Year-End Stats for 2018

For our JGR Space Physics editorial board meeting that we had during the Fall AGU Meeting a couple weeks ago in Washington, DC, AGU, Wiley, and me compile a bunch of stats about the journal. I’d like to share a few of those with you over the next few posts.

In GEMS, my editor powers allow me to make reports about the journal workflow. This is one of them:

The “2018 to Date” is through today, Friday, December 28, so it probably won’t change by much. Maybe the manuscripts will go up by a few, and I just assigned a bunch of manuscripts to other editors, so the number of reviewers could also go up by several, but the other numbers won’t change much. I took over as EiC of JGR Space Physics at the beginning of 2014, so this shows a quick summary of journal stats during my term.

First, let’s look at the second row, “Number of Manuscripts Received.” Just for perspective, this was under 1000 before 2014. Note that this is the number of “new” manuscripts, not revision submissions with an “R” added to the end of the manuscript number. You were writing many more papers every year, increasing the submissions by ~100 manuscripts a year for several years. This was also due to several large special sections in the journal, with the really big Measurement Techniques in Solar and Space Physics, lots of papers in the ULF special section, several large ones focused on Van Allen Probes results and other inner magnetosphere special sections, a big one for MAVEN, and several on space storms, like the St. Patrick’s Day Storms and storms in the Van Allen Probes era. We had a big one for MMS in 2017 in there too. This last year, we’ve had a few special sections, but so many and not as large.

There are several rows that I really like on this chart. The “Percentage of Manuscripts Sent for External Review” has remained steady, right near ~90%. Similarly, the “Receipt to First Decision” time has hovered near ~40, and the “Receipt to Acceptance” has actually dropped in recent years. Finally, I like that the “Acceptance Rate” has remained steady near ~70% throughout my term.

Note that the “N/A” values for “publication” are because the manuscript shifts to Wiley for that phase and is no longer in GEMS. Those numbers are typically 3-4 weeks.

My last post was in mid-August, four months ago. When I started this blog, I told myself that it was an extra thing I’d do for the community and I would not apologize for a hiatus. So I won’t.

AGU Centennial

The American Geophysical Union is turning 100 years old next year. The society has launched a major campaign to celebrate this triple-digit milestone of existence. They even have a nice logo:

Details of the design of this logo are explained here.

There will be special events at both the 2018 and 2019 Fall AGU Meetings, one kicking off the festivities and the other wrapping it up. Note that the 2018 Meeting will be in Washington DC, with tours of the renovated now-net-zero AGU building. One of the big activities going on right now is the AGU Narratives Project, a joint activity with StoryCorps to record conversations about our experiences conducting Earth and space science.

JGR Space Physics is participating in the Centennial in several ways. Firstly, AGU is asking all of the journals to have a series of papers on Grand Challenges in their field. We are working on this. Secondly, we are making plans for a written version of the AGU Narratives project, a collection of papers from the pioneers of space physics. JGR Space Physics actually had a special issue on this exact topic over twenty years ago. There was also a book, a couple years later, entitled, “Discovery of the Magnetosphere.” We will be doing this again. We are also actively taking part in and coordinating with the AGU Centennial celebration planning.

To lead all of this, I have appointed one of the journal editors, Larry Kepko, to be the coordinator of our activities. He has fully embraced this role and is coming up with some good ways to have space physics to be integrally involved in the Centennial celebrations. If you have questions or comments about this, you can contact either him or me.

To make time for this, Dr. Kepko is pulling back a bit from the normal duties of being assigned “regular” submissions to the journal. I will still be assigning him a few papers, but far less than before. So, when you submit a manuscript, you can still request him as your preferred editor, but there is less chance that I will assign it to him because I am intentionally keeping his manuscript workload down.

This new role for Dr. Kepko, combined with a slowly increasing number of manuscript submissions over the years, is the need for adding two new editors to the JGR Space Physics board. The announced application deadline was yesterday (February 23), but you can still submit for a couple more days. I am off to the Editor-in-Chief meeting, which will occupy my time for the first half of next week. So, the deadline is unofficially extended until February 28. On March 1, when I am back in my office, I will start coordinating with the others on the search committee to begin the selection process. So, there is still time to apply for this position. If you have any questions, then please send me an email, or contact any of the current editors.

TESS-2018

TESS is back! Yes, it has been 3 years since we had the first Triennial Earth-Sun Summit and, in order to keep the name true, it is time for the next one.

The official website of the meeting is here, and abstract submissions are now open, with a deadline of Tuesday, February 20.

TESS is a meeting designed to directly appeal to the readership of JGR Space Physics. Organized as a joint meeting of the AGU’s Space Physics and Aeronomy section and the AAS’ Solar Physics Division, it is a chance for our community to have our own meeting that spans the full range of space sciences within the solar system.

There are a lot of special sessions for TESS-2018. There are sessions focused on the Sun and solar atmosphere, the heliosphere, on geospace and near-Earth space weather, some on planetary space environments, and still others that cut across these “regional” boundaries and focus on a fundamental physical process or universal phenomenon. This last group of sessions seeks to draw together the various sub-field communities. There was a big emphasis on this cross-disciplinary theme for the first TESS meeting, and while the speaker lists were great at that conference, the attendance was relatively small (about 400) compared the full number of researchers in our field (several thousand, counting everyone from around the world). One drawback was that the only pre-arranged special sessions were these cross-disciplinary ones. This time, TESS-2018 has many discipline-specific special sessions already on the schedule, which I hope will excite the community and yield a large attendance at the conference. There will also be plenary session talks every morning, with no concurrent sessions in parallel with them. We’ll all be in the same room together for at least part of the every day.

If you are an organizer of one of these special sessions for TESS, then please think seriously about submitting a proposal to JGR Space Physics to organize a special section. I will probably be checking in with you about this before or after the conference.

The meeting is the last full week of May, with sessions scheduled Monday – Thursday, May 21-24 and an icebreaker on Sunday, May 20. The venue is a nice resort hotel in Leesburg, Virginia, a historic town just northwest of Washington, DC. I plan to attend, at least for the first half and perhaps for the full meeting, depending on family travel plans.

Open Special Sections of JGR-Space

Here’s a public service announcement for the special sections that are open to new submissions at JGR Space Physics right now. If you have an idea for a special section, then please feel free to contact any of the editors and, when you are ready to propose, please fill out the form. There’s nothing quite like a deadline to motivate the community to finalize and write up their findings.

Dayside Magnetosphere Interactions

            Submission deadline: 30 November 2017

This special collection addresses the processes by which solar wind mass, momentum, and energy enter the magnetosphere. Regions of interest include the foreshock, bow shock, magnetosheath, magnetopause, and cusps, the dayside magnetosphere, and both the dayside polar and equatorial ionosphere. Results from spacecraft observations (e.g., MMS, Cluster, Geotail, THEMIS, and Van Allen Probes), ground-based observations (all-sky camera, radar, and magnetometer), MHD, hybrid and PIC simulations are all included. Parallel processes occur at other planets, and recent results from NASA’s MAVEN mission to Mars, as well as ESA’s Mars and Venus Express missions are also included.

Mars Aeronomy

            Submission deadline: 5 January 2018

The Mars upper atmosphere, ionosphere, magnetosphere, and solar-wind interactions are becoming increasingly important for understanding loss of atmosphere to space and the evolution of the Martian climate.  Recent observations have been made from Mars Express over the last decade, from MAVEN for the most-recent Mars year, and from Mars Odyssey, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Orbiter Mission; landed spacecraft and earlier orbiters also provided valuable information. The International conference on Mars Aeronomy held in May 2017 in Boulder, Co, USA brought together all aspects of Mars aeronomy, including pertinent observations, analyses, theoretical models and results. The proposed special issue will collect the papers presented at the conference as well as will be open to all relevant manuscripts about the Mars upper atmosphere and space environment, even if the authors did not attend the conference. This collection is a joint special section between JGR-Space Physics and JGR-Planets, so the authors can submit manuscripts to either journal. The submission deadline is 5 January 2018.

Science and Exploration of the Moon, Near-Earth Asteroids, and the Moons of Mars

            Submission deadline: 31 January 2018

This special collection, sponsored by NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) invites papers focusing on the science and exploration of the Moon, near-Earth asteroids, and the moons of Mars. We invite contributions covering topics including, but not limited to, geologic investigations, dust/exosphere/plasma environments, surface remote sensing studies, field analog studies, laboratory analyses, and geophysical modeling relevant to the bodies of interest. In addition, we invite contributions focusing on efforts to prepare for future human exploration of these bodies. Special collection submissions can be submitted to JGR-Planets, JGR-Space Physics, Earth and Space Science, or GeoHealth. Potential authors do not need to be members of a SSERVI team to submit a paper to this special collection.

Hurricane Special Session

I am very saddened to hear about the loss of life in Texas, the Caribbean Islands, Puerto Rico, and Florida as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma made landfall this past month. There is also tremendous loss of life in Bangladesh due to the severe flooding happening there. And we can’t forget the huge earthquake off the coast of Central America. I hope that survivors can find a way to make their way through the chaos left behind from these disasters.

We can already be thinking about what to learn from these beasts of nature. Specifically, AGU has created a late-breaking session for the Fall Meeting about these large and devastating hurricanes. Originally, it was just about Hurricane Harvey, but the scope has been expanded to include Irma.

            The first author rule is relaxed for late-breaking sessions. Even if you have submitted one already, you can submit another to this (or any other) session created after the original submission deadline.

Space physics can participate in this session. Storms in the troposphere produce atmospheric gravity waves that break in the lower thermosphere, heating this region and creating ripples in ionospheric density. Sometimes magnetic fields are shaken, creating ULF waves that propagate into the magnetosphere. Harvey is particularly intriguing because it parked itself for such a long time, allowing this energy coupling to influence a particular spot for an unusually long time. There are probably other lower-upper atmospheric connections of interest.

The deadline for this session is October 31, so you have time to do some preliminary analysis before making a decision about an abstract submission.

AGU HQ staff and the journal EiCs are already discussing the possibility of a joint special section about new science findings from these hurricanes. I have no details on that yet but, if you pursue a study on this topic, then please keep an eye out for this special section. Even if it doesn’t materialize, then please consider submitting such papers to an appropriate journal, like Space Weather, Geophysical Research Letters, Radio Science, or JGR Space Physics.