I began working at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) in 2019, as Editor in Chief of the Survey’s flagship scholarly journal: GEUS Bulletin.
Besides the day-to-day running of the journal, my main task has been to modernise the journal and boost its visibility, readership and submissions among geoscientists in GEUS and around the world.
Throughout its history, GEUS Bulletin has been run by scientists for scientists, with no publication or subscription fees. It has successfully documented important geological research in Denmark, Greenland and the wider Arctic, and reported on active research involving the Survey. Beautifully presented in printed volumes, it was nonetheless suffering from a declining impact factor as the scholarly publishing industry moved away from print-publication models to online-models with strict and extensive industry standards. My challenge was to modernise the journal while maintaining the quality of written articles and editorship that has characterised GEUS Bulletin since its inception in 2003.
I investigated a number of solutions, including a publishing partnership with an existing scholarly publisher and signing up to a commercial journal hosting company. Our preferred route, as an open access journal was to adopt an open source journal platform. After considering two possible solutions, we landed on one that was affordable and offered us the technical requirements and support we needed to embark on the modernisation and digitisation of GEUS Bulletin.
In partnership with Open Academia, a publishing solutions company in Sweden, we launched the new platform at GEUS bulletin.org in May 2020. Development continues to implement a data repository for authors to submit datasets alongside their articles, and novel tools for displaying and interacting with data alongside articles.
My intention is to blog about these tools, hopefully as inspiration for other scientists and institutions looking to promote open access and open source scholarly publishing. Affordable tools are out there for scientists and research institutions to host their own scholarly journals and break free from unjustifiably expensive journal fees and subscription charges of the commercial journal industry. I hope that the experience of GEUS Bulletin can help others to follow us in promoting affordable, open access publishing solutions.
