The AAS calculates article publication charges based on the number of “digital quanta” — a quantity assigned to different elements of submitted manuscripts. If you would like to estimate your AAS publication charges, please use the Quanta Estimator housed within the manuscript submission site.
To use the Quanta Estimator, you will enter into the form the quantity of different types of elements in your manuscript. The Estimator will then provide a rough estimate of the total number of quanta contained in your manuscript, and it will indicate the corresponding charge tier for your manuscript. Please note that this is only an estimate; final assessment of manuscript quanta will occur after submission.
How Does the Quanta Estimator Work?
Each figure, table, or digital component in a manuscript is counted as 1 quantum. Note that all online-only components must be accompanied by a representative example within the article — for machine-readable tables, this should be an example or descriptive table, and for interactive or animated figures and figure sets, this should be a standard figure. The quanta count for the online component is in addition to the count for the corresponding regular component.
A group of 350 words is equivalent to 1 quantum, where a “word” is a space-delimited set of one or more characters. To assess the number of word quanta in your manuscript, you’ll need to provide the Estimator with a word count. To obtain a word count for your manuscript:
- Do not include author names and affiliations, the reference list, or the acknowledgments section, as these do not contribute to the word quanta.
- LaTeX users can estimate the word count in their manuscript using our LaTeX word count tool. Be sure to then enter the word count, not the word quanta count, into the corresponding line of the Quanta Estimator.
- Word users should open their manuscript in Microsoft Word and manually remove the author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, and references. You can then use Word’s built-in capability to provide the manuscript word count.
