Geomorphica – Summary of activities

Summary of Geomorphica’s activities in 2023:

Geomorphica (https://geomorphica.org) is a community-led Diamond Open Access journal that promotes scholarly discourse and disseminates research results pertaining to all aspects of geomorphology. Diamond Open Access journals are free for all to read, without subscription, and do not charge article processing fees to authors.

Thanks to the work of a diverse community of more than 30 volunteers who have contributed to its development over the last couple of years, Geomorphica opened for submissions in June 2023. Since then, six manuscripts were submitted, including five research articles and one case study. Three manuscripts have already received a first decision, and three are currently under review.

In May 2023, an association, geomorphica, was created in order to manage the funds available to support, advertise and promote the journal. On 20 June, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the International Association of Geomorphologists (IAG) and Geomorphica to formalise their collaboration.

Throughout the year, different teams have been busy setting up the journal. After much discussion, the editorial team has opted for a triple-anonymous peer review system where the authors and reviewers are anonymous, but also the associate editor who makes the recommendation does not know any information about the authors and reviewers. The Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team has looked at best practice in scientific publishing in order to define EDI measures. This includes quantifying the diversity of Geomorphica’s team, defining which author demographic characteristics should be collected and how they should be collected, and establishing post-acceptance manuscript guidelines that incorporate author and contributor credits and land acknowledgements as appropriate. The communications team has decided to stop using X / Twitter at the end of 2023 and is now running a BlueSky account, as well as keeping the Instagram and LinkedIn presence. The steering committee is currently working on its first editorial.

The whole team is looking forward to receiving many manuscripts in 2024.