Instructions for contributors

SUBMISSION

This journal uses ScholarOne Manuscripts for online submission and peer review.

We recommend that you use the PASA template in Overleaf, an online writing tool that allows authors to easily format articles, collaborate with co-authors and submit directly into the ScholarOne Manuscripts system.

There is also a downloadable zip file containing the PASA LaTeX template for manuscript layout, if you prefer not to use Overleaf.

Complete guidelines for preparing and submitting your manuscript to this journal are provided below.

SCOPE AND AUDIENCE

PASA publishes new and significant research in astronomy and astrophysics. PASA covers a wide range of topics within astronomy, including multi-wavelength observations, theoretical modelling, computational astronomy and visualisation. PASA also maintains its heritage of publishing results on southern hemisphere astronomy and on astronomy with Australian facilities.

The journal is published continuously, paper by paper, as one volume per year.

PASA publishes research papers, review papers, and special series on topical issues, making use of expert international reviewers and an experienced Editorial Board. The journal does not publish letters to the editor or other submissions of a more journalistic style.

PASA offers a free data archiving service for code, catalogs or datasets.

This journal is compliant with Open Access policies. Please see the license options and embargo periods here. PASA's Editorial Board approve a certain number of papers per year to be published Open Access without a publication fee.

PASA POLICY ON BINARY STAR PAPERS

View the PASA policy on binary star papers here.

PUBLISHING ETHICS

PASA Code of Ethics.

PASA considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that

The manuscript is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work;
The manuscript has been submitted only to the journal - it is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published elsewhere;
All listed authors know of and agree to the manuscript being submitted to the journal; and
The manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, fraudulent, illegal, libellous, or obscene.

Fabrication of data or selective reporting of data with the intent to mislead or deceive is unethical and unacceptable, as is the appropriation of data or research results from others without permission and attribution.

During manuscript submission, authors are required to disclose the nature of any competing and/or relevant financial interest. The statement should describe all potential sources of bias, including affiliations, funding sources, and financial or management relationships, that may constitute conflicts of interest.

The submitting author must provide contact information for all co-authors. The author who submits the manuscript for publication accepts the responsibility of notifying all co-authors that the manuscript is being submitted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Deletion of an author during the peer-review process requires a confirming letter to the Editor-in-Chief from the author whose name is being deleted. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after the manuscript is accepted.

Note that the journal uses CrossCheck / iThenticate software to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to PASA you are agreeing to any necessary originality checks your paper may have to undergo during the peer review and production processes.

The Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board will collaborate with Cambridge University Press using the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics in cases of allegations of research errors; authorship complaints; multiple or concurrent (simultaneous) submission; plagiarism complaints; research results misappropriation; reviewer bias; and undisclosed conflicts of interest.

REVIEW STYLE AND PROCESS

PASA authors may elect single-blind or double-blind review process, where reviewers may or may not see the author names and affiliations. Differences in the submission process are outlined at the base of this page.

The fitness of a manuscript for publication is based on

Significance/relevance to scope of the journal
Conceptual framework (connections to relevant constructs in literature)
Methods (if manuscript is an empirical study)
Appropriateness to questions
Adequate description of methods (including data collection and analysis)
Rigorous and appropriate methods
Findings/conclusions are literature or data-based
Overall contribution to the field
Writing style/composition/clarity

The Review Process

Manuscripts initially are assigned to and screened by the Editor in Chief, then screened in conjunction with at a member of the Editorial Board. If these above criteria are met, manuscripts are subjected to peer-review. The Board member considers the reviewer's comments, independently evaluates the manuscript, and makes an editorial recommendation to the Editor in Chief to reject, request a revision with the stipulation of further peer review, request a revision subject to review by the editors, or accept as is. Authors receive copies of (anonymous) referee's comments. Referees may be informed of the final disposition of the article. Although feedback will usually be provided to authors, the Editors reserve the right to reject a manuscript for publication without providing a rationale for the decision. Final decisions regarding acceptance of a manuscript will be made by the Editor in Chief.

EDITORIAL TEAM

The full Editorial Board is listed here.

Further guidance for authors can be provided on request. It is often an advantage for prospective contributors to discuss the length, content, and emphasis of a proposed article with the Editor in Chief prior to submission. Queries should be addressed to: pasa@cambridge.org

Detailed discussion on submitted papers will be conducted only through the peer-review system.

DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS TO CONTRIBUTORS

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR

This journal uses a contributor agreement that allows for just one author (the Corresponding Author) to sign on behalf of all authors. Please identify the Corresponding Author for your work when submitting your manuscript for review.

The Corresponding Author will be responsible for the following:

ensuring that all authors are identified on the contributor agreement, and notifying the editorial office of any changes to the authorship;
securing written permission (via letter or email) from each co-author to sign the contributor agreement on the co-author's behalf;
completing the copyright or licence to publish forms on behalf of all co-authors.

Although very rare, should a co-author have included content in his or her portion of the article that infringes the copyright of another or is otherwise in violation of any other warranty listed in the agreement, you will be the sole author indemnifying the publisher and the editor of the journal against such violation. Please contact the editorial office if you have any questions.

AUTHORSHIP

Authorship credit should be based on

substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
final approval of the version to be published.

Authors should meet all conditions. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship.

MANUSCRIPT TYPES

Research Papers contain original and significant research, or a description of a new technique or instrument. Typical manuscripts will not generally exceed 10 two-column pages including abstracts, text, references, appendices, and tables. However longer manuscripts will be considered. Authors should keep Tables and Figures to a reasonable minimum and avoid repeating tabulated data in a graphic.

Review Papers give a general overview of a subject of current interest in astronomy and astrophysics. The introduction should arouse the reader's interest, describing the background, significance, and development of the field, and should be able to be understood by a broad audience. Important: Unsolicited reviews should be discussed with the Editor-in-Chief no more than six months before submission in order to receive approval to submit a review on the topic.

The Dawes Review are a special review series written on invitation by the Editorial Board.

MANUSCRIPT LANGUAGE AND STYLE

All manuscripts must be in English. Spelling and punctuation should be internally consistent.

PASA's style and layout requirements are described in the LaTeX template for manuscript layout. Use of these defaults will result in a pleasing uniformity of layout and font selection. A short style guide to using the template is available. When preparing your manuscript, please pay careful attention to the instructions in this guide. Adherence to the correct PASA style will hasten your manuscript's progress through refereeing and production. The template file also contains instructions for using LaTeX commands to include citations, figures and tables. (We recommend that you try the PASA template in Overleaf, an online authoring tool that can help authors meet these style and layout requirements, collaborate with co-authors and submit directly into the journal's ScholarOne Manuscripts system).

Abstract and keywords: All manuscripts must include an abstract and some (1-6) standard keywords. The keywords used to categorize your paper should be selected from the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus. Abstracts describing the essence of the manuscript must be 400 words or less.

Headings: Headings should be used to help organize the manuscript. Typical headings for research articles include review of literature, method, results, discussion, and references. For theoretical manuscripts, authors are encouraged to use headings that clarify the flow of the manuscript as well as assist the reader in understanding the content of the paper. Section headings should be concise.

Mathematics: Typeface: scalar variables are italic, vectors are bold italic, matrices are bold roman. Differential d, complex i, exponential e, and trigonometic and logarithmic functions are all roman. Sub/superscripts that are physical variables are italic, while those that are just labels are roman (e.g. N_i , but T_eff).

Text extractions: Please use single quotation marks, except where 'a quotation is "within" a quotation'. Long quotations of 40 words or more should be indented with quotation marks.

TABLES AND FIGURES

Both Tables and Figures should be titled with a short and concise description, numbered separately but consecutively (Table 1, … ; Figure 1, … ), and referenced in the text. Tables should be clear, concise, and able to stand alone. with footnotes included to clarify entries. Figures should be provided as a high quality format. For imported scanned material a minimum resolution is 300 dpi. In multi-part Figures, each part should be labelled (Figure 1a, Figure 1b, …).

More detail on artwork is here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledge individuals or organizations who provided advice or non-financial support. If there are no acknowledgements, include the heading 'Acknowledgements' followed by the text 'None.' For double-blind refereeing please include this only in the title page.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT

Provide details of the sources of financial and in-kind support for all authors, including grant numbers. Grants held by different authors should be identified as belonging to individual authors by the author's initials. Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: 'This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.' For double-blind refereeing please include this only in the title page.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Conflict of interest exists when an author has interests that might influence his or her judgement, even if that judgement is not influenced. Authors must disclose potentially conflicting. Non-financial interests that could be relevant in this context should also be disclosed. If no relevant interests exist, this should be stated. This requirement applies to all the authors of a paper and to all categories of papers If there are no conflicts of interest, include the heading 'Conflicts of Interest' followed by the text 'None.' For double-blind refereeing please include this only in the title page.

REFERENCES

All citations and references must be complete and accurate on submission. PASA papers are indexed in the NASA ADS archive and we recommend using their journal abbreviations.

Papers will be declined for publication if they have references that are found to be incomplete or inaccurate. References should be selective, appropriate, and easily accessible. All sources cited in the text and tables must appear in the reference list at the end of the paper, and all entries in the reference list must be cited in the text.

The PASA LaTeX template and the PASA Overleaf template contain a pasa-mnras.bst bibliography style to help you format references. ADS or and DOI/CrossRef links are included automatically when this reference style is applied.

If any catalogues or databases are referred to in the paper, authors should ensure that those responsible for compiling them are properly credited. Rather than citing only a URL, if at all possible a reference should also be cited (and included in the reference list), or if a reference is not available then the names of those who compiled the database should be given.

DATASTORE SERVICES

Code, catalogs or datasets associated with an article may be archived in the PASA datastore. Data curation is free to authors. The published paper and the dataset will be reciprocally linked. Datasets are freely available to all readers.

Please indicate on article submission that there is a dataset associated with the paper. Approval for storing the dataset is at the discretion of the Editors. Do not submit the dataset though the article submission process.

AUTHORING TOOLS

We recommend that you try the PASA template in Overleaf, which authors to easily comply with the journal's guidelines. We've received positive feedback from authors who have tried Overleaf since we started promoting it in November 2016.

The benefits of using Overleaf include:

an intuitive interface, in which an author can write in LaTeX or rich text and see a typeset preview of the article;
features to enable collaboration with co-authors (the ability to share, highlight and comment on versions of articles);
sophisticated version control;
clean PDF conversion and direct submission into the PASA ScholarOne Manuscripts system.

Note: authors should flatten their image files before uploading them to Overleaf and the journal’s ScholarOne system. This can be done by using Photoshop or GIMP, an open source Photoshop equivalent, both of which have a ‘Flatten Image’ option in the Layer menu. If you are using a local installed LaTeX editor, it’s also possible to use in-line commands to do a round-trip conversion – see this Overleaf help page for more information.

You can also contact Overleaf for general support using the tool.

There is also a PASA template in ShareLaTeX, another online collaborative authoring tool - but this does not enable direct submission into the journal's ScholarOne Manuscripts system.

PROFESSIONAL EDITING SERVICES

Cambridge University Press recommends that authors have their manuscripts checked by an English language native speaker before submission; this will ensure that submissions are judged at peer review exclusively on academic merit. We list a number of third-party services specialising in language editing and / or translation, and suggest that authors contact as appropriate.

Their inclusion should not be taken to imply an endorsement of the service.

PERMISSIONS

The corresponding author is responsible for providing copies of permission for lengthy quotations or reprinted or adapted tables or figures. It is the responsibility of the author to check with the publisher or copyright owner regarding specific requirements for permission to adapt or quote from copyrighted material. Appropriate acknowledgement must be given in your manuscript.

MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION

PASA accepts submissions through ScholarOne Manuscripts for online submission and peer reviews.

There is no submission fee or page charges.

Manuscripts may be uploaded into ScholarOne in any of three ways

1. Upload a single PDF and compressed source files
Upload the main PDF as a 'Main Document'
Upload the manuscript source files as a single ZIP or TAR file as a 'Compressed Source Files'

2. Uploading a main document and graphics files
Upload the main TEX or DOC file first as your 'Main Document'
Upload each file related to the main document. Select 'TeX/LaTex Suppl Files' if the main document is a TEX file. Select 'Figure' or 'Table' if the main document is a DOC file.
Uploaded a PDF version, selecting the file designation of 'PDF'. Please note PDF files produced directly from pdfTeX can be problematic, see below.

3. Upload via retrieving a manuscript from arXiv
Enter the E-Print number in the box provided.

4. Use the PASA template in the collaborative authoring tool Overleaf. At the end of the process you will be able to submit to the journal's ScholarOne Manuscripts system.

Files should be kept as small as possible at this stage – files larger than 10 MB are not supported and should not be uploaded without prior approval. Authors may need to reduce the quality of their figures to meet this file size requirement; if the paper is accepted then higher quality figures may be reincorporated at the production stage.

Authors may also upload supplementary material which they wish to make available to the editor and referee but is not intended for publication, such as additional data tables or figures. This should be designated as 'Supplementary Material (for review)'. This will be automatically added to the PDF generated by the system.

For authors using LaTeX: ScholarOne does not reliably compile LaTeX files, so please compile a PDF version before uploading. PDF files generated with pdfTeX/pdfLaTeX sometimes fail on the ScholarOne Manuscripts system. Solutions that have worked include adding \pdfminorversion=5 to the preamble of your LaTeX file, \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} and \usepackage{aecompl} to the preamble of your LaTeX file, or alternatively by converting to a PS file before uploading. Please check the PDF generated by the system before submitting. Alternatively, use the PASA template in Overleaf, which generates a clean, compiled PDF file at the end of the process and submits it (with LaTeX source files in a supplementary zip folder) into the ScholarOne Manuscripts system.

Double-Blind Review: The journal offers the option to have your paper reviewed in a double blinded manner, i.e., reviewers will not be able to see the authors' names. If you wish to have your paper reviewed in this way, please submit your Main Document without any author details or acknowledgements. A separate file should then be uploaded, designated as Title Page. The Title Page will not form part of the system PDF, but will be made available to editors and to production, should your manuscript be accepted for publication. The Title Page includes: article title; authors' names, titles and highest academic qualification, and emails; authors' affiliated institutions; and any acknowledgments, financial disclosure information, author notes, and/or other text that could identify the authors to reviewers.

To find the status of any manuscript that you've submitted through ScholarOne Manuscripts, visit the journal's site, log in, select 'Author Center', look at the step-wise list under My Manuscripts, and click on the items until you find your manuscript's description and status.

For further information about ScholarOne Manuscripts, please visit their author help page.

ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

To assure the integrity, dissemination, and protection against copyright infringement of published articles, you will be asked to assign us, via a Publishing Agreement, the copyright in your article.

Under the conditions detailed on the Journal's standard transfer of copyright form, when an article is accepted, its authors are free to post the accepted version of the manuscript on a website or repository and the version of record after a period. The conditions are summarised here.

Authors also have the option to publish their paper under a fully 'Open Access' agreement, upon the payment of a one-off 'Article Processing Charge'. In this case, the final published 'Version of Record' shall be made freely available to all, in perpetuity, and will be published under a creative commons licence, enabling its free re-use and redistribution for non-commercial means. The corresponding author will be able to choose between standard publication and publication under the 'Open Access' agreement once their paper has been accepted.

PASA's Editorial Board approve a certain number of papers per year to be published Open Access without a publication fee.

ORCID

Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia now requires that all corresponding authors identify themselves using their ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript to the journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you’ve authored.
Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

If you don’t already have an iD, you’ll need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. You can register for one directly from your user account on Scholar One or via https://ORCID.org/register. If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting, either by linking it to your Scholar One account or supplying it during submission by using the “Associate your existing ORCID ID” button.

Last updated 12th June 2019