ATNF PUBLICATIONS POLICY
The ATNF publications policy was last updated in November 2001. Comments on
it should be addressed to Jessica
Chapman.
Choice of Journal
ATNF staff may submit papers to any journal. For astronomers,
the most appropriate journals are generally MNRAS, Nature, Science,
ApJ, AJ, A&A, and PASA. The choice of which journal to use
will depend on several factors, including:
- Where other papers in your field tend to be published
- The Journal Impact Parameter - this is a
measure of the average number of citations for papers published in the
previous two years in a journal. For the most recent values see the
ISI Journal citation reports.
- Whether you will need to pay page charges
- How quickly the paper will be published
- How accessible the journal is in electronic form.
Page Charges
If you intend to submit a paper to a journal for which the ATNF will
be liable for page charges, your Special
Research Budget (for an astrophysics group member) or group
costcode (for non-astrophysicists) will be debited for the amount of
the page charges. You will also be required to pay for any reprint
charges. ATNF honorary fellows should request approval for page charges from
Lister Staveley-Smith. In you are in any doubt about payment of page charges consult
Anne Barends
before submission.
Publications with one or more ATNF authors
- The first ATNF author listed on the paper is responsible for
providing Christine van der
Leeuw with the details of the paper. Christine will enter the
information into the ATNF Publications Database.
- It is highly recommended that papers for refereed journals
be internally refereed.
When the draft paper is ready, ask another member of ATNF staff to
referee it. For astro papers - Jim Caswell will act as a "referee
consultant" and is available for advice on who to use as an internal
referee. Jim should be consulted when there is some
uncertainty or difficulty about who to approach.
If necessary iterate until you and the referee both agree that
the paper is satisfactory. The referee's role is advisory rather than
prescriptive, and the author has the final say in any disagreement. If
there is a major disagreement between the referee
and the author, either may refer it to the ATNF Director who will then
be the final arbiter.
- After refereeing, produce the final corrected version of the
paper. The author is responsible for submitting the paper to the
journal, dealing with external referees, proof-reading etc and for
keeping Christine notified of the progress.
- If you wish to distribute hard copy preprints to colleagues in your field,
you should print them out and post them yourself.
- After a paper has been accepted, you may wish to put the electronic
version of the paper on an external server such as astro-ph. Astro-ph is
currently the most widely distributed astrophysics electronic preprint system.
Nature papers should not be placed on electronic servers until after
publication.
- Please provide Christine van der Leeuw with the URL of the
electronic version of your papers so that the web links can be added.
Instructions for ATNF-affiliated students
- ATNF-affiliated students must include their university as their
affiliation on the paper. Students may also list the ATNF as a
secondary affiliation.
- If the ATNF affiliation is given then the ATNF will contribute 50% of
the pro-rata page charges for the student.
- It is recommended that ATNF-affiliated students who do not list the ATNF as an
affiliation in the author list include a footnote on the front page
to state that
name is a graduate student jointly enrolled at the
university name and the Australia Telescope National Facility.
- If the first author of the paper is an ATNF-affiliated student,
then the paper MUST be internally refereed at the ATNF.
Other Information
- Lists of ATNF publications are made available on the
web publications
pages and are included in the ATNF newsletters and Annual Reports.
- If you have a good image please send it, together with a figure
caption, to the webmaster
for inclusion on the ATNF web pages or to Helen Sim , for use in ATNF
publicity material.
- If you have images of extragalactic sources, submit them to the NED image
library. Instructions for submitting images are available
here.