Adventures in Open Access publishing
There is not a lot of diversity in the journals geochemists,
geochronologists and hard-rock petrologists traditionally publish in. Precambrian Research, Geochimica, Chemical
Geology, Gondwana Research, and EPSL are all run by Elsevier, while the Journal
of Petrology and Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology are also published
by large, for-profit corporations.
American Mineralogist is one of the few society journals still published
and operated independently. And although member subscriptions and not too dear,
the journal is by no means open access.
Other fields of geoscience have been making more progress in
the open access revolution. Planetary
and astronomy related geophysics often finds its way into arXiv, biogeosciences
can sometimes access PLOS or PeerJ, and the EGU have a variety of open access
society journals which span a range of geophysical topics.
One of these journals is Geoscientific Instrumentation,Methods, and Data Systems (GI). While most of their published work appeares to
relate to home-made data acquisition systems for geophysical experiments, a
colleague and I decided to approach them and see if they were interested in a
manuscript relating to ICP-MS, one of the mainstay bread-and-butter methods of
geochemical analyses these days. So we sent in the manuscript, and, to make a long story short, it is published online here.
Anyone reading this who is interested in new, community-based
alternatives to the big scientific publishing houses should check it out- the
process and handling was similar to any other journal, the timescale was
similar to traditional publishing in our field (about 5 months submit to
published, including Christmas, and at least 1 month of delay which was
entirely my fault), and I have to say that I found the editors to be as
professional and helpful as anywhere else I have submitted.
www.geosci-instrum-method-data-syst.net/4/75/2015/
doi:10.5194/gi-4-75-2015
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