REACH

About REACH

REACH — Reviews in Human Space Exploration: Journal Profile and Guide

REACH, in full REACH – Reviews in Human Space Exploration, was an international review journal published by Elsevier GmbH in Germany, devoted to the whole field of human space exploration. It holds a genuinely unusual place in scholarly publishing: when Elsevier announced its launch in Berlin on 25 July 2016, the announcement could state, through its first editor-in-chief, that until then no review journal had existed that focused entirely on this topic. The journal was created to fill that exact gap. It was the official human space exploration review journal of two bodies at the centre of world astronautics, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) and the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), whose names it carried on its ScienceDirect page alongside the notice that later closed its story: “Title discontinued as of 2023.” Its single ISSN, 2352-3093, is the identifier carried by the Journals World record for this post, by its Elsevier author information pack, by its ScienceDirect journal page and by its Elsevier shop listing, and it is the anchor for everything in this profile.

Because REACH is a discontinued title, this profile is written differently from a profile of a living journal. There is no current submission route to describe, no live call for papers to summarise, and no author fee to quote, and any profile that presented those things as current would be misleading its readers. What remains valuable, and what this profile provides, is a complete, verified account of what the journal was, what it published across its 2016–2022 run, who led it, how it was indexed and cited, and how a reader, librarian or researcher should handle its archive today: how to cite it, how to find its articles, how to distinguish it from unrelated publications that share its short, common name, and how to interpret the metrics that aggregator sites still attach to it years after its final issue.

Quick Facts

A note on completeness belongs here. A current editorial board, a submission timetable and an article processing charge for REACH are not published, because the journal no longer accepts submissions; those fields are therefore not filled with historical figures dressed up as current ones. Where a historical figure is given in this profile — the launch editorial team, the planned frequency — it is labelled as a launch-era fact, taken from Elsevier’s own 2016 announcement and author information pack.

Launch and History

Elsevier’s launch announcement of 25 July 2016 described REACH as “a review journal that focuses on all aspects of human space exploration”, covering comprehensive overviews of the science of human and robotic space exploration, life sciences research in space, and beneficial terrestrial applications derived from spaceflight. It stated the journal’s educational ambition in terms that became its signature: REACH would educate readers from academia, industry and government, with special emphasis on summarising the most important recent developments and challenges in each covered field and on making published articles legible for a non-specialist audience. That last clause is the key to the journal’s identity. Human space exploration is a field practised by a small number of agencies and companies, studied by a far larger community, and funded by publics and governments who are not specialists. A review journal written to be legible beyond the specialist circle was a deliberate intervention in how that field explains itself.

The founding editor-in-chief, Professor Rupert Gerzer of the Skoltech Space Center in Russia, explained the title itself in the announcement: REACH is “an ambitious title, a title that should remind us to extend the possibilities of human activity, ‘to reach for the stars’, especially in this highly symbolic realm, to focus on the exciting challenges to come, and to always go forward.” His surprise at the gap the journal filled is also on the record: “Human spaceflight has a great history and an even brighter future. It is surprising that, until now, no review journal existed that focused entirely on this topic.” The launch co-editors were named in the same announcement and were chosen, Elsevier noted, to represent established aerospace nations: Jeffrey Davies of NASA, United States; Peter Gräf of DLR, Germany; Yinghui Li of the Chinese Astronaut Centre, China; and Oleg Orlov of IMBP, Russia. That editorial geography — the United States, Germany, China and Russia around one table — was itself a statement about human spaceflight as a shared, multinational undertaking, and it mirrored the journal’s IAA and IAF affiliation, both of which are international bodies rather than national ones.

The run that followed was compact. Scopus coverage in SCImago-derived listings is given as 2016–2022, ScienceDirect presents the archive in the same span, with its latest articles dated September 2022, and the ScienceDirect journal page now records the title as discontinued as of 2023. A seven-volume life is short for a journal, and readers should understand the archive in those terms: REACH is a bounded, complete collection of review articles from a specific period in human spaceflight — the years of International Space Station utilisation, of commercial crew development, of growing lunar-return planning and of expanding commercial human spaceflight — rather than an open-ended literature. Its boundedness is also its archival convenience: the whole journal can in principle be surveyed, its review topics mapped, and its coverage of a question checked exhaustively, in a way that is impossible for a century-old title.

Publisher and Society Affiliation

The publisher of record is Elsevier GmbH, Elsevier’s German company, and SCImago-derived listings consistently give the publisher as Elsevier GmbH and the country as Germany; the thin Journals World template’s country attribution to Germany, once its garbled numeric publisher string is set aside, points at the same fact. The journal lived on ScienceDirect, Elsevier’s platform, where its page carried the IAA and IAF names as its affiliated bodies. Affiliation mattered for this title more than for most: an official-journal relationship with the International Academy of Astronautics and the International Astronautical Federation gave a brand-new review journal immediate standing in a field where trust is held by agencies, academies and federations, and it signalled to prospective authors that a review published in REACH would be read as part of the field’s own conversation about itself, not as an outsider’s summary of it. The Elsevier shop listing for the title, which still presents the full scope text and the ISSN, is a further publisher-side record of the journal’s intended identity, preserved after closure in the way subscription pages often are.

Scope: The Whole Field, In Reviews

The scope, as stated identically in the Elsevier author information pack and the Elsevier shop listing, covered the entire field of human space exploration through a named list of territories. That list deserves to be given in full, because it is the most precise statement of what the journal considered its field to be: human space exploration mission scenarios; robotic space exploration missions, where they prepare or support human missions; commercial human spaceflight; space habitation and environmental health; space physiology, psychology, medicine and environmental health; space radiation and radiation biology; exo- and astrobiology; the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI); spin-off applications from human spaceflight; benefits from space-based research for health on Earth; Earth observation for agriculture, climate monitoring and disaster mitigation; terrestrial applications of space life sciences developments; and, in the shop listing’s version of the text, extreme environments. Read together, those headings draw a boundary that is wider than engineering and narrower than all of space science: astronomy or planetary science entered REACH when it bore on human missions, on the environments humans would meet, or on the returns human spaceflight brings to Earth, and not otherwise.

Two editorial rules shaped everything inside that boundary. First, REACH published reviews: its author pack states that authors could submit non-solicited review articles, and states in the same breath that original research articles are not published in REACH. A manuscript reporting a new experiment, however excellent, was therefore out of scope by article type, not by quality. Second, the planned shape was four issues per year containing six to eight review articles each, which over a full run implies a literature of roughly a few hundred commissioned and submitted overviews rather than thousands of reports — a scale at which editors can plausibly know their field’s whole output and choose what most needs consolidating. The articles visible at the head of the ScienceDirect archive show the model working as designed in its final year: a review of mental health implications for aviators from COVID-19, a review asking whether Mars has become the new space race and whether space exploration can be justified, a report of the ISS4Mars international workshops of 2020–2021 on enabling innovative research on the International Space Station to solve the challenges of a human mission to Mars, and an integrative review of spaceflight participant psychological assessment and training for commercial space tourism. Psychology, ethics and justification, station research planning, and commercial tourism sit side by side, which is exactly the breadth the scope promised.

Editorial Leadership

Beyond the launch team already named — Editor-in-Chief Rupert Gerzer, with co-editors Jeffrey Davies (NASA, USA), Peter Gräf (DLR, Germany), Yinghui Li (Chinese Astronaut Centre, China) and Oleg Orlov (IMBP, Russia) — a complete, verified final editorial board could not be obtained from the sources fetched for this profile, and none is reproduced. That restraint is deliberate. Board lists for discontinued journals are especially prone to being copied from one aggregator to another long after they ceased to describe any living body, and presenting a launch-era or mid-run roster as the journal’s board would misstate the record. What can be said accurately is that the journal’s founding leadership was drawn from the central institutions of human spaceflight on four national programmes, that its editor-in-chief spoke for it publicly at launch, and that its society affiliations placed its editorial enterprise inside the IAA and IAF community from the first issue. Researchers tracing responsibility for a particular article should use the article’s own ScienceDirect record, which names its authors and, in the archive, its handling context, rather than any reconstructed board list.

Indexing and How the Archive Is Found Today

REACH was a Scopus-covered title: SCImago-derived listings give its coverage as 2016–2022 and build their category, quartile and citation indicators for it from Scopus data. Its articles remain on ScienceDirect under the journal page for REACH, ISSN 2352-3093, each carrying an Elsevier DOI in the pattern 10.1016/j.reach followed by the article number, as in the September 2022 examples cited above. For a discontinued Elsevier title that DOI pattern is the most durable finding aid there is: a citation that gives the DOI resolves to the version of record regardless of how platforms reorganise their browsing pages, and a citation that gives only the short title “REACH” and a year may not, because the word is shared with unrelated publications in other fields. A Directory of Open Access Journals listing could not be verified from the DOAJ search-API output obtained for this profile, and no such listing is claimed; REACH was in any case a subscription-era Elsevier review journal whose individual articles were presented in the archive in mixed form, some as complimentary access and most as abstract-only for non-subscribers, as the ScienceDirect listing of its final articles shows.

Librarians and readers holding print-era or subscription-era access should note the practical consequence of discontinuation: the archive is static. No new volume will extend it, corrections or retractions, if any ever arise, would appear on the article records themselves, and the correct catalogue description of the title is a closed run, 2016–2022, discontinued as of 2023, not a title “awaiting” its next issue. Interlibrary and document-delivery requests should quote the ISSN and the article DOI together, which removes the ambiguity that the one-word title otherwise invites.

Metrics, Attributed and In Context

The metrics attached to REACH by SCImago-derived listings are consistent in kind and slightly variable in vintage, and they are reported here with that variation left visible rather than smoothed away. One SCImago-derived listing fetched for this profile (2024 vintage) gives an SJR of 0.359, an h-index of 14, an overall rank of 14912, an impact score of 1.00 computed for 2024 from Scopus data, and category quartiles of Radiation (Q2) as the best quartile, with Aerospace Engineering (Q3), Human Factors and Ergonomics (Q3), Medicine (miscellaneous) (Q3) and Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging (Q3) alongside it. An earlier-vintage listing of the same SCImago data gives an SJR of 0.372, an h-index of 11 and an overall rank of 13150. The Journals World template record from which this profile was rebuilt carried an h-index of 16. Three different h-index values — 11, 14 and 16 — for one small, closed journal is not a scandal; it is what happens when indicators computed in different years, from a still-accumulating citation record for a ceased title, are stripped of their dates and copied as timeless facts. Citations to a closed archive keep arriving after closure, so its h-index can keep rising even though it publishes nothing new.

No OpenAlex figures are cited for REACH in this profile. OpenAlex access during this batch returned an HTTP 429 rate-limit response, and this project’s standing rule is that bibliometric figures are used only from foreground responses actually obtained; the honest statement for REACH is therefore that its OpenAlex metrics could not be verified in this pass, rather than that any particular number applies. Likewise, no Journal Citation Reports impact factor is stated, because none was verified from a Clarivate source in the material fetched. Interpreted fairly, the verified SCImago picture is of a small review journal with respectable standing in its niches — a Q2 best quartile in Radiation is a creditable result for a title whose centre of gravity was space life sciences — and with the outsized per-article visibility that review articles in a defined field typically earn. Its influence was never going to be measured well by volume-based indicators, because it published few articles by design.

Publication Model While the Journal Was Active

While active, REACH operated as a conventional Elsevier subscription journal with review-only content, a planned quarterly rhythm of four issues a year, and a mixture of commissioned overviews and non-solicited review submissions, the latter explicitly welcomed in its author pack on the condition that they were reviews. Its guide for authors formed part of that same Elsevier author information pack, which set out the description, audience and editorial board before the guide itself — the standard Elsevier pattern of the period. An article processing charge for REACH is not published in any source verified for this profile, and none is quoted: for a discontinued subscription title, quoting a fee would in any case describe a transaction no author can now enter into. The live question for present-day authors is different, and it deserves a direct answer: work that would once have fitted REACH must now be placed elsewhere, in the continuing review and primary journals of space life sciences, space policy and human spaceflight, and authors should not respond to any third-party solicitation that purports to accept submissions for REACH under this ISSN, because the title’s own platform records it as discontinued as of 2023.

Distinguishing REACH From Publications That Share Its Name

“Reach” is a common word and a crowded name. The space journal REACH, ISSN 2352-3093, Elsevier GmbH, DOI stem 10.1016/j.reach, is not the European chemicals regulation universally known as REACH, not any of the professional, charitable or commercial publications that use the word as a title, and not any conference or magazine series in rehabilitation, education or communications that a catalogue search may return alongside it. The disambiguation used throughout this profile — full title Reviews in Human Space Exploration, publisher Elsevier, society names IAA and IAF, and above all the ISSN — is the disambiguation readers should apply in their own searching. A search on the ISSN alone returns this journal cleanly; a search on the word alone returns noise, a point demonstrated during the preparation of this profile, when a site-internal title search on the single word produced page after page of unrelated journals whose texts merely contain the word. Quote the number, and the record resolves.

Who Should Use This Archive, and How

The REACH archive is most useful to four kinds of reader. Researchers entering human spaceflight from an adjacent field — physiology, psychology, radiation biology, aerospace medicine, mission design — will find in its reviews the legible, non-specialist-facing consolidations the journal was founded to provide, still the fastest honest route into a sub-field’s state of knowledge as of the early 2020s. Researchers already in the field will find its workshop reports and agenda-setting reviews, such as the ISS4Mars workshops article, useful as dated evidence of what the community judged its priorities to be at that moment. Teachers will find review articles pitched, by editorial design, at educated non-specialists, which is precisely the register undergraduate and interdisciplinary teaching requires. And historians and policy analysts of spaceflight will find a compact, society-endorsed record of how the field presented itself — its Mars ambitions, its commercial turn, its psychological and medical concerns, its willingness to argue in public about its own justification — during 2016–2022. All four should cite the archive by DOI, date their reliance on it, and check whether a later review elsewhere has superseded a REACH overview before treating its conclusions as current.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is REACH still publishing? No. ScienceDirect records the title as discontinued as of 2023, and its coverage run is 2016–2022.

What did REACH stand for? The journal’s full title was REACH – Reviews in Human Space Exploration; its first editor-in-chief presented the name as an exhortation to “reach for the stars” and extend the possibilities of human activity.

What is its ISSN? 2352-3093, carried by its Elsevier author pack, ScienceDirect page, shop listing and this record. No second ISSN was verified for the title.

Did REACH publish original research? No. Its author information pack states that original research articles are not published in REACH; it published review articles, including non-solicited reviews.

Whose journal was it? It was published by Elsevier GmbH and was the official human space exploration review journal of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) and the International Astronautical Federation (IAF).

What metrics does it hold? Attributed SCImago-derived figures only: SJR 0.359 with best quartile Q2 in Radiation and h-index 14 in a 2024-vintage listing, against SJR 0.372 and h-index 11 in an earlier vintage. No impact factor from Journal Citation Reports, and no OpenAlex figure, was verified for this profile, so none is stated.

Can I submit a review to REACH now? No. The title is discontinued. Treat any solicitation offering submission to REACH under ISSN 2352-3093 with caution and verify it against the ScienceDirect record, which shows the title as closed.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was built from foreground-fetched sources: Elsevier’s launch announcement of 25 July 2016 (founding rationale, society affiliation, editor-in-chief and launch co-editors, with their institutions and countries), the Elsevier author information pack for REACH (ISSN, full scope list, review-only rule, planned frequency), the ScienceDirect journal page (discontinuation as of 2023, IAA and IAF names, final articles with their DOIs, ISSN and mixed access presentation), the Elsevier shop listing (scope text and ISSN), and SCImago-derived listings for publisher, country, coverage window, categories, quartiles, SJR and h-index, each attributed in the text. Fields that could not be verified — a complete final editorial board, an article processing charge, a DOAJ listing and OpenAlex metrics (the service returned HTTP 429 during this batch) — are stated as not published or as could not be verified, rather than reconstructed.