Manuscripts submitted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal (PSJ) must generally be prepared in the same way and must meet the same criteria as for all articles published in the AAS journals. The following specific policies and guidelines govern the submission and review of PSJ manuscripts.
Dual Anonymous Review
The PSJ is dedicated to eliminating biases and allowing authors and reviewers to focus on the manuscript as written. We are therefore introducing dual anonymous peer review as the standard practice for all submissions to the journal. Both reviewers and authors will be anonymized by removing names, institution lists, and acknowledgment sections. Reviewers can intentionally identify themselves, if they choose, by including identifying information in the text of their reviews (typically by including their name). Authors can intentionally identify themselves, if they choose, at submission time by writing in the “Manuscript Comment” box a note to the Editors indicating that they wish to opt-out of DAR. However, beyond that, nothing about manuscript preparation changes for authors. The author list, affiliations, and acknowledgments will be automatically removed by the editorial office to create a review copy that will be sent to reviewers. We have a set of best practices for how to avoid unintentionally revealing identity that we encourage authors to adopt.
Version 6.3.1 of AASTeX provides a specific “anonymous” style for rendering a manuscript PDF that is anonymized, removing the author(s), affiliation(s), and acknowledgments. Anonymized AASTeX templates are available. For Word (doc/x) submissions authors should simply leave the authors, affiliations, and acknowledgments out of the submitted manuscript file. Please include the author names, affiliations, and acknowledgments in a separate cover letter. A Word (doc/x) template is also available. Authors are encouraged to use these for submissions.
Two Reviewers
The PSJ will honor the legacy in the planetary sciences of providing more feedback to authors by generally sending the manuscript to two reviewers.
Copyright
The PSJ is a fully Gold Open Access journal; all articles published in the PSJ are free to read and reuse under a CC-BY license. Authors retain copyright for manuscripts accepted by The Planetary Science Journal and grant the AAS a license to publish under CC-BY 4.0. A copy of the Gold Open Access agreement and CC-BY 4.0. license can be downloaded from this website.
Publication Charges
Publication charges for the Gold Open Access model for the PSJ are given at this page.
References
As of August 2024, articles published in the PSJ can have the full titles of the references appear in the final published article. This capability is available only for the PSJ and not for any other AAS Journal article. Presently, it is necessary for the submitted manuscript to contain title strings for them to be included in the published version; title strings will not be added during proofs. PSJ authors writing in Word can simply include the title strings in their preprints. PSJ authors writing in LaTeX can include title strings either by (a) using “Icarus” export formats in NASA ADS or (b) using a bibtex style that provides author-year formatted output with titles. We are currently developing an updated bibtex style for AASTeX that will appear in the upcoming release of AASTeX 7 anticipated by January 2025. A temporary “bst” file is provided here.
