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Invitation to Progress in Earth and Planetary Science

An Erratum to this article was published on 27 June 2014

After much long preparation it gives me great pleasure to see that the first paper to be published in Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (PEPS) has now been released.

PEPS is the new open access e-journal which the Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU) has set up in partnership with Springer. The purpose of this journal is to publish papers that present new discoveries, ideas and unifying concepts in the various fields of earth and planetary sciences.

Since there are already a large number of journals that cover the full spectrum of earth sciences, many of which have a long tradition of publishing excellent research, I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about why the JpGU is launching PEPS into such a competitive marketplace. Basically we have focused on two issues: problems caused by the ever rising costs that universities and other scientific institutions must pay as subscription fees for scientific journals; and issues for authors caused by increasingly complicated procedures on copyright-related matters. We are convinced that the open access e-journal model provides a solution to both of these issues, and in particular, we guarantee that PEPS will provide the following benefits for the scientific community:

  • All articles published by PEPS are to be made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. There will be no subscription charges or registration barriers.

  • Although authors of articles published in PEPS grant PEPS the right to reproduce and disseminate their articles they remain the copyright holders of their work.

Of course as an open access e-journal PEPS has many other advantages over traditional printed journals, including: no restrictions or limitations on pages, figures, tables; no additional charges for colour figures; the ability to include additional files including videos or large original data files; and of course fast publication.

We at the PEPS editorial team aim to use the advantages offered by the open access e-journal format to make PEPS a top-level international journal. In order to ensure that we publish only high-quality research papers and review articles, all submitted manuscripts (including invited papers) will go through a full peer review process. To this end we have organized a first class editorial board of more than 50 members, composed exclusively of active scientists from institutions around the world whose expertise covers the various fields of earth and planetary sciences. It will be their job to ensure that the refereeing process is strict but fair, and I would like to thank them all for helping us with this task.

Finally, although the PEPS editorial team has worked hard to launch PEPS and will continue to do so, the success of this journal depends of course on our receiving many high quality manuscripts for publication. Since JpGU members are most likely to be aware of what we are doing, I would particularly like to ask them to submit their best work to PEPS: if they do so we will have published a high quality body of work and will be able to demonstrate to those in the community at large who are less familiar with our endeavors that PEPS is indeed the best place for them to submit their papers. We earnestly wait for your submission of high-quality manuscripts to PEPS.

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Correspondence to Yasufumi Iryu.

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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2197-4284-1-12.

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Iryu, Y. Invitation to Progress in Earth and Planetary Science. Prog. in Earth and Planet. Sci. 1, 2 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2197-4284-1-2

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