Journal of Astronomy & Earth Sciences Education

Responding to the discipline-based education research community’s need for a formal, archival journal to document program evaluation and educational impact of programs and innovations, the Journal of Astronomy & Earth Science Education (JAESE.org) is a scholarly, double-blind,peer-reviewed journal designed to serve the discipline-based astronomy, planetary, and geosciences education research community.  JAESE’s first issue was published on December 31, 2014 and has published four volumes and seven issues since that time.  By far, the median article topic has been focused on planetarium education research, while there have only been a few articles on conventional solid-Earth geosciences education research. Although there is not yet an even distribution of topics across the field, there is a relatively even distribution among author demographics. Authors include a range of both junior and senior members of the field.  There have been significantly more female authors than male authors.  Submissions are distributed as blind-copies to two or three peer reviewers with authors’ names and identifying information redacted from the manuscript.  The average time to complete the first round of peer-review reviewers is 6.2-weeks. There have been too few manuscripts to reliably publish a “percentage acceptance rate.” Taken together, JAESE’s guiding Editorial Advisory Board judges this to be a successful first few years.  In a purposeful effort to make JAESE authors’ scholarly works as widely accessible as possible, JAESE adopted an open-access business model.  JAESE articles are available to read free-of-charge over the Internet, delivered as PDFs.  To date, the most common way articles are downloaded by readers is through Google Scholar, although synthesizers like ResearchGate and AcademiaEDU have notable impact. In contrast to the traditional revenue model of charging readers and libraries recurring subscription fees, JAESE charges authors a nominal submission fee and a small open-access fee, to date averaging about $700 USD.  These charges are far lower than the traditional page charges and gold-package open-access fees typically charged to authors or their institutions by typical scientific journals, making JAESE an attractive publishing venue for many scholars to make their work as widely read as possible.  The five-fold established review criteria applied to all submitted manuscripts are that the manuscript clearly: i. makes an important contribution to the discipline; ii. has a clearly stated research question that is adequately motivated by the existing scholarly literature base; iii. has study methods and participants tightly and appropriately aligned with the research question; iv. presents evidence that clearly supports the conclusions forwarded; and v. has an accessible writing style, grammar, syntax and voice for a wide audience of scholarly readers.