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GSA’s Geosphere and Lithosphere
to be Open Access in 2018

Claudia Mora, GSA Past President

In 2014, GSA Council announced its commitment to transitioning GSA journals to full
open access beginning in 2017 with Geology. The motivation for this decision was largely
aspirational: to provide a valuable service to our membership and extend the reach and
impact of our publications by making them accessible to the global research community
and to the public and policymakers, worldwide. This plan was delayed to allow Council
time to fully understand the positive and negative impacts of this decision to our mem-
bers, to the Society, and to authors. Over the past year, Council made an internal review
of our publication options and business changes that would support adoption of open
access. We brought in experts to assess our publication model, to survey our authors
(including members and nonmembers), to share research on factors favoring a successful
transition to open access, and to provide us with informed input on how GSA could move
toward implementation of open access. After thorough discussion, Council voted at its
2017 spring meeting to change GSA’s phased transition to open access. We will now tran-
sition Lithosphere and Geosphere to open access in 2018. Transition of GSA Bulletin and
Geology is postponed.

What last year’s work has shown us is that the open-access movement is progressing,
and we continue our commitment to this exciting possibility, but implementation of full
open access requires changes across commercial, nonprofit, and university business mod-
els that are not yet well-synced, as well as adaptations and changes in the perceptions and
experience of authors and GSA membership. We believe the transition to open access
poses great opportunities for Lithosphere and Geosphere to reach new audiences and to
develop and evolve in perspective and impact. This is also opportunity for GSA to better
educate itself on the management of open-access journals not only for the success of the
journal and its authors, but also for the benefit of the Society’s membership. We look for-
ward to beginning GSA’s move to journal open access and welcome your input and feed-
back as we begin this initial step.

Manuscripts submitted to Geosphere
or Lithosphere on or after 1 Sept. 2017
that are ultimately accepted for publi-
cation will be assessed an article pub-
lication charge (APC) of US$1,750.
GSA members will receive a US$100
discount on this APC. There will be
no other color or page charges, and a
waiver system will be in place. No
manuscript will be rejected for an
inability to pay. (More details on jour-
nal fees and options are posted at
www.geosociety.org/AuthorInfo.)

52 GSA Today | September 2017