Mission Statement for Publications
Dedicated to the pursuit of excellence and free and universal accessibility of scientific publications in all areas of geosciences and planetary and solar system sciences for the benefit of the scientists worldwide.
- Online + Open Access Publishing of the European Geosciences Union
- Initiatives and Comments regarding Online + Open Access Publication
Objectives
The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is a dynamic, innovative and interdisciplinary learned society devoted to the following publication strategy:
- Maximum flexibility regarding the type and the medium of publication
- Maximum attention with respect to the scientific and technical quality of a publication
- Maximum visibility and impact for all published articles
- Personalized Copyright under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence
Means of achieving these objectives
- produce all types of publications, such as magazines, journals, books etc.
- use all media for publication, such as printing media, WWW, CD-ROM etc.
- apply rigorous but fair peer-review to all manuscripts assisted by an effective Editorial Support Office to keep review times short and costs low
- apply professional copy-editing, where necessary
- process figures, movies and sound tracks
- select the print-on-demand technology to reduce costs, to make back issues available at any time, and to print colour illustrations at no extra charge for authors
- provide immediate and free web access to all articles, articles to be indexed by an ever increasing number of search services, and the most liberal copyright agreement for the free reproduction for non-commercial scientific purposes
- provide immediate and full article alert service about any new publication to all alert-subscribers
- take full advantage of emerging text-searching and data-mining techniques to exploit the full set of online publications
- guarantee permanent online accessibility through external e-archives and internal sophisticated backup facilities
Service Charges
Open access electronic publication implies that the authors are expected to pay for the actual services provided by the publisher from pre-submission to publication of their articles on WWW, while the costs for the production, handling and distribution of printed issues are covered separately by subscriptions. Since in all cases the same (pdf) article files are used and digital printing applied, these subscription rates are, in general, very moderate and no extra charges for colour illustrations are levied.