Please find here the instructions for preparing your paper(s) and the Proceedings volume of your IAU Symposium:
Instructions for Authors and Editors of Proceedings for IAU Symposia
Aims and Scope
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union publishes high-quality and timely previews and reviews of fundamental and state-of-the-art astrophysical developments around the world, as presented at some nine IAU-sponsored conferences per year and at the triennial General Assemblies of the IAU. Subjects covered include fundamental astronomy; the sun and heliosphere; planetary systems; stars and variable stars; interstellar matter; the galactic system; galaxies and the Universe; optical and infrared techniques; radio astronomy; and space and high-energy astrophysics.
Types of Article
IAU welcomes the following article types:
- Research Articles
- Poster Papers
These article types may be eligible for APC waivers or discounts under one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.
Article Length
The Proceedings of an IAU Symposium should provide a comprehensive overview of the field, rather than a collection of short papers that provide snapshots. Thus, the IAU encourages the Editor(s) to publish primarily review and invited papers of typically 10-20 pages each that summarize the main developments in the subfield over the past decade and list outstanding questions.
Posters should not be included in the published Proceedings (for space reasons or otherwise) but they can be provided as 'supplementary information' in electronic format only, of typically 2 pages each.
Preparing your article for submission
Authors are encouraged to compose their papers in LATEX. Authors should use the LaTeX templates provided here:
www.iau.org/publications/proceedings_rules/
If you are uploading your manuscript in LaTeX format, please upload a single PDF file for review and reference and designate as "Main Document". Please upload your LaTeX source files under the "LaTeX Source Files" designation. Authors can upload all of their LaTeX source files in a single zip file if needed. Please note: The system cannot convert PDF files produced directly from pdfTeX (though PDF created from .dvi is fine). If your PDF has been created using pdfTeX, open it in Adobe Acrobat and re-save it in a standard PDF format before uploading it to the ScholarOne system. ScholarOne does not support type 3 fonts.
Tables and Artwork
Tables
Tables, however small, must be numbered sequentially in the order in which they are mentioned in the text. The word table is only capitalized at the start of a sentence.
Figures
Figures should be as small as possible while displaying clearly all the information required, and with all lettering readable. Every effort should be taken to avoid figures that run over more than one page. For review purposes figures should be embedded within the manuscript. Upon final acceptance, however, individual figure files will be required for production.
Each figure should be accompanied by a single caption, to appear beneath, and must be cited in the text. Figures should appear in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text and figure files must be named accordingly to assist the production process (and numbering of figures should continue through any appendices). Failure to follow figure guidelines may result in a request for resupply and a subsequent delay in the production process.
For further information, please consult the Cambridge Journals artwork guide
Seeking permission for copyrighted material
If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. As the author it is your responsibility to obtain this permission and pay any related fees, and you will need to send us a copy of each permission statement at acceptance.
For information on how to obtain permission, please refer to this guidance document.
Ethics and Transparency Policy requirements
Please refer to the IAU's Publishing Ethics and Research Transparency policies when preparing your manuscript.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their main manuscript file. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.