Mission Statement for Publications
The European Geosciences Union (EGU), established by the Council of the European Geophysical Society (EGS) and the Council of the European Union of Geosciences (EUG) on 7 September 2002, is
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
Objectives
The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is a dynamic, innovative and interdisciplinary learned society devoted to the following publication strategy
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
- use open access software for the most cost-effective and highest-quality composing, editing and formatting of articles
- apply professional copy-editing, where necessary
- process figures, movies and sound tracks with state-of-the-art software
- select the print-on-demand technology to reduce costs, to make back issues available at any time, to print colour illustrations at no extra charge for authors, and to provide free offprint files to 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
- use the online server-assisted cross-reference technology to interlink the references ( of electronic publications with their currently valid online addresses
- guarantee permanent online accessibility through 'mirroring' clusters of web-servers located at different secure sites and sophisticated backup facilities
And run all operations on a not-for-profit basis and by assistance of the Copernicus Online Service + Information System (COSIS) for rigorous reduction of production costs and online assistance in editorial and production matters.
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 and/or CD-ROM issues are covered separately by subscriptions. Since in all three 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. A fully automatic, internet-based electronic evaluation and production system is currently under construction, which will then reduce service charges to the minimum of the pure maintenance costs.
List of Publications
And all copyrights, trade mark rights and other publishing rights as well as any rights for pricing and distribution rest exclusively in the hands of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
