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Submission Guidelines

Presence is an interdisciplinary journal for the dissemination of ideas, experimental results, theoretical models, practical applications, and survey and tutorial material related to virtual environments. Manuscripts are accepted for consideration with the understanding that they represent original research and are not being considered for publication elsewhere.  Submissions may take the form of Articles or Forum contributions.

Articles are scholarly contributions that may take several forms:

  • Research papers describe new concepts, algorithms, devices, or experiments. Authors should compare and contrast the described work to related work in the field, and present documented results.
  • Reports on implemented systems or applications should describe the problems to be solved, developmental difficulties, and implementations.
  • Survey articles should be well-organized presentations of material that is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. Survey articles must be relevant to the readers of Presence.
  • Tutorial articles should develop to an appropriate level of detail a significant topic that is of interest to, but not well known to, a significant portion of the Presence readership.

In the Forum section of Presence, the editors wish to encourage the presentation of material that may take many forms, including short papers, technical notes, reviews, commentaries, opinion pieces, and letters that explore new concepts or propose new points of view. Forum contributions should be timely and relevant to the readers of Presence. Arguments may be speculative, but should be technically informed, and should include references to the literature as appropriate. Reports of work-in-progress should be set in context with relevant work in the field. Lab reports should provide an overview of work conducted in that laboratory. Correspondence should contribute to an informed and open dialogue and need not be related to work previously published in Presence. In general, review criteria for Forum contributions are less stringent than those for articles.

Special Issue Proposals

Presence accepts special issue proposals from the VR and AR community. In general, two to four guest editors are required to manage articles over a one-year period, including 2-3 months for the call for papers, 2-3 months for the review process, and an additional 2-3 months for revisions. The requirements for special issue proposals state that guest editors should have several years of experience working within the field, with a publication track record in Presence or any other reputable journal in the field. The guest editor's introduction to the special issue should be written with several sub-sections, introducing each article and naming all the contributing authors. This introduction will be a published and citable article that needs to be submitted via the EM. The special issue and the guest editor's introduction should provide forward-looking insights to our readership, including research trends, current issues, and future projections. Special issue guest editors are required to use their official institutional emails. All guest editors' responsibilities should be clearly communicated to the Journal, and included in all email communications.

Prior Publication Policy

When a manuscript is submitted to Presence, it is assumed that it has not been published elsewhere, nor is it being considered for publication elsewhere, in a peer reviewed journal or a commercially available proceedings of a meeting, independent of the language of that publication. This constraint shall remain in effect until the final Presence review process has been completed and the manuscript has been accepted or rejected by Presence. When there is any doubt, authors should include copies of the previously published or submitted manuscript and a detailed statement of differences for consideration by the reviewers and editors along with the Presence submission. To be considered an original work, extended journal manuscripts based on prior publications must contain significant amplification or clarification of the original material (a minimum of 30% new material when compared with the prior publication). Violation of this requirement will automatically result in rejection of the submission to Presence.

Publication Charges

Presence does not currently charge article processing and page fees.

Submission Instructions

Preferred format for initial submission is electronic (PDF or PostScript). Page format for all text, including abstract, references, footnotes, appendices, and figure captions, is single column, double-spaced, left-justified, minimum 1-inch margins. Text should be prepared in a 12-pt. serif font. Footnotes and appendices should be kept to a minimum. The manuscript should contain, after the title, the names and institutions of all authors, together with an email address for the corresponding author. Figures and the associated captions must be embedded in the article and linked to the reference text.

Some details are as follows:

  • Abstract should be 150–200 words in length, and one paragraph.
  • Figures: All texts should be legible (e.g., good contrast, and a 10-pt. font, or larger, double spaced).
  • Tables and Figures: All tables and figures should be embedded within the text where they are referenced.
  • References: The format is as specified in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), 7th edition. Full citation details should be provided for each reference, the capitalization of all text should be correct, and journal/conference titles should be consistent and not abbreviated.

Presence has a rich collection of articles spanning almost three decades of original research where new submissions should draw from.

For manuscripts that report a user experiment or evaluation, the following additional instructions that are derived from the APA Manual should be followed: • The experiment should be structured with the following headings: Method, Results, and Discussion. Optionally, the last two may be combined into Results and Discussion. • The Method section should be subdivided into sections that describe the Participants, Materials, and Procedure. • The term "participants" should be used, rather than "subjects." • Statistical results should be reported using the conventions that are documented in the APA Manual.

Submission Checklist

Effective April 15, 2021, all original manuscript submissions should come through our Editorial Manager site:

http://www.editorialmanager.com/pvar/

Please ensure the following items are present:

  1. Formal Letter to Editors (PDF): In addition to the manuscript, we also ask for a short letter to the Editors outlining the paper with more information than in the abstract.
  2. Original manuscript with ALL tables and figures incorporated in the text. The article should be spell checked and grammar checked.
  3. Prior publication if the submission is an extended paper. Please include a copy of the prior publication and, within the Letter to Editors, a statement that the submission contains a minimum of 30% new material, a description of where that new material appears, and a description of the contribution that that new material makes.

The editors are committed to providing timely and anonymous peer review, with comments returned to authors within four months of submission. Authors whose work is accepted for publication will be informed by email and will be requested at that time to sign a transfer of copyright to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All accepted manuscripts are subject to revision by the editors for greater conciseness, clarity and conformity to the journal's style. Detailed instructions about preparing the final pre-production version of manuscripts will be sent to authors after notification of acceptance. Upon acceptance, figures must be supplied in camera-ready form (300 dpi), with labeling sufficiently large to be legible when reduced for page layout. Supplemental material in digital form can be offered in conjunction with the online published version of articles; information about this option is included in the authors' final formatting guidelines. Although no guarantees can be given, it is our intention that accepted material appear in print within one year of the time it is accepted. For additional information, please contact the Managing Editor by email ([email protected]).

Peer Review Taxonomy

Identity transparency: Single anonymized
Reviewer interacts with: Editor
Review information published: None

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