Submission. Authors must submit via PiMMS (the Pion Manuscript Management System). Submission of a paper implies acceptance of the following four conditions: (1) the paper reports original unpublished work; (2) the manuscript is not being concurrently submitted to any other publication and not being made available in electronic form; (3) the authors are fully authorised to submit the material for publication; and (4) if accepted, the paper will not be republished in printed or electronic form without the consent of the publishers. Papers may be submitted as regular articles or as ‘Last but not least’ articles.
Electronic manuscript files.
Authors must upload the following electronic files (this includes LBNL papers):
Figures and illustrations. Though low resolution figures should be used in the original submission, the final individual figures should have at least 300dpi resolution for greyscale or colour TIFFs, and at least 600dpi resolution for black and white TIFFs. Colour printing must be paid by authors and, if a paper contains colour, this should be indicated in the Confidential Information section of the submission form; if the paper is accepted, authors will be contacted in due course with an estimate of costs. It is possible to have colour in the electronic version of the paper free of charge (the paper copy will be in black and white). However, the black-and-white copy must then be intelligible independent of the colour—for example, different shades of grey could be used to indicate different lines in a graph. Colour images are welcome as "additional material" (see below).
Style. Authors are urged to write as clearly as possible, in English (either UK or US usage is acceptable), 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.
Presentation. 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).
Abstract. All papers should be preceded by a brief abstract (of about 200 words for regular articles, and no more than 150 words for LBNL articles).
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.
Website. We encourage the submission of additional material relevant to the submitted manuscript, to be hosted on the Perception website—for example, the stimuli used in the published study, or material which cannot be represented in print, such as animations or colour images (see above).
References. References in the text should give the surname of the author and the year of publication in parentheses, for example Attneave (1935) or (Attneave 1935) followed by a, b, ... when two or more references to work by the same author(s) are given for the same year. At the end of the text the references should be listed in alphabetical order of authors' names and in chronological order for each author. Titles of papers and the names of periodicals should be given in full, with initial and final page numbers. The publisher and town of publication should be given for books. Examples of reference citation are given below:
Carpenter R H S, 1988 Movement of the Eyes 2nd edition (London: Pion)
Morgan M J, 1991 "Hyperacuity", in Spatial Vision Ed. D M Regan (London: Macmillan) pp 87 - 113
Nascimento S M C, 1995 Surface Colour Perception under Illuminant Transformations PhD thesis, Keele University, Keele, UK
The Highway Code 1974 (London: HMSO)
Watanabe T, Cavanagh P, 1996 "Texture laciness: the texture equivalent of transparency" Perception 25 293 - 303
Wenderoth P (forthcoming) "The effects of the contrast polarity of dot pair partners on the detection of bilateral symmetry"
Proofs and reprints. The proofs should be returned without delay and alterations kept to a minimum. Authors will receive permission to distribute a limited number of electronic copies (PDFs), which will be supplied to them on request.
Meeting the requirements of grant-awarding bodies.
In some cases, grant-awarding bodies set certain publication requirements—for instance, requiring funded research to be made publicly available in an unrestricted format within a certain time period. We are almost always able to satisfy the requirements of funding bodies, and invite authors to contact us if they have any concerns in this regard.
Submission of ‘Last but not least’ manuscripts.
‘Last but not least’ is a section of Perception in which the conventional rules of publication are relaxed. This section 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 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). The work might also be written to amuse. Manuscripts are limited to a length of 1200 words (including abstract, references, and figure captions, but excluding the title page and acknowledgements) and abstracts are limited to 150 words and should not include references. Papers and abstracts shorter than this are strongly encouraged. To encourage brevity and informality, there should be no section headings apart from the abstract.
Prospective manuscripts should be submitted via PiMMS (the Pion Manuscript Management System) in the file types described above. During the submission process ‘Last but not least’ should be selected as the paper type (default is "Standard article"). The word counts of the abstract and the full length must be stated in the Confidential Information section of the submission. Papers exceeding the limits described above will be returned to the authors without review. Before being sent out for review, the section editor first assesses the general suitability of papers for publication in this section.
The journal aims to publish one ‘Last but not least’ paper per issue.
Ethics of experiments.
When describing experiments using humans, the author(s) should include a statement in the paper confirming that those experiments were carried out in accordance with the relevant institutional and national regulations and legislation and with the World Medical Association Helsinki Declaration as revised in October 2008 (http://www.wma.net/e/policy/b3.htm). Where animals were used a similar declaration of conformity with the relevant institutional and national regulations and legislation should be included.