The Seismica initiative: a community-led Diamond Open Access journal for seismological research

On 24 November 2020, the Springer Nature publishing group announced the introduction of Open Access (OA) journals in Nature and its sibling journals. The corresponding OA publication fee (charged directly to the authors) was set to €9,500/$11,390/£8,290, an amount that may be well out of reach for researchers with limited financial means. This is especially a problem for researchers in developing countries, and for early-career researchers on small, personal fellowships. Funding agencies often demand that research be published under an OA license, forcing authors to accept the high publication fees.

The high cost of these and similar OA fees for other Earth science journals prompted a discussion among the seismological community on Twitter, during which the idea was raised to start a free-to-publish, free-to-read journal for seismological research. The concept of Diamond Open Access was previously adopted by Volcanica (www.jvolcanica.org) for volcanological research, providing a precedent and directives for similar initiatives (like Seismica, but also Tektonika for the structural geology community). Following the community discussion on Slack with over 100 participants, a small "task force" was formed to investigate in detail the possibility of starting a Diamond OA seismology journal, taking Volcanica as a model. In this contribution, we report the progress that has been made by the task force and the seismological community in the conceptualisation of the journal, and the steps that remain to be taken. Once the initiation of the journal is completed, Seismica will offer a platform for researchers to publish and access peer-reviewed work with no financial barriers, promoting seismological research in an inclusive manner. We invite all interested members of the seismological and earthquake community to participate in the discussions and development of this OA journal, by contacting the authors listed on this abstract.