AAS & IOP Publishing Launch Innovative eBook Program

This announcement is adapted from a joint AAS-IOP press release:

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) and IOP Publishing (IOP) have created a new electronic book publishing partnership as part of the AAS's mission to enhance and share humanity's scientific understanding of the universe.

The program will combine IOP's award-winning ebook publishing with the expertise of the AAS community to foster a deeper understanding of diverse topics in the astronomical sciences. These will include not only planetary, stellar, galactic, and cosmological phenomena and processes, but also instrumentation and techniques, computation and statistics, and other practical aspects of modern astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, and related fields.

The AAS and IOP Publishing have collaborated successfully for many years on the society's peer-reviewed journals, the Astronomical Journal and the Astrophysical Journal, Letters, and Supplement Series. They have recently grown this cooperation by developing sophisticated tools such as the Astronomy Image Explorer, which both simplifies and broadens information discovery for researchers.

The new ebook series will be hosted alongside journal content on IOP's website, IOPscience, providing seamless searching and discovery of all AAS book and journal content. Authors will be able to fully exploit evolving digital publishing capabilities, as the ebooks will be available in HTML, PDF, Mobi, and EPUB 3 format to be compatible on most e-readers and devices. Multimedia and advanced features such as MathJax are an integral part of the ebook and mean that complex formulas are perfectly rendered and scalable on a wide range of devices.

Dr. Kevin Marvel, Executive Officer of the AAS, said, "The AAS is perfectly positioned right now to undertake this exciting new effort. Our partnership with IOP on the publication of our journals, which play key roles in the field, has grown the range and volume of content we publish, secured their financial position, and expanded their impact and capabilities. We are looking forward to this new effort, which is central to our mission."

Steven Hall, Managing Director of IOP Publishing, said, "We are delighted to combine our experience in ebook publishing with the AAS's expertise and reputation in astronomy. This is an exciting new chapter in our relationship and we look forward to developing the world's best book publishing program in astronomy, which will serve the mission of both of our organizations in supporting scientific discovery."

Commissioning for the program will begin immediately. The program will be supported by an expert advisory board assembled by the AAS to meet the needs of its members and the wider astronomy community. For more information, please visit http://ioppublishing.org/books/aas. For authors interested in being part of the program, please [email protected].

If you are attending the 225th AAS meeting 4-8 January 2015 in Seattle, Washington, please visit the IOP Publishing booth (109) for additional information.