Physical Review X
Physical Review X is the world’s leading open access journal for cutting-edge research across physics and adjacent fields. A premier venue among APS journals, the journal is highly selective with a diverse readership and provides a personalized experience for authors and referees.
Breaking New Ground in Physics
Reflecting the diversity and dynamics of today’s physics research, PRX showcases research in established core areas of physics that achieves breakthroughs in technology, experiment, and theory, or that represents a paradigm shift in understanding. The journal also publishes creative, impactful research that brings together multiple physics fields, or bridges physics with other disciplines.
PRX is renowned for its highly personalized and responsive editorial process that brings together authors, editors, and referees in an interactive, reasoned dialog to guide each article through the rigorous selection process and produce the best possible outcome. PRX realizes that not all research can be adequately described in only a few pages. The journal therefore offers flexible article lengths and formats that allow authors to engage and inform a broad audience, while also providing the scientific substance sought by specialists.
By Scientists, For Scientists
Like all of the journals in the Physical Review family, PRX is shaped by researchers to serve the research community. This ensures that its mission, standards, and policies prioritize the needs of researchers and the broader scientific community; this commitment is reinforced by APS’s promise as a founding member of the Purpose-Led Publishing coalition.
Submitted manuscripts should meet one or more of the following criteria:
- Makes a fundamental experimental or theoretical discovery
- Defines a landmark in a fast moving topic area
- Establishes key new connections between subfields or between other scientific disciplines and physics
- Propels an established field in an important new direction
- Significantly advances the state of the art of a field
- Creates a new paradigm or develops a paradigm shift of a field
- Provides high impact community tools or databases that enable substantial advances in a field
- This journal is funded through article publication charges (APCs), which are due once an article is accepted for publication.
- All articles are published with an open CC-BY (4.0 International) license with authors retaining copyright. This license permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work with proper attribution. APS reviews APCs regularly to ensure that it offers a reasonable and cost-effective publishing option for authors in line with APS’s status as a not-for-profit society publisher.
- APS authors are free to post the final version of their articles on their laboratory, institutional or departmental web sites.
- APS offers authors from lower-income countries the opportunity to publish open access at no cost by automatically offering APC waivers for articles accepted into all hybrid and gold open access titles. Learn more here.
Editorial Board
The PRX editorial board is a diverse group of active, distinguished scientists, selected by editors and appointed by the Executive Editor. Board members serve three-year terms. They may be requested by the editors to advise at any stage of the review process and they serve as adjudicators in formal appeals. PRX’s editorial board serves as a community-based sounding board for the ongoing evolution of the journal and its editorial policies.
Editorial Team
PRX is managed by a professional editorial team of Ph.D. scientists with extensive research experience at major academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. All editorial decisions are based on PRX acceptance criteria.
High Visibility, Broad Dissemination
PRX authors gain high visibility and achieve broad dissemination of their work by publishing in a high-impact, online-only publication that offers global free access. The editors bring attention to outstanding research and elucidate its importance through a number of features:
- Editors’ Suggestions: Selected papers are chosen as Editors’ Suggestions to direct readers to interesting, important, and well-written articles in areas of research beyond their usual interests. They garner, on average, more downloads and citations than other papers published in the journal and are more frequently covered by news outlets.
- Popular Summaries: Each article appears with a non-technical popular summary, disseminating the article’s main results to a broad readership.
- Featured in Physics: Editors regularly notify Physics, APS’s daily online news and commentary publication, about important papers, resulting in coverage in the forms of Synopsis, Focus, or Viewpoint.
- Publicity: APS promotes press-worthy papers from its journals to journalists through a weekly Tip Sheet, resulting in frequent coverage in industry publications and the popular press, such as Physics World and Business Insider.
- Indexing: ISI (Science Citation Index®), Scopus, Inspec, Google Scholar, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Follow APS on Social Media:
- X: @PhysRevX
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- WeChat: @APSPhysics
Editorial and Publishing Policies
All journals published by APS follow a common set of Editorial Policies and Practices, which cover Editorial Oversight and Decision Making, Authorship, Submissions, Resubmissions, and Transfers, Peer Review, Ethics and Research Integrity, Post Publication, and Open Access and Publications Rights.
PRX is published electronically one article at a time. Articles are identified by volume number and a six-digit article number, for example, Journal 1, XXXXXX (2020).
PRX editors can decide to accelerate the review process for a small number of manuscripts that report particularly important or groundbreaking research.