I. Overall Concept

Living Reviews in Solar Physics is an exclusively WWW-based, peer-reviewed journal, publishing reviews of research in all areas of solar and heliospheric physics. Articles are solicited leading authorities and are intended for physicists at or above the graduate-student level. The Articles in Living Reviews provide up-to-date critical reviews of the state of research in the fields they cover. Articles also offer annotated insights (and where possible, active links) into the key literature and describe online resources available in these fields. Living Reviews is unique in maintaining a suite of high-quality reviews; its articles are subjected to strict peer-review and are kept up-to-date by the authors. This is the meaning of the word "Living" in the journal's title. Living Reviews in Solar Physics is the second Living Reviews journal following Living Reviews in Relativity , which is now online in it's sixth year.

It is central to the concept of Living Reviews in Solar Physics that it be a fully electronic journal. This gives it the ability to update its articles regularly and with minimum effort. Besides its high-quality, searchable, easily navigable scientific content, the journal includes useful indexes of print and electronic resources. In this way, Living Reviews in Solar Physics can be used by its readers as a database, an encyclopedia, or a resource letter, in addition to a review journal. The goal of the journal is to develop its articles into a carefully screened and edited, well-integrated, topical set of hypertext documents that, taken together, form a valuable research tool for the solar and heliospheric physics community. Living Reviews in Solar Physics is a service provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, and is supported by the Heinz Nixdorf Center for Information Management in the Max Planck Society (ZIM). The journal's aim is to become one of the first places a scientist looks for information about work in the fields covered by the journal.

Recognizing that many useful electronic journals already exist, Living Reviews in Solar Physics intends to complement, rather than to replicate, existing WWW astrophysics resources. It is neither a first-publication journal, nor a collection of electronic monographs or textbooks. Instead, articles are placed at the level of a good plenary review talk at an international conference. Written by experts in solar and heliosphere physics, reviews published in the journal cite, explain, and assess the most relevant, interesting, and important print and electronic resources in a given field. The articles evaluate existing work, place it in a meaningful context, and suggest areas where more work and new results are needed.

In this manner, Living Reviews in Solar Physics aims to provide the international solar and heliospheric physics community with a valuable and unique service.

II. Facts about Publication

The journal is organized into yearly volumes. Articles appear throughout the year, as they are ready for publication. The journal carries no page charges for authors and no subscription fees for users. Current plans are to ensure that Living Reviews in Solar Physics remains a freely available publication throughout its existence.

The journal is not distributed on paper in the traditional way. In general, users access and employ Living Reviews in Solar Physics on its home website. Individual articles can be downloaded in a format suitable for printing or in a self-contained set of HTML pages for off-line reading.

As a free service, we will maintain a subscription list. This mailing list will be used to notify journal users when a new article has been published, providing the article's abstract. In addition, information about general changes and other matters pertaining to Living Reviews in Solar Physics will be emailed to subscribers. Users will not need to subscribe to the Living Reviews in Solar Physics mailing list in order to view the articles in the journal; joining the list, however, will be a convenient way for users to keep informed about what's happening in Living Reviews in Solar Physics.

It is the aim of the editors of Living Reviews in Solar Physics for the full text articles published therein to become accessible as soon as possible via the Astronomical Data Service (ADS).

III. The Electronic Design of Living Reviews: Users, Utility, and Updatability

To facilitate online reading and browsing, Living Reviews in Solar Physics provides a well integrated hypertext viewing environment: pop-up windows give instant access to earlier equations, to footnotes and to the reference list, special buttons enable citation tracking within the article. Authors are encouraged to include an unlimited number of colorful figures, graphs, and movies in their articles and to create active links to other electronic resources. Print versions of each article will be provided in multiple common formats (whereby some features of the original article may be lost, however, e.g. only a single frame from movies can be printed).

All articles appearing in Living Reviews in Solar Physics and all references appearing in those articles, will collated into a online searchable reference database. Queries to the database will return active links to cited materials available on the web. Through this, Living Reviews in Solar Physics provides a comprehensive way for its users to become aware of and, where possible, to directly access the most important research in the field, even without going through any specific review article.

Living Reviews in Solar Physics users are expected to be drawn from the entire solar physics community. Graduate students can use the journal to start their initial literature surveys or to learn about fields peripheral to their own; researchers can use it to quickly find out about up-to-date results in fields in which they are not current, to track down bibliographic references that they have not recorded, or even to find areas in which their own skills can be applied in a new field; and lecturers can use it to find information and visual materials that can be used in presentations at all levels.

Because Living Reviews in Solar Physics offers immediate on-line access to all its articles and to any online materials cited in those articles, it recognizes that it is essential that all articles and all links stay current. Living Reviews in Solar Physics will stay current in the following ways. First, and most importantly, authors will revise articles as important new research developments occur. These article updates are either treated as new publications, subjected to refereeing, and published with a new publication number, or in case of errata or small, but important additions, are added directly to the original article. Second, all electronic links made in articles and in the journal at large to on-line resources will be actively maintained. They will be automatically checked frequently and updated as needed. Finally, Living Reviews in Solar Physics is always evolving; we are always looking for ways to increase its usefulness. These ways of keeping current make the journal a "Living" resource.

IV. Editorial Policy and Journal Content

Living Reviews in Solar Physics publishes reviews in all areas of solar physics. The editors solicit articles from leading experts, with a view to achieving uniform coverage of modern solar physics research. All submitted articles are reviewed and edited carefully, with attention paid to content, organization, and style as they relate to the aims of Living Reviews.

The coverage and depth of an article should be at a level similar to that found in a plenary review talk at a major conference. That is, an author specializing in a given area informs advanced scientists from other areas about the latest significant research in his or her area of specialization. Although articles may explain difficult concepts and provide an overall framework for understanding work in a field, they will not be primarily tutorial in nature. Rather than methodically covering every aspect of a given research area, an article published in Living Reviews in Solar Physics highlights significant issues affecting the field, provides thoughtful and evaluative commentary on the essential techniques and concepts being used in current research, and offers insight into the challenges facing future research efforts. Through their commentary, and, where appropriate, by offering direct annotation, authors guide users to the most useful, reliable, and interesting references.

Normally, articles survey relatively narrow areas of research. This makes the job of writing and maintaining them more tractable for authors. It also keeps articles more concise, a characteristic that makes them more usable in a hypertext environment. By including and cross-linking many articles on specific subjects, the journal as a whole pursues comprehensive coverage of solar physics. Where appropriate, Living Reviews in Solar Physics also includes broader review articles to bridge gaps or to make meaningful connections among more specific subjects.

As mentioned above, articles in Living Reviews in Solar Physics are revised as new research developments occur. In this way, users can be confident of finding the latest important work in Living Reviews in Solar Physics. Substantial article updates are treated editorially as new articles, with full referee scrutiny. These are assigned a new publication number and replace their older versions in the article listings. Article updates appear in the journal as soon as they are accepted. For archival purposes, the previous version of the article is still listed in the original volume in which it was published, and it remains accessible from the article's history page. In addition, authors may also request the publication of errata or small, important additions of new information within the original article. All such changes are carefully documented in the online and print versions of the article, and recorded on the article's history page.

V. Technical Matters

The journal's main goal is to develop a strong base of well organized, effectively navigable scientific content. For the foreseeable future, the journal will rely most heavily on tested features of the WWW while occasionally branching out, as the needs of authors and users evolve, into the latest web technologies.

Authors must submit their articles in LaTeX. Using our software built on top of Eitan Gurari's TeX4ht converter, we convert LaTeX documents to valid HTML; authors are not responsible for HTML code in their documents. This is the responsibility of Living Reviews in Solar Physics.

Authors find more details under the restricted access pages at Author Guidelines.