Guidelines for Special Issues

The Journal on Miniaturization for Air and Space Systems (J-MASS) seeks proposals for Special Issues based on thematically organized papers resulting from in-scope conferences, workshops, or other focused scholarly reporting activities and venues.

Proposals for Special Issues

A Proposal for a J-MASS Special Issue (SI) should include:

  1. Original Source. What activity is the original source and who were the sponsors?
  2. Title. What name best captures the essence of the theme of the intended body of papers? Incorporating the name of the source conference is a good starting point; there may be a critical topical mass of papers that are best described with an alternative description.
  3. Summary. Describe the Special Issue theme. What developments reported within the conference emerged as a coalescing topics that form the foundation of the SI?
  4. Guest Editors. Identify the slate of Guest Editors for the Special Issue. Guest Editors must be willing to actively manage the end-to-end process including disseminating the call to the author community, obtaining reviewers to complement the J-MASS reviewer pool, helping ensure timelines are maintained, writing a Guest Editorial, etc.
  5. Timetable. The anticipated timetable: Due to the purely on-line e-publishing format of J-MASS, between 3-6 months is expected between announcement and issue publication.

Early discussion with the J-MASS EIC (schmalzel@rowan.edu) can help determine fit while addressing questions about the SI process.

Preparation for Manuscript Submission

Once approved, the development of the Special Issue focuses on soliciting extended manuscripts based on papers originally accepted and presented at the source conference. Manuscripts with supporting documents are submitted to the portal: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmass. Authors will need to register with the manuscript system. Once registered, Author Instructions provide the detailed guidelines for manuscript preparation. Note that all authors of a submitted paper must individually link a valid ORCID ID to their personal page on the web-based submission system. Clear Instructions can be found in the submission section of the system. A summary of submissions requirements includes:

  1. A Cover Letter clearly identifying the paper as a submission for the Special Issue that is an extended version of the original conference paper. Any changes to the author list between the original article and the new submission must be explained with all co-authors (original, new, removed) as co-signers.
  2. The extended manuscript.
  3. Details describing how the paper has been technically extended. This is provided as a separate file to be uploaded as part of the submission process.
  4. A PDF copy of the original paper. The original proceedings paper must be one of the references incorporated and listed in the extended paper.
  5. The name of the Special Issue should be included in the upper right-hand corner of every document submitted.
  6. Additional detail will be available on the manuscript submission portal, https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmass.