About BAAS

The Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society (BAAS) publishes reports of broad interest to the astronomical community, commentary about the discipline, science meeting abstracts, and obituaries.

Background and Introduction

The Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society (BAAS; ISSN 0002-7537) was established in 1969 primarily as a vehicle for the abstracts of the Society’s scientific meetings. Over time, obituaries, observatory reports, and articles about the state of the discipline found their home in its pages as well.

While formal publications of observatory reports ultimately declined due to the rise of the Internet, astronomers’ desire to publish community-focused content has remained robust. The modern BAAS aims to be the venue of choice for relevant material not specifically presenting research results, such as commentary and opinion pieces; instrument and facility proposals, descriptions, and updates; articles about the discipline itself or issues related to the discipline; and other content deemed appropriate for publication.

To enable rapid communication with a low barrier to entry, the BAAS is online-only, free to read, and free to publish. Submissions are edited but not sent for external refereeing unless requested by the authors. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) and copyright is retained by the author(s).

Co-Editors

• Ethan Vishniac, AAS Editor-in-Chief, Johns Hopkins University

• August Muench, Managing Editor of the BAAS, American Astronomical Society

Submissions

The submission process used by the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society (BAAS) depends on the kind of material being submitted.

Abstracts from AAS Meetings

Abstracts from AAS meetings are published in the BAAS as soon as possible after meeting presentations have concluded. Visit the AAS Meetings website for information about upcoming meetings and how to submit abstracts.

Obituaries

Obituaries are published as tributes and for future historians of science.  To inform us of the death of an astronomer or to volunteer to write the obituary of a colleague please contact the current Vice-Chair of the Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) or Crystal Tinch. The HAD coordinates authoring and final submission of obituaries.

Community Reports, News, and Commentary

To submit other items of potential interest to the BAAS, please contact the Managing Editor of the BAAS, August Muench, at [email protected] with a description of the proposed contribution. The BAAS editorial team will contact you within one business week about whether or not your submission is eligible for publication in the BAAS.

Approved contributions are ultimately imported into the electronic publishing platform used by BAAS, PubPub. The preferred method for authoring submissions is to use PubPub’s web-based collaborative editing environment, which provides an experience similar to Google Docs (but with support for citations, equations, and so on). Upon approval of a submission, authors will be granted access to the authoring environment.

Alternatively, manuscripts may be authored outside of BAAS and submitted in TeX (preferred), Word, or PDF formats, which will then be imported by BAAS staff; authors of important manuscripts will then be asked to further edit and revise the PubPub versions of their submissions. (Imported submissions should be sent as an archive of the manuscript files, figure images, BibTeX files, etc.) The PubPub version of the submission will be shared with the authors for review before final publication.

Submitted manuscripts should obey the following general structure:

1. Title

2. Author Information: Names, affiliations, email addresses, ORCids

3. Abstract

4. Main text

5. Acknowledgments

6. References

The BAAS is currently free to read and free to publish.  For this reason, the BAAS does not generally provide peer review or copy editing services. Authors may request peer review of their manuscript, which BAAS editors will undertake to arrange.