Slinging Earth & (exo)Planets Structure and Dynamics into Diamond Open Access

The past decade has seen the consolidation of open access practices in scientific publishing, with funding bodies, international agencies and academic institutions requiring free access to not only scientific papers but also other output such as datasets and computer codes. The transition to open access practices has led multiple academic publishers to offer Gold Open Access (GOA) schemes, under which scientific papers are free-to-read. Compared to the traditional publication models, GOA comes at a much higher cost for authors. These practices have had a documented negative impact on the scientific publishing landscape, from the rise of predatory journals to the broadening of the economic divide between academic institutions.

Partly in response, different fields of Earth Sciences have seen the rise of several community-led Diamond Open Access journals (DOAJ). These journals are free-to-publish and free-to-read. The aim is to remove financial barriers to scientific publishing by making peer-reviewed articles available at no cost to both authors and readers, thus offering a platform for true open science. DOAJs are created and maintained by the very same scientific community they aim to serve, thus removing economical and business considerations that drive a large fraction of the modern publishing landscape. These community-led journals offer a high-quality alternative to classical for-profit scientific journals.

We are pleased to announce a new DOAJ initiative called Geodynamica. Coordinated by a core committee of seven scientists, Geodynamica aims at promoting academic discourse and disseminating research pertaining to the quantitative study of Earth and (exo-)planetary internal structure, dynamics, and evolution from observational to modelling perspectives.

Geodynamica, which is expected to launch in early 2025, enjoys the support of eScholarship (University of California), and hugely benefits from the experience of existing community-led journals within the geoscience field, such as Volcanica, Tektonika and Seismica, as well as the help of a pre-launch editorial team composed of a dozen of established volunteer scientists. 

In this contribution, we will provide the vision behind this initiative, report on the structure of this journal, its scope, and the remarkable community effort that will make this new DOAJ a reality.