Strasbourg Students Physical Letters

(2SPL)

Strasbourg Students Physical Letters

The Strasbourg Students Physical Letters (2SPL) are a student-led scientific journal published by the students of the Quantum Science and Nanomaterials Interdisciplinary Thematic Institute (QMat) of the University of Strasbourg. Our Editorial Board is chosen from members of QMat's student organisation, the Young Investigators Group (YIG). We support a variety of YIG projects such as Student Seminars at the Faculty of Physics and Engineering, the annual Young Investigators Congress, and the Geometry for Quantum Science Group (GeQS).

See all 2SPL publications

The 2SPL Philosophy

Nowadays, researchers are evaluated, selected and promoted mainly on the basis of the number and the quality of their publications in peer-reviewed literature. In spite of this, many PhD students complete their thesis with no or very few published paper because they are not invited to, nor explained how to write and submit a scientific article.

The Strasbourg Students Physical Letters were created to give students a first experience of scientific publishing. We welcome any article on any subject related to physics, may it result from your own personal research, from a tutored project or from a laboratory internship. We encourage you to adapt your internship or project report in the form of a scientific article and submit it.

Note our submission/publication process is simplified but similar to what you can expect from any scientific journal. Namely, all submissions will be peer-reviewed by PhD students, and you will be given feedback to improve your article before publication.

Aims and scope

We publish well-written, scientifically sound and pedagogical articles in all fields related to physics, including (but not limited to)

soft and quantum condensed matter,
classical and quantum optics,
quantum foundations, quantum information and quantum computing,
nuclear and particle physics,
astrophysics and cosmology,
atomic and molecular physics,
materials science,
instrumentation and experimental techniques,
theoretical physics and applied mathematics,
computational physics,
engineering sciences,
experimental and theoretical chemistry,
biophysics,
econophysics,

etc.

In particular, we welcome bibliographic articles written by students. We do not make any assessment on the significance or the relevance of the article.

Article types

We welcome submissions of the following article types:

Letters: short communications by students that do not exceed ten pages. Letters should consist in a pedagogical, scientifically sound report of an experimental technique, a numerical method, a theory, etc. that is either new or not the direct subject of a Faculty lecture. Letters should be written in English.
Seminar proceedings: accounts of QMat Student Seminars held at the Faculty of Physics and Engineering. Seminar proceedings should be written in English.
Tutoring notes: accounts of tutoring sessions held at the Faculty of Physics and Engineering. Tutoring notes have a more flexible format and are subjected to a simplified peer-review process where revisions are asked only for correcting scientific errors. They can be published in French as well as in English.

Submission process

To submit an article, please send an email to the Editor-in-chief or any member of the Editorial Board (contact information here) briefly explaining the content of the work and containing:

your main *.tex file (the file we need to compile), titled main.tex,
all additional files needed for compilation (images, bibliography, LaTeX packages, etc.).

Find here an example of submission email (also called a cover letter).

Submissions are checked for completeness and relevance by the Editorial Board and then single-anonymously peer-reviewed (the reviewers’ identity is unknown to the author(s)). The Editorial Board takes a decision on publication upon reception of the reviewers’ reports:

acceptance: the article is accepted as it is and will be published as soon as you sign the licensing agreement we will send you,
minor changes required: the article should be resubmitted with a few changes (grammar, spelling, clarifying a paragraph...) according to the reviewer's comments, and the article should be directly published upon resubmission,
major changes required: the article should be resubmitted with major changes (structure, results...) according to the reviewer's comments, and the article will undergo a second peer-review after resubmission,
refusal: the article is rejected and should not be submitted again.

Submit an article

Research data and permissions

Please ensure that you have permission to publish the data and content you use in your article before submission. Notably, if the article results from an internship, ask your tutor to check the content of your article before submitting.

Open access

As a student journal, we are strongly dedicated to open access. All articles are published under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 License (Free distribution - Attribution - Share alike), and are made available on this website.

Author guidelines

Letters and seminar proceedings must be written in English, while we also accept tutoring notes written in French. Letters should not exceed ten pages.

Please use the following templates when composing your article:

(For tutoring notes, we exceptionally accept submissions made without the corresponding template). The bibliography should be sent in *.bib format. Images should be sent in *.pdf format, but they can alternatively be submitted in *.jpg or *.png.

Feel free to use other LaTeX packages than those included in the template, you may however be required to provide a *.sty file after the submission.

If you wonder what your article should look like, you can see a few examples here (the templates may have changed, but the structure is the same).