Japan Geoscience Union Meeting 2019

Presentation information

[J] Oral

U (Union ) » Union

[U-03] Future of Scientific Publishing in Geosciences

Tue. May 28, 2019 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM 101 (1F)

convener:Hodaka Kawahata(Atmosphere Ocean Research Institute, the University of Tokyo), Hirokuni Oda(Institute of Geology and Geoinformation, Geological Survey of Japan, AIST), Chairperson:Hirokuni Oda, Hodaka Kawahata

11:05 AM - 11:25 AM

[U03-05] "Earth, Planets and Space" An Open Access Journal: Past, Present and and Future

★Invited Papers

*Yasuo Ogawa1, Kiyoshi Baba2 (1.Volcanic Fluid Research Center, School of Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2.Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo )

Keywords:open access journal, Earth and Planetary sciences

EPS (Earth, Planets and Space) is a peer-reviewed open access journal published on behalf of the following five societies; The 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.

EPS was established in 1998 as a continuation of the two journals, the Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoelectricity (1949 to 1997) and the Journal of Physics of the Earth (1952 to 1997). In 2014 we started open access publication under the SpringerOpen platform. Open Access publication successfully shortened the publication time, increased visibility of the journal and widened its international readership. We publish average of 190 papers per year and half of the authors are from overseas. One of the qualification indices of the journal, impact factor (IF), is continuously increasing from 1.328 (2014) to 2.773 (2017) and it will also go over 2.6 in 2018. The increasing IF is supported both by increase of highly cited papers and by decrease of uncited papers, suggesting the success of quality control by the editorial board and possibly increasing of the visibility via open access.

The scope of EPS covers Earth and Planetary Sciences, particularly geomagnetism, aeronomy, space science, seismology, volcanology, geodesy, and planetary science. The EPS share common scopes as well as a common journal platform with PEPS (Progress in Earth and Planetary Science). In contrast to PEPS, which emphasizes review papers, EPS is characterized by the following article types: (1) “Express Letter” which aims at fast publications, (2) “Technical reports“, which describe technical developments for scientific researches and (3) “Frontier Letters” for leading edge researches only with the invitation from the editor in chief. EPS promotes topical article collections (what we call special issues) on the first results of geoscientific events (earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) and scientific missions (satellite missions). EPS has been recently successful in attractive special issues.

Aiming at fast and qualified review system, we have expanded editorial board members internationally since 2017. Now we have currently 50 regular editors (including 22 oversea editors). The oversea editors are 10 from Europe, 3 from North America, 5 from Asia, and 3 from Oceania.

As part of the promotion of the journal we have four annual awards to recognize authors and reviewers: (1) EPS Excellent paper awards, (2) EPS Young researcher award, (3) Highlighted Paper Awards and (4) Excellent Paper Awards.

From 2018, EPS has strengthened ties with JpGU. EPS has started collaborative advertisement activities at major domestic and international academic meetings, like JpGU, AGU, EGU and AOGS. EPS has updated the APC (Article Processing Charge) in September 2018 for sustainable operations of the journal.