About the Journal

The OpenFOAM® Journal publishes original papers related to the OpenFOAM® computational library. Focus is given to the benefit for the OpenFOAM community and reproducibility of results. The main features of the journal are:

  • It is free to publish
    • no financial contribution required for publications
  • It is free to access
    • no financial contribution required for accessing the publications
  • Each publication will have an associated discussion forum, to increase the interaction between the readers and the authors, and the overall impact of the contribution.
  • Authors are strongly encouraged to provide information that will allow the reproducibility of the published information, which might include:
    • source code;
    • validation and verification data (including experimental results);
    • case and mesh dictionaries;
    • videos.

This material does not have to be kept up to date, the publication is a snapshot of research and development.

  • All the contributions must outline the following two major keystones in the presentation of the work:
    • reproducibility of results
    • benefit for the OpenFOAM community (academia and/or industrial application)

The journal publishes one main issue per year with the following sections:

  1. Full papers – focuses on publications that provide detailed information about novel solver development, innovative verification and validation done with existing solvers and new case studies that illustrate the potential of OpenFOAM® based tools.
  2. Technical notes – focuses on publications that describe and illustrate novel features/capabilities/functionalities/tools based on OpenFOAM®, providing clear benefits for the community.
  3. Review papers - focuses on detailed and critical analyses of existing OpenFOAM® based tools to address complex or novel topics. The publications in this group are not expected to provide innovative work, but should be clearly useful to help/guide the community in selecting the best approaches to address the envisaged topics.

Authors providing source files or case dictionaries are not required to keep the files up to date, however, they are given the possibility to provide a link to an external repository, where they keep the files up to date. In all cases the snapshot of the source code will be kept alongside with the manuscript as supplementary material.

The authors are permitted  to publish the submitted manuscripts in preprint servers before acceptance. However, the authors should be aware that this publication may reveal their identities and, consequently, bias the double-blind review process followed by the journal.

Reproducibility and benefit for the OpenFOAM® community

To ensure the scientific sanity of published results and the usefulness for the OpenFOAM® community, the OpenFOAM Journal puts a strong focus on reproducibility. Authors wishing to submit a manuscript into the full papers and technical notes sections are required to fulfill one of the following two criteria:

  1. The default expectation for papers presenting code development is that new source code with a test case setup is published along with the paper. If the authors choose not to provide the source files along with the publication, the Editors and Reviewers may choose to accept manuscripts without accompanying code, case setup files etc., if it is assessed that the level of detail in the manuscript itself is sufficient to reproduce the results of the paper and the benefit of the presented work to the OpenFOAM community is clearly outlined.
  2.  In case of validation and verification (V&V) articles, the case setup files must be supplied along with detailed information about the OpenFOAM® version used to obtain the presented results (and preferably also pre- and post-processing scripts for comparison with experiments). Experimental data can also be supplied to V&V articles; however, authors must make sure they have the rights to publish the experimental results. In case experimental data cannot be published as separate files, authors may also choose to provide the results within the manuscript. In case of a confidential V&V geometry/cases, authors can submit result in their manuscript without providing the geometry and/or the case setup. However, in this case at least one additional corresponding and non-confidential "open case" (simplified) has to be submitted as an auxiliary case with the geometry, mesh and case setup files for reproducibility purposes. This way authors can describe as many confidential cases as they prefer in the manuscript with the addition of at least one "open case".

Alternatively, authors are also invited to prepare contributions to the review paper section (described above). In this case the focus must be on the benefits of the presented results to the OpenFOAM® community. The addition of supplementary material is not mandatory for these works but is still strongly encouraged. This may depend on the nature of the review paper and can be discussed throughout the review process.

It is emphasized that Editors or Reviewers may reject a manuscript on the sole basis of either insufficient reproducibility or lack of benefit to the OpenFOAM® community. It is expected that papers representing genuine contributions to the OpenFOAM® Community including source code, V&V and case setup files have a much higher impact and citation rate than publications not offering any of these to the community.

Plagiarism Check

A Plagiarism Check is performed for every manuscript submitted to the OpenFOAM Journal. The OpenFOAM Journal is affiliated with CrossRef, which provides access to the iThenticate similarity check tool. This tool allows for comparing the content of submitted manuscripts with a vast and continuously growing scholarly content database, which helps to identify unoriginal work.

Code of Conduct/Ethics Statements

The OpenFOAM Journal adheres to the Code of Conduct and Ethics Statements established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows the COPE Flowcharts for Resolving Cases of Suspected Misconduct.