Instructions to authors

The question about copyright is important to clarify.  The ECCC will follow the procedure used for the ECCC 2023 Proceedings, and to aid understanding page 2 of the ECCC 2023 proceedings is attached:

• The ECCC 2023 Proceedings were assigned the ISBN 978-1-7399925-2-1 by the British Library.  The copyright of the ECCC 2023 proceedings is held by the High Temperature Materials Testing Committee (HTMTC) in the UK as they are a legal body. 
• Page 2 of the proceedings makes clear that other organisations are not able to publish or extract material from the volume without obtaining prior permission.  (That is to protect the content of the Proceedings, for the mutual benefit of the ECCC, authors and readers.) 
• Page 2 also makes clear that the intellectual property remains with the authors of the papers contained in the ECCC 2023 proceedings. That is, they can use that information (more likely – parts of it) within other publications (eg journals) if they so wish, and the journal publishers permit it.   

The ECCC does not seek transfer of copyright from the authors: the intellectual property remains with the authors. However, publishing a paper in the Proceedings could restrict further publishing of that work, according to the rules of publishers, see also the question below.

Download ‘Proc ECCC2023 p2 copyright and IPR.pdf’

Most authors will prepare a full paper for inclusion in the ECCC 2026 Proceedings that will be published prior to the start of the Conference. However, some authors may wish to seek to have their paper included in the journal Materials at High Temperature, ECCC 2026 Special Edition (for further details see on this page and MHT Special issue). Note that the editors of the MHT journal will apply their usual rigorous review of the paper, and there is no certainty that it will be accepted for publication. Typical reasons for rejection include: already published work; testing programme is incomplete or technical work has just started with little being reported; the work is a repeat of other work and the novelty is therefore insufficient to publish; and the materials and/or the testing programme are not applicable to high temperatures. Please consider such points before you submit your paper to MHT for consideration.

If you do decide to submit the paper to MHT Special Issue, then you are required as part of your Conference Registration to submit as well an Extended Abstract that can be included in the Conference Proceedings. It is typically 3-5 pages in length, and is expected to provide a good overview of the full paper, but not include information that would prevent the journal accepting the paper. Generally, this means that new results being reported should not be included in the Extended Abstract, since that would mean the MHT Special Issue would feel that the work had already been published and would reject your full paper containing the same results.

Having an Extended Abstract in the ECCC 2026 Conference Proceedings, will provide a detailed description of the authors’ work made available to Conference participants before it starts. It will help attendees choose more easily which sessions to attend, and which papers to listen to. After the conference, readers will understand more easily : whether the work is of interest to them, where the full paper is published, and how to obtain a copy of the full paper from the MHT website etc.

By way of example, the Extended Abstract could contain

1. Quite detailed descriptions of the background and motivation of the work, and the materials investigated « eg, composition and heat treatment details of the investigated alloy are shown in Table 1) »
2. The Experimental work might include such information as « Creep testing was performed at 550, 600 and 650°C at stresses targeted to result in 20kh test durations » but not show any of the results.
3. In discussion, you might find something such as « a Monkman-Grant type analysis was performed on the creep rates, using the equations shown in Eq 1.  » but not give any of the fitted coefficients. The Monkman Grant figure would be excluded, as would any written insights into the results.
4. The Extended Abstract might typically contain statements such as « the observed creep behaviour was rationalised in terms of the lambda-factor approach leading to conclusions about the applicability of such analyses in identifying low-ductility materials from relatively short-term testing ». But not say what the conclusions were in detail.

We hope that clarifies the relationship between the content of the Extended Abstract for ECCC 2026 Proceedings and the MHT ECCC 2026 Special Edition. Please don’t hesitate to contact the Organising Committee with any further queries.