The ongoing and rapidly evolving situation with COVID-19 continues to create widespread disruption to business and daily life – this includes scholarly communication. The Geological Society Publishing House staff have been working from home since Tuesday 17 March and want to reassure you that we are focused on continuing to deliver our services with a minimum of disruption. We appreciate that priorities will have changed so we have summarized how we are maintaining our services to support our Earth science journal and book programmes should you be able or wish to use them.
Authors
All our journals are running normally with minimal interruption and so we encourage authors to continue to submit manuscripts as usual. Peer review may take a little longer under the current circumstances but we will do our best to keep any delays to a minimum. We recognize that revisions may take longer than the usual time frames so until this challenging time is behind us we will give authors as much time as they need to submit revised manuscripts. This applies to papers currently in revision and any submissions made during the pandemic.
Reviewers and Editorial Board members
The quality-control process of peer review depends on the dedicated work of researchers around the world. We know that there are many competing priorities at the best of times, but in the present situation we understand that you may need more time and flexibility than usual. Please let us know of any specific issues you face and we will work with you to minimize delays whilst keeping authors informed.
Researchers
We understand that many of you will be making adjustments to your professional lives as you switch to working from home and adapt to remote teaching.
We do not anticipate any disruption to service on our Lyell Collection platform. Our staff are on hand to help if users are experiencing any difficulties with remote access and we will ensure that guidance on remote access remains updated.
Our platform host HighWire, working with Google Scholar, has extended the time-to-live for CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) tokens from 30 to 120 days after the user has generated them. These tokens allow for off-campus access to subscribed materials for faculty, staff and students who find themselves working off-campus. This will allow authorized staff and students to access their subscribed journals and books until (at least) mid-July when we can re-evaluate the situation for students and researchers checking in with their home institution networks. Access HighWire's CASA FAQs.
We have made a number of Thematic Collections free online for faculty and students. Please explore our Thematic Collections.
Librarians
We are offering free trial access to the Lyell Collection for content to which you are not currently subscribed. If you wish to add extra Lyell Collection content to your existing subscriptions please get in touch and we will work with you to provide access.
Print copies
Journals: the dispatch of some issues has been delayed. Please see the Bookshop page for the latest information.
Books: the dispatch of books from our warehouse in Bath will resume when the office and warehouse re-open. Please see the Bookshop page for the latest information.
Publishing House Staff contact details
Journal of the Geological Society: Contact Patricia Pantos
Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology: Contact Helen Floyd-Walker
Petroleum Geoscience: Contact Lucy Bell
Geochemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis: Contact Lucy Bell
Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society: Contact Lucy Bell
Scottish Journal of Geology: Contact Helen Floyd-Walker
Special Publications and Memoirs: To propose a book: contact Bethan Phillips. For queries related to production contact Jo Armstrong or contact Samuel Lickiss. For book submission queries contact our Editorial Office. For anything else please email us.
We will continue to work with all of our stakeholders through this crisis to ensure trusted, peer-reviewed research is made available as rapidly as possible. We ask for your patience on behalf of all the individuals who strive to make the Geological Society journals and books successful – our authors, editors, reviewers and staff. This is a very challenging and uncertain time for everyone and we want to assure you that we will endeavour to maintain our services in support of our science, profession and society.