The Combustion Institute is an international, non-profit scientific and educational society founded in 1954 at the Fifth International Symposium on Combustion, held at the University of Pittsburgh. Bernard Lewis and Hoyt Hottel were among its founders, and the Institute is still headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is not a commercial publisher: it owns two journals and lends its name to four affiliated ones, and the actual publishing, hosting and pricing is handled by Elsevier (and by Taylor & Francis for two affiliated titles).

That structure matters for authors. When you "publish with the Combustion Institute" you are submitting to an Elsevier-hosted journal, using Elsevier's Editorial Manager workflow, Elsevier's open-access options, and Elsevier's article publishing charges - while editorial control, editor appointments and scope sit with the Institute and its volunteer editorial boards. This guide covers which venue fits your manuscript, what open access costs, how peer review runs, and how the biennial symposium feeds the Proceedings.

Two society-owned journals:

• Combustion and Flame - founded in 1957 and published monthly by Elsevier on behalf of the Institute. It carries experimental, theoretical and computational studies of combustion phenomena: reaction kinetics, ignition, laminar and turbulent flames, detonations, sprays, soot and pollutant formation, and combustion in engines and furnaces.
• Proceedings of the Combustion Institute - the archival volume of the biennial International Symposium on Combustion. It succeeded the Symposium (International) on Combustion series, whose first volume with published proceedings appeared in 1948; symposia have run biennially since 1952. Volume numbering tracks the symposium number, and the 41st symposium was held in Kyoto in July 2026.

Four affiliated journals carry the Institute's endorsement but are editorially and commercially separate: Progress in Energy and Combustion Science and Applications in Energy and Combustion Science (both Elsevier), and Combustion Theory and Modelling and Combustion Science and Technology (both Taylor & Francis).

Because Elsevier and Taylor & Francis do the publishing, the Institute has no separate APC schedule. Three routes exist:

• Gold OA - Applications in Energy and Combustion Science is fully open access; every article is published CC BY (or CC BY-NC-ND at the author's choice) with no subscription paywall.
• Hybrid OA - Combustion and Flame, Proceedings of the Combustion Institute and Progress in Energy and Combustion Science are subscription journals that offer a per-article OA option.
• Green OA (self-archiving) - Elsevier permits posting the accepted manuscript to your institutional repository, subject to a per-journal embargo; check the journal's sharing policy.

Elsevier personalises the quoted charge at submission based on country, institutional affiliation and society membership, revises list prices annually, and applies Research4Life waivers and discounts for authors in eligible low- and middle-income countries. Treat every figure above as indicative and confirm on the journal's own open-access page before you submit. Authors at institutions with an Elsevier read-and-publish agreement may have the charge covered entirely - check the ESAC registry or your library.

• Model: single-anonymised peer review across the Institute's journals. Reviewers see author identities; authors do not see reviewer identities.
• Combustion and Flame: rolling submission, handled by a subject editor, typically two or more reviewers, with revision rounds as needed.
• Proceedings of the Combustion Institute: a distinct two-stage process. Full-length papers are submitted to a colloquium by the symposium deadline, reviewed against the colloquium's criteria, and accepted papers are both presented at the symposium and published in the volume. Acceptance rates are competitive and deadlines are hard - the cycle runs to the symposium calendar, not to a rolling queue.
• Progress in Energy and Combustion Science: reviews are invited or arranged from a proposal agreed with the editors in advance; do not submit an unsolicited full review.

1. Choose the venue using the decision table above; PROCI only when the symposium call is open.
2. Read the journal's Guide for Authors on ScienceDirect (or Taylor & Francis Online for the two affiliated titles) - scope, length limits and figure requirements differ by journal.
3. Format the manuscript. The Institute's journals use a numbered citation style in the Elsevier convention; SciSpace has ready-to-use templates for the main titles.
4. Submit through Editorial Manager, the platform Elsevier uses for these journals. PROCI submissions go through the symposium's dedicated submission site during the call window.
5. Declare funding, conflicts and data availability at submission; Elsevier requires a data availability statement.

The journals follow COPE guidance on authorship, plagiarism, duplicate submission and retraction, administered through the publisher's research-integrity processes. Combustion research frequently involves proprietary fuels, engine hardware or defence funding, so declare restrictions on data or materials up front rather than at revision. Institute membership brings discounted symposium registration and reduced-rate personal access to the journals, but membership is not required to publish and confers no editorial advantage.