# Information for Authors

Call for Papers
The IMA Journal of Mathematical Control & Information is pleased to announce that after clearing a large backlog of good papers, the Journal is now encouraging submissions. The journal offers advance access and once accepted can be published online within 4 weeks of receipt at Oxford University Press.

Aims and Scope
The Journal is to provide an outlet for papers which are original and of high quality in mathematical control theory, systems theory, and applied information sciences. Short papers and mathematical correspondence or technical notes will be welcome, although the primary function of the journal is to publish papers of substantial length and coverage. The emphasis will be upon relevance, originality and clarify of presentation, although timeliness may well be an important feature in acceptable papers. Speculative papers that suggest new avenues for research or potential solutions to unsolved problems of control and information theory will be particularly welcome. Specific application papers will not normally be within the remit of the journal. Applications that illustrate techniques or theories will be acceptable. A prime function of the journal is to encourage the interplay between control and information theory and other mathematical sciences.

All submitted papers will be judged on their merits by at least two referees and a full paper report will be available to the intending authors. Submitted articles will in general be published in an issue within six months of submission. Papers should not have previously published, nor should they be undes consideration for publication in another journal. This Journal takes publication ethics very seriously. If misconduct is found or suspected after the manuscript is published, the journal will investigate the matter and this may result in the article subsequently being retracted.

Editors:

Professor Sarah Spurgeon FREng
Professor of Control Engineering
Department of Electronics
University of Kent
Canterbury
Kent CT27NT
UK

Nick Karcanias
Professor of Control Theory and Design
Associate Dean for Research,
School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences
Control Engineering Research Centre
City University
Northampton Square
London EC1V OHB
UK

## INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS

*New for 2010 – Please note that the journal now encourages authors to complete their copyright licence to publish form online*

## 1. SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS

Manuscripts must be submitted online. Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the instructions below please visit the online submission website. Instructions on submitting your manuscript online can be viewed here.

For specific information regarding style, please refer to the Ima style guide.

When submitting papers, you will need to include the names for four potential referees.

## 2. MANUSCRIPT LAYOUT

For style information, please see the IMA Style Guide.

Each page of the manuscript should be numbered. The front page should contain the article title, author's name and affiliation, keywords, and a summary. The summary or abstract should not exceed 300 words and should be intelligible to general readers without recourse to the main text. A list of notation should be avoided, but new notation and departures from standard use should be explained in text. Avoid footnotes.

Articles should, in general, begin with an introduction which adequately covers the literature and scope of the paper. Each section in the paper should be numbered and equation numbers should be related to their own section. For example, section 2 might use:

2. Main Results , equations numbers (2.1), (2.2) etc.'' Each article should have, in general, a conclusion or discussion section. Any appendices should follow the Reference section.

Equations should be typed wherever possible and punctuated to conform to their place in the syntax of the sentence.

The SI system of units should be used in all papers.

## 3. ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures must be submitted in the best possible quality and should allow for editing during the typesetting phase. Figures should be set within the document at their most appropriate location and not collected at the end of the document. Figure titles must be provided as text, must be separate from the figure object itself, and should immediately follow the figure. For figures produced using MS Excel, the "Chart Title" box should be empty. The use of "Gridlines" should be avoided. The use of a figure border and grey or coloured background areas should be avoided.

All figures submitted to the journal in colour will be published in colour online at no cost (unless the author specifically requests that their figures be in black and white online). Authors may choose to also publish their figures in colour in the print journal for £350 per figure: you will be asked to approve this cost in an e-mail after your article is accepted for publication. Colour figures must have a resolution of at least 300 dots per inch at their final size. Authors, who opt to publish black and white in print, should submit just one figure legend that works for both colour and grayscale. You will be issued an invoice at the time of publication.

Tables should again be positioned within the document at their most appropriate location and not collected at the end of the document. A table title should immediately proceed the table. The use of vertical dividing lines in tables should be kept to a minimum.

Table and figure titles should, within reason, be sufficiently detailed to allow the reader to understand and interpret the quantities represented therein without recourse to the main text of the manuscript.

## 4. REFERENCES

References will be listed at the end of the main text. The Harvard system, whereby the surname of the author and year of publication of the reference are used in the text is obligatory. The list of references should be in alphabetical order of first-cited names. References by the same author(s) should be in chronological order. The normal form of listed references is author's surname, initials; year in parenthesis; article title; journal name (abbreviated in accordance with the World List of Scientific Periodicals (4th edn)); volume number (underlined); inclusive page numbers.

## 5. LANGUAGE EDITING

Particularly if English is not your first language, before submitting your manuscript you may wish to have it edited for language. This is not a mandatory step, but may help to ensure that the academic content of your paper is fully understood by journal editors and reviewers. Language editing does not guarantee that your manuscript will be accepted for publication. If you would like information about one such service please click here. There are other specialist language editing companies that offer similar services and you can also use any of these. Authors are liable for all costs associated with such services.

## 6. FUNDING

Details of all funding sources for the work in question should be given in a separate section entitled 'Funding'. This should appear before the 'Acknowledgements' section.

The following rules should be followed:

• The sentence should begin: ‘This work was supported by …’
• The full official funding agency name should be given, i.e. ‘National Institutes of Health’, not ‘NIH’ (full RIN-approved list of UK funding agencies) Grant numbers should be given in brackets as follows: ‘[grant number xxxx]
• Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma as follows: ‘[grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]’
• Agencies should be separated by a semi-colon (plus ‘and’ before the last funding agency)
• Where individuals need to be specified for certain sources of funding the following text should be added after the relevant agency or grant number 'to [author initials]'.

An example is given here: ‘This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [AA123456 to C.S., BB765432 to M.H.]; and the Alcohol & Education Research Council [hfygr667789].’

### Crossref Funding Data Registry

In order to meet your funding requirements authors are required to name their funding sources, or state if there are none, during the submission process. For further information on this process or to find out more about the CHORUS initiative please click here.

It is a condition of publication in the Journal that authors assign copyright to Oxford University Press. Upon receipt of accepted manuscripts at Oxford Journals authors will be invited to complete an online copyright licence to publish form.

The licence form ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. In assigning copyright, authors may use their own material in other publications provided that the Journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication, and Oxford University Press is notified in writing and in advance. In consideration for assignment of copyright, the publisher will supply a URL of the paper.

Offprints may be ordered using the Oxford Journals Author Services site.

IMA authors have the option to publish their paper under the Oxford Open initiative; whereby, for a charge, their paper will be made freely available online immediately upon publication. After your manuscript is accepted the corresponding author will be required to accept a mandatory licence to publish agreement. As part of the licensing process you will be asked to indicate whether or not you wish to pay for open access. If you do not select the open access option, your paper will be published with standard subscription-based access and you will not be charged.

Oxford Open articles are published under Creative Commons licences. Authors publishing in IMA can use the following Creative Common licence for their articles:

• Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY)

You can pay Open Access charges using our Author Services site. This will enable you to pay online with a credit/debit card, or request an invoice by email or post. The open access charges applicable are:

Regular charge - £1750/ $2800 / €2275 List B Developing country charge* - £875 /$1400 / €1138
List A Developing country charge* - £0 /\$0 / €0

Please note that these charges are in addition to any colour charges that may apply.

Orders from the UK will be subject to the current UK VAT charge. For orders from the rest of the European Union, OUP will assume that the service is provided for business purposes. Please provide a VAT number for yourself or your institution, and ensure your account for your own local VAT correctly.

Please see these guidelines for reuse of Oxford Open content.

## 8. ACCEPTANCE OF LATEX

Authors of accepted papers will be asked to provide the LATEX source files of the paper. In preparing the paper, please use the standard article.cls file and when sending the source file for submission, please ensure that all the macros used to write your paper accompany the manuscript. If you have any questions about the use of this file in preparing your paper, please contact: imamci@oxfordjournals.org

Please follow all the usual instructions to authors as detailed above, however, text width should be set to 30 picas (126 mm) and the page depth to 46 picas (195 mm). It is very important to follow the correct referencing system.