Optics Express Submission Guide: How to Submit to OE (Optica Publishing Group)

Optics Express publishes original research articles, special-issue contributions, invited reviews, and comments on published articles. It is explicitly not a letters journal, so the need for urgent dissemination is not by itself a reason for acceptance, and short-format speed is the job of Optics Letters instead.

Original research articles have no hard page cap. Length is governed by completeness and by the page-based open-access charge rather than by a reformatting limit, which means an over-long article is judged on whether every section earns its space and on whether you are willing to pay the per-page overage above 15 published pages.

The abstract is limited to about 100 words and must be a stand-alone summary that states the problem, the methods, and the major results and conclusions. The review criteria are explicit that an abstract should not read as an introduction, and reviewers are asked to judge whether it works on its own.

Comments on published articles are a distinct article type with their own brief format, intended for substantive technical response rather than general discussion.

For files, Optica provides a LaTeX template and style guide for Optics Express, and authors should include a data availability statement with the submission. The Prism form also collects the standard declarations: a conflicts of interest disclosure, a funding statement, author contributions where applicable, ORCID iDs, and any supplementary material uploaded as separate files. Manuscripts whose English quality is not appropriate for an archival journal can be returned for language reasons, so the presentation bar is enforced at review, not deferred.

Before the novelty statement and declarations are locked, an Optics Express novelty-and-impact readiness check can confirm whether the statement actually argues the advance against prior work or whether it restates the abstract.

Optics Express assigns submissions to a Deputy Editor and then an Associate Editor in the relevant area, drawing on a board of more than 100 Associate Editors who handle manuscripts through Prism. Optica reports a median first decision near 32 days and median publication near 79 days, and SciRev community data agrees, with a first round near 0.9 months and about 2.2 reports. Treat the stages below as planning ranges, not commitments.

• Day 0: Submission and form completion. The Prism portal ingests your files, the cover letter, and the novelty-and-impact statement. You confirm the single corresponding author, the data availability statement, and the policy and licensing answers, then submit.

• Days 1 to 5: Editorial screening. Editorial staff and a Deputy Editor check scope fit, the optics-centrality question, completeness, and language quality.

The fastest returns happen here: out-of-scope work, manuscripts where optics is not central, and language-quality returns rarely reach external review.

• Days 5 to 14: Associate Editor assignment. An Associate Editor in the relevant photonics area takes the manuscript and decides whether to send it for review or return it.

Work that reads as incremental against the novelty bar is commonly returned at this stage before reviewers are invited.

• Days 14 to 32: Peer review. Reviewers are invited and reports return, typically about two reports per round, on a multi-week cadence. The median first decision near 32 days places most outcomes in this window.

• Weeks 5 to 10: Decision and revision. Reject, revise, or accept.

A manuscript judged moderately low or very low on scope, novelty, or technical content will generally not be accepted, and one needing significant revision is rejected and must be resubmitted as a new manuscript rather than carried through a revision round.

• Weeks 10 to 12: Final decision and production. Median time to publication runs near 79 days from submission, with faster outcomes for clean single-round papers and slower ones where the novelty argument needed strengthening.

In our pre-submission review work with Optics Express submissions, four patterns generate the most consistent early returns. None of them are about the optics being wrong. They are about novelty framing and evidence packaging that this journal screens for before peer review begins, because Optics Express tells reviewers in writing that incremental work is likely to be rejected.

In our review of optics and photonics manuscripts, each of these is a named rejection pattern you can check your own draft against, and each reflects an editorial triage pattern specific to how Associate Editors at this journal read submissions. The required novelty-and-impact statement raises the stakes on every one of these, because the journal forces the novelty question to the front of review.

Editors consistently screen for these before sending a manuscript out for review.

Optics Express review criteria and the Optica Publishing Group author guide define the mechanics below; the patterns describe how manuscripts coming through pre-submission review for this journal most often fall short of them. SciRev community data on this journal, where authors report a first round near 0.9 months and about 2.2 reports per submission, is consistent with what we see: most attrition happens at the scope and novelty screen, before reviewers ever weigh in, and these four patterns are why.

Incremental device or system demonstrations with no clear advance over prior work. The single most common stall we see is a competent demonstration that nonetheless reads as a small step. The manuscript reports a working device, a slightly improved figure of merit, or a known technique applied to a new wavelength, and the novelty-and-impact statement claims significance without showing it.

An Associate Editor reads it against the journal's own test, would I learn anything new or surprising, and the honest answer is no. Optics Express states directly that incremental work is likely to be rejected, so a paper whose contribution is an expected next increment, rather than a result that enables a new application or solves an important problem, is a leading reason submissions are returned before external review.

The fix is not more polish on the device. It is an honest novelty argument, supported by data, that explains why this result was not obvious.

Check whether your Optics Express novelty-and-impact statement argues a real advance →

Simulation-only work whose conclusions are not supported by the data presented. A large share of Optics Express submissions are computational or theoretical. The parallel failure on simulation-only manuscripts is a results section that asserts performance or behavior the figures do not actually establish. The technical-content criterion is explicit: reviewers ask whether the conclusions are supported by the data presented and whether the work is free from technical errors.

When a simulation reports a result with no convergence or validation against a known limit, no comparison to an analytical or experimental benchmark, and conclusions that outrun what the figures show, the gap is visible. Optics Express does not require experiment, but it does require that simulation claims be demonstrated rather than assumed, and manuscripts that treat agreement as self-evident are commonly returned.

Check if your Optics Express simulation conclusions are supported by the figures →

Device or measurement results missing the characterization and metrics that prove them. On the experimental side, the failure is a demonstration reported without the characterization a reviewer needs to trust it. The paper shows a fabricated device or a measurement, but the error analysis, repeatability, calibration, and key performance metrics are absent or compressed into a single sentence.

Reviewers in photonics treat characterization as part of the result, not an appendix to it, so a figure with no error bars, no statement of measurement uncertainty, and no quantitative comparison to the state of the art reads as incomplete.

The methods and results sections are where this is decided: if the setup, the metrics, and the uncertainty are not described well enough to judge confidence in the numbers, the manuscript is not yet ready regardless of how clean the data look.

Check whether your Optics Express device characterization is complete →

Scope framed as optics when the core contribution is elsewhere, or aimed at the wrong Optica venue. Optics Express covers work where light or electromagnetic radiation is central, and a recurring desk return is a manuscript whose real contribution is in chemistry, materials, or applied mechanics with an optical measurement attached for fit.

The introduction frames the work as photonics, but the novel result is a material property or a biological mechanism, and the optics is the instrument rather than the advance. The journal's own scope test is whether a reader would search for this topic in Optics Express or start with another journal.

A second, subtler version of this is venue mismatch within Optica: a genuinely high-impact, broad-interest result belongs at Optica, and a four-page rapid result belongs at Optics Letters, so a manuscript pitched at the wrong sibling journal is identified as a fit problem before review.

This guide tells you what Optics Express editors look for; a Manusights review tells you whether YOUR paper passes that screen. A Manusights review checks the novelty argument, the optics-centrality, the simulation validation, and the device characterization against the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review. Paid Manusights reviews include a 60-day money-back guarantee, and we do not train models on submitted manuscripts.

Before submitting, an Optics Express novelty and scope readiness check tests whether your novelty argument, supporting evidence, and scope framing clear the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review.

This guide was built from the Optics Express review criteria, the Optica Publishing Group author guide and publication-charges pages, the Prism submission system, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from optics and photonics manuscripts. We checked the novelty-and-impact requirement, the page-based open-access charge, and the abstract and data availability rules against the journal's own pages, and we cross-checked review-timing ranges against SciRev community data and Clarivate JCR 2024 metrics. The failure patterns describe what we see most often when optics and photonics manuscripts come through pre-submission review for this journal.

Use this page before you upload, when the official instructions cannot answer the real question: whether your novelty argument, supporting evidence, optics-centrality, and venue choice are already defensible. Source limitation: Optica updates charges, format details, and policies after this review date, so confirm administrative specifics against the journal's official pages before submission. To pressure-test the manuscript itself, run a manuscript readiness check.

• Optics Letters submission process
• Applied Physics Letters submission process
• For the broader cluster, see the physics journals overview.

Before you upload, run your manuscript through an Optics Express submission package check to catch the novelty, evidence, and scope issues editors filter for on first read. The check is free to run and takes a single upload.