examined within the Editorial Board and published accordingly. If you discover a mistake in another author’s publication, it is good practice to inform the other author of the mistake and initiate a dialogue. As an outcome of this dialogue, the other author may choose to publish an “Comments/Corrections”, or you may choose to publish a “Comments/Corrections” on the paper in question. For further questions, contact our staff.

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

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

Read more about the IEEE eCF here and here.