Geodynamica: slinging Earth and (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. While mostly embraced by the scientific community, the transition to open access practices has led multiple academic publishers to offer Gold Open Access schemes, under which scientific papers are free-to-read. Compared to the traditional publication models, Gold Open Access comes at a much higher cost for the authors, normally of thousands of US Dollars for a single paper. 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 to the negative impact of Gold Open Access practices, different fields of Earth Sciences have recently seen the rise of several community-led, Diamond Open Access journals (e.g., Volcanica, Tektonika, Seismica). These journals are free-to-publish and free-to-read. The aim is to remove financial barriers to scientific publishing by publishing peer-reviewed articles at no cost to both authors and readers, thus offering a platform for true open science. Diamond Open Access journals 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. Therefore, community-led journals offer a high-quality alternative to classical for-profit scientific journals.

We are pleased to announce a new Diamond Open Access journal initiative called Geodynamica, with the aim of promoting free-to-publish and free-to-read research on the  dynamics of the Earth’s and (exo)planets’ interior. Geodynamica was born in 2023 thanks to the effort of six scientists, who form the core committee that coordinate the efforts of the various teams. The target launch date for the journal is autumn 2024. 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 enjoys the support of eScholarship (University of California), and hugely benefits from the experience of existing community-led journals within the geosciences community, namely Volcanica, Tektonika and Seismica.

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 diamond open access journal a reality.