[U05-P02] Earth, Planets and Space, an open access journal: achievements and foresight II
★Invited Papers
Keywords:Earth, Planets and Space, open access journal
Earth, Planets and Space (EPS) is published on behalf of the following five societies; Society of Geomagnetism and Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, The Seismological Society of Japan, The Volcanological Society of Japan, The Geodetic Society of Japan, The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences. These five societies are all society members of the Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU). The journal scope covers wide range of Earth and Planetary Sciences, particularly geomagnetism, aeronomy, space science, seismology, volcanology, geodesy, and planetary science. EPS’ missions as an international academic journal representing Asian and Oceanian regions are publishing research achievements on international collaborative project that Japan leads and on geological phenomena, which can result in disaster, from Japan not depending on overseas journals, and yielding a return the knowledge to the related community for its development.
EPS had been supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) 251001 the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for five years since 2014. Thanks to this grant, we have restructured the journal. EPS became an online full open access journal in the partnership with Springer Nature. The editorial board was expanded by adding many international members to yield faster and qualified review process. Four article categories were newly made to characterize the journal: Full paper, Express Letter, Frontier Letter, and Technical Reports. Express Letter is a short article for a quick publication of new findings, Frontier Letter is a short article invited by the editor in chief. Technical Report is for publication on a software tool or an experimental or computational method, test or procedure or hardware design. Proposals of a special issues have been actively invited and accepted. We have promoted EPS by many ways to improve the visibility. As the result of these efforts, we published around 190 articles every year. 44% of these are the articles by overseas authors. 15 special issues were published since 2014 and many of the special issues were succeeded as the publication tool for the society members. The turnarounds were shortened from 330 days in 2013 to 164 days for Full Paper and 109 days for Express Letter in 2017. The journal impact factor (IF) increased to 2.243 for 2016, which corresponds to the top 38% of the journals in Geosciences, Multidisciplinary category. From these achievements, we can say that EPS is now ready to be a competitive international journal.
The EPS steering committee have collected and analyzed the data on submission and publication and the stream of potential readers and authors via questionnaires. The results indicate that the recent increase in the IF is the results of the decrease of articles that are not cited and the increase of articles that is frequently cited; the enhancement of the editorial board contributed to the former and the papers in the special issue and Frontier Letter contributed to the latter. However, most of the Frontier Letter authors were Japanese nominated by the societies and many of the special issue were proposed by domestic researchers. They still have room to grow for internationalization. From the questionnaires, we found that the authors tend to give weight to the IF and publication speed rather than article processing charge to select a journal for submission. We will present further detail of these data and analysis in the poster presentation.
In the future, EPS should continue to publish papers with stable growth. We will operate the journal with deeper collaboration with JpGU for following goals; 1) further improvement of steering foundation, 2) establishment of self-financial-support by publication, 3) further enhancement of the editorial board, Frontier Letter, and special issues in terms of internationalization, and 4) further improvement of the journal visibility in the international community.
EPS had been supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) 251001 the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for five years since 2014. Thanks to this grant, we have restructured the journal. EPS became an online full open access journal in the partnership with Springer Nature. The editorial board was expanded by adding many international members to yield faster and qualified review process. Four article categories were newly made to characterize the journal: Full paper, Express Letter, Frontier Letter, and Technical Reports. Express Letter is a short article for a quick publication of new findings, Frontier Letter is a short article invited by the editor in chief. Technical Report is for publication on a software tool or an experimental or computational method, test or procedure or hardware design. Proposals of a special issues have been actively invited and accepted. We have promoted EPS by many ways to improve the visibility. As the result of these efforts, we published around 190 articles every year. 44% of these are the articles by overseas authors. 15 special issues were published since 2014 and many of the special issues were succeeded as the publication tool for the society members. The turnarounds were shortened from 330 days in 2013 to 164 days for Full Paper and 109 days for Express Letter in 2017. The journal impact factor (IF) increased to 2.243 for 2016, which corresponds to the top 38% of the journals in Geosciences, Multidisciplinary category. From these achievements, we can say that EPS is now ready to be a competitive international journal.
The EPS steering committee have collected and analyzed the data on submission and publication and the stream of potential readers and authors via questionnaires. The results indicate that the recent increase in the IF is the results of the decrease of articles that are not cited and the increase of articles that is frequently cited; the enhancement of the editorial board contributed to the former and the papers in the special issue and Frontier Letter contributed to the latter. However, most of the Frontier Letter authors were Japanese nominated by the societies and many of the special issue were proposed by domestic researchers. They still have room to grow for internationalization. From the questionnaires, we found that the authors tend to give weight to the IF and publication speed rather than article processing charge to select a journal for submission. We will present further detail of these data and analysis in the poster presentation.
In the future, EPS should continue to publish papers with stable growth. We will operate the journal with deeper collaboration with JpGU for following goals; 1) further improvement of steering foundation, 2) establishment of self-financial-support by publication, 3) further enhancement of the editorial board, Frontier Letter, and special issues in terms of internationalization, and 4) further improvement of the journal visibility in the international community.