Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal.

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About

The Journal of High Altitude Ballooning (JHAB) is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to high altitude ballooning and related activities. is a journal that is dedicated to high altitude ballooning and related activities.

Focus and Scope

The Journal of High-Altitude Ballooning (JHAB) is a single-blind peer-reviewed online journal published by the Stratospheric Ballooning Association (SBA). The purpose of this journal is to publish manuscripts of interest to those in the stratospheric ballooning community such as (a) higher education faculty and their students, (b) amateur radio (AKA Ham radio) high-altitude balloonists, and (c) informal educators and pre-college teachers engaged in ballooning. Manuscripts are nearly always ballooning-related (though not always stratospheric-ballooning-related) and may report on topics such as (a) balloon-borne science and engineering research, (b) hardware/software for balloon trajectory prediction and balloon tracking, (c) balloon handling /launch/recovery techniques and best-practices, (d) ballooning regulations, (e) special topics /events, such as eclipse-ballooning in August 2017, (f) the use of ballooning in educational contexts, especially in higher education for STEM recruitment/retention classes, introductory/general education STEM classes, upper-level classes for STEM majors, student research in STEM areas, education research (such as Physics Education Research (PER)), and/or modules for pre-service STEM-teacher training, and (g) the use of ballooning for STEM outreach.

Manuscripts submitted to the annual Academic High-Altitude (Ballooning) Conference (AHAC) (which are peer-reviewed for potential inclusion in AHAC Proceedings) will be considered for publication in JHAB. Manuscripts not presented at AHAC may also be directly submitted to JHAB for consideration for a later publication.

Submission Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  1. All submissions go through Janeway and thus all authors must have an account created in our Janeway system
  2. For submissions to be considered for the upcoming issue, they must be submitted by the due date. Any articles after that due date will only be considered for the following issue.
  3. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (with the exception of AHAC proceedings).
  4. The submission file format is PDF and we recommend all authors use the Microsoft Word or LaTeX templates that we provide.
  5. When available, DOI URLs for the references will be provided.
  6. The manuscript must be formatted in the following style. The easiest way to do this is to use the provided templates
    1. 12 point Time New Roman font, one column
    2. 1 inch margin on all sides
    3. Full justification
    4. Single spacing
    5. Must not exceed 15 pages including tables, and images
    6. References must follow IEEE format for references, references will not count towards the page limit
    7. All Figures must be captioned and referenced. Figures should be in line with the text at the top of the closest page.
    8. Appendices are not permitted or allowed, however, we do allow for supplemental files, images, and other material can be uploaded to Janeway for inclusion

All submissions must be set up for blind review during the review phase of the submission process. Please follow these instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review has been followed. If the manuscript is fully accepted, you will then submit a final copy with the items removed for blind review put back in.

Copyright Notice

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication. Works are released under a Creative Commons license, which provides unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons License stipulates that: "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."

The citation of articles published in JHAB must include: the name(s) of the authors, the name of the journal, the full URL of the article (in a hyperlinked format if distributed online), and the DOI number of the article.

Peer Review

All submissions will be single-blind peer-reviewed by active researchers. All communication will be through the assigned section editor.

All submitted manuscripts are first reviewed by the editorial team. Those papers that seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent for formal review. The editorial board reserves the right to reject manuscripts without sending them for formal review.

Promising submissions are sent for formal review, typically to two reviewers, but sometimes more. The editors make a decision based on the reviewers' advice from among the following options:

  • Accept: Your submission has been accepted as is.
  • Revisions Required: Your submission requires minor changes and will be accepted once those have been completed.
  • Resubmit for Review: Your submission needs significant re-working. A new file must be submitted and another round of review will take place.
  • Reject: Your submission was not accepted for publication with this journal, either because it was not seen to be of high enough quality, or its subject did not match the journal.

While reviews in all cases are blind, we recognize that articles that germinated in conference presentations are exceptionally hard to anonymize. In such cases, we will, therefore, ask reviewers to disclose any conflicts of interest, disclose whether they know the identity of the author, and to justify their comments solely on the basis of the article under submission. These factors will be combined and considered at the discretion of the editors in reaching a decision.

In the case of editors submitting, the submission will be handled by other members of the team who must adhere strictly to the recommendations of external reviewers.

Licences

The following licences are allowed:


  • None
  • CC BY 4.0
    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Publication Fees

This journal is published by the Stratospheric Ballooning Association (SBA) in conjunction with Iowa State University. Unlike many open-access publishers, there is no fee to publish accepted papers. However, at least one author must be a member of the SBA and in good standing at the time that the paper is accepted for publication. If at least one author is not a member, this may delay the publication of the manuscript or result in the manuscript being withdrawn.

Publication Cycle

JHAB is published twice a year.

Sections

Section or article type

Public Submissions

Peer Reviewed

Indexed

Review Article