Athena Closes JSEAS and Starts Transition to Add Non-STM Content to Portfolio

Athena International Publishing today announced the closure of the “Journal of Software Engineering for Autonomous Systems”. The move completes the consolidation of Athena's STM (scientific, technical and medical) journals portfolio and marks the start of a transition period to prepare adding non-STM content on the Athena platform. The company plans to announce four new non-STM publications at the start of 2027.

Athena launched the Journal of Software Engineering for Autonomous Systems (JSEAS) in 2022 as an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal dedicated to distributing research and industrial results in the field of autonomous systems and software engineering, as well as overview papers in this area. JSEAS was launched as a successor journal to the Journal of Automotive Software Engineering (JASEN) which transferred to Athena from Atlantis Press and ceased publication at the end of 2021. Compared to JASEN, JSEAS was given a broader scope to cover autonomous systems in general rather than automotive systems only, had an expanded Editorial Board and a revised editorial strategy aimed at attracting more submissions and preparing for indexation in key databases. Despite publishing four volumes on the Athena platform, the journal never succeeded to achieve a regular submission flow due to being unindexed in a highly competitive domain. Therefore it was decided in consultation with the Editors-in-Chief to discontinue the journal at the end of the year.

The move completes the consolidation of Athena's STM journals portfolio, after earlier journal closures at the end of 2023 (Materials Highlights) and 2025 (Growth and Form and Natural Language Processing Research). It also marks the start of a transition period during which Athena prepares to expand the scope of its publications by adding non-STM content to the portfolio of products. This transition involves restructuring areas of the website as well as developing additional capabilities and platform functionality. The company expects to complete these enhancements by the end of the year and plans to announce four new non-STM publications at the beginning of 2027.

Athena International Publishing is a publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information as well as non-STM literature. The company was founded at the end of 2021 to further support the efficient dissemination of “sound science” and the advancement and exchange of scientific knowledge at a time when general trust in science was globally under pressure. With our headquarters based in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, our team consists of a group of publishing professionals with more than 200 years of combined experience across major STM publishers and service providers in the industry. The Athena publishing portfolio consists of journals, book series, conference proceedings and books covering all STM disciplines including Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Biology and Life Sciences, Health and Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities. Non-STM content was added to the portfolio from 2027 onwards. All Athena publications are Open Access and hence free to read, download, copy and distribute under the terms of the applicable Creative Commons end-user license. For more information, please visit https://www.athena-publishing.com.